Have you ever felt lost in your own life? Wondering who you truly are beneath all the roles and expectations? How do you rediscover yourself and build the confidence to live authentically?
In this inspiring episode, I am joined by Leah Beltz, a passionate Co-Active coach and skilled facilitator with over 23 years of experience across global organizations. She is the founder of Honor The Space and creates a space for people to feel seen, heard, challenged, and supported in their growth, helping them live with more clarity, confidence, and connection to their purpose.
Today, Leah shares her journey of self-discovery, how she found her authentic self through The DigⓇ method, and how she now helps others do the same. She discusses the importance of knowing your history to understand your path, the unique process of The DigⓇ, and how creating space for yourself and others can lead to personal growth. Leah’s story is one of overcoming fear, embracing vulnerability, and stepping into her true self. Listen now to start your journey toward living a more authentic and confident life!
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Rediscovering Your Authentic Self To Thrive with Leah Beltz
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I’m a big fan of music. I’m a particularly big fan of Pitbull, I listened to his Globalization channel on XM Radio. I’m a fan of him as a person as well. He has a lot of things he says on the channel, one of them is if you don’t know where you’re coming from, you don’t know where you’re going. Similar to what Bob Marley said, when you know your history then you know where you’re coming from. And so I want to talk to you today about a process that I underwent several months ago around kind of taking my life experience, my life story and trying to distill it down into kind of an easily digestible piece of information for me to keep with me, and there’s a process called The Dig that was administered to me by my guest today, Leah Beltz, the founder of Honor Your Space.
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Leah, welcome to the program.
Hi, Stephen, welcome. It’s nice to be here again.
Yeah, it’s wonderful to have you. And, first of all, tell us a little bit about The Dig, since I kind of started that whole thing. I know you’re a facilitator, you’ve worked with a lot of clients on this program.
I can give you a short answer and I can give you a long answer. The short answer, if I were to describe it in only two words, I would describe The Dig as self-discovery. So similar to what you said with Pitbull, kind of understanding where you’ve come from to understand where you’re going. I would say the longer version of that, The Dig is a one-on-one facilitated method of self-discovery that helps you get epic clarity on who you are and how you operate so that you can then live with more confidence and connection to your life’s purpose.
So, we’re talking about clients here and people who have had a lot of life experiences because most people do and most people have a lot of things they’ve gone through in life that just ends up being confusing, because it’s like, “Why this? Why that?” So, what’s the journey, the customer journey, for anyone who speaks product, around that person who comes to you and just like, “Okay, well, I had this happen, I had that happen, and I’ve had these experiences, and WTF?”?
Right. What I love about The Dig, what makes it unique is the actual process that we go through. So, I want to acknowledge there are a lot of tools and processes like this. The Simon Sinek Find Your Why or the Pursuit of Happiness, all these different things, but what makes The Dig unique is the process which we go through and it’s done through a matter of storytelling and reflection and it’s all based on capturing different words, so it involves language and we capture words throughout the conversation and then those words, I work with the client, like I worked with you, and we look at those words that I’ve captured and explore what they mean and how they represent who you are and how you operate and we’re getting at that sort of your true authentic self, but it’s this exchange through storytelling, reflection, and words that we do that and, like you said, to narrow it down to one single word, which is your Dig word.
And do you remember my Dig word?
I do? Do you remember it?
It’s “paradox.”
Yes.
Because I would think about that later on and even the core of my business around helping people cut down on their screen time as a response to this paradox that we see with regards to, especially social media. Whenever you hear Mark Zuckerberg essentially going to congressional testimonials and saying, “You know, our company’s mission is to bring people together,” knowing well that almost everybody understands that they’ve done the exact opposite of that.
Exactly. I hear what you’re saying.
You’ve done a lot of storytelling with various different clients. What are some of the more bizarre experiences? I don’t know if you’re allowed to say it based on confidentiality but do you have any strange or really significant or enlightening experiences that you’d like to share today?
Well, what I do, confidentiality is really important to both me and my client but I can speak in general terms and I would say, I’m going to kind of flip this question around a little bit because what surprises me is not necessarily things that are bizarre or really different but seeing the commonalities of people, and I think specifically in sort of the space that people are in, that they find themselves in, when they come to do The Dig, there’s a lot of commonality there. It may show up in different ways but, typically, people are looking for direction. They feel stuck. They feel this sense of, “What am I doing here? What’s, why am I here? What’s my purpose?”
So it’s a similar experience, and it reminds me of a lesson that I learned way too late in life, which is just that we all have these experiences and, oftentimes, we think we’re alone because of how much people are out there trying to play up a role and trying to hide some of these weaknesses they have but, oftentimes, whatever we’re experiencing, we’re not alone. I remember the first time I read, I think it was The Way We Work Is Not Working by Schwartz and seeing this study show how many people actually work well in 90-minute focused spurts as opposed to the standard nine-to-five day where you’re just expected to be there sitting on your butt in front of that computer and I thought I was the only one that that didn’t really work for and then found that out and on issue after issue, I’d find out the same exact thing like, wow, we’re often not alone. And so how often do your clients come in, even though like you’re observing similar experiences, similar desires, thinking, “I’m the only one in my company, I’m the only one in my family, I’m the only one in my town that can’t just get with the program and figure out a path”?
I think that when I see that a lot and that resonates with me sort of what you’re saying of this idea of people think that they are the only one in a particular scenario and I think that’s a result of a couple of things. One is people are just now starting to embrace this idea of vulnerability, to be able to put yourself out there to risk sort of that exposure and I don’t know that that was much of a thing before so people are warming up to that idea a little bit more. So, on one hand, people are being a little bit more brave and being vulnerable, but on the other hand, I think that we are faced with so much, with social media, other media of what we see other people projecting or portraying and we think that that’s their real, authentic life and you think, “Wow, if they’re doing that and I’m just this, certainly I’m alone,” and so I think that’s happening more and more is that we are exposed to everyone’s highlight reels so then the things that make us different feel more isolating.
Are you a fan of Brené Brown?
I am.
I was wondering when you brought up the vulnerability piece.
Yes. Big fan. I cite her work quite a bit, yeah.
And, oddly enough, what you just described with the other aspect of our current culture is also, in my view, a paradox in the sense that ever since Brené Brown and a few others have started speaking, people have talked more about being vulnerable, “leading with vulnerability,” to directly quote her, but also we have this new tool called social media with a highlight reel that is making people feel more isolated at the same time.
Exactly, right? It’s this idea of the isolation that it creates — well, it’s the isolation and the connections and that’s like the real paradox there.
Yeah. Now, tell me a little bit more about Honor Your Space as a whole organization, because I definitely have a deep familiarity with The Dig, the one part of it, but there’s a lot more to what you do.
Right. So thanks for the question. What’s interesting, too, is this all ties back to my own experience with The Dig. So, the company that I just founded, Honor the Space, was really built out of my own Dig experience so I went through the Dig a couple of years ago and my Dig word is the word “space.” And when I went through it and the facilitator who happened to be the founder of The Dig, she facilitated The Dig for me and when we came up on that word, I was sort of like, “Oh, okay,” I thought my word was going to be “authentic” or “connection” or something like that, but the more I sat with the word “space” and the more that she kind of took that word and looked at my life story that I had shared with her and she had shown me sort of ways that that showed up and it just opened this whole world to me and I just really embraced the word.
And what’s interesting is once you start to embrace that, then you see it everywhere. I tell people it’s kind of like what I call like the yellow car theory, it’s like you buy a yellow car because you don’t think anyone has a yellow car and then you see yellow cars everywhere. It’s like I hadn’t really ever thought of the word “space” until I thought about it and then I would see it everywhere. And the funniest thing is, I don’t know if you’re a person that does Wordle?
Oh, yeah.
It wasn’t too long after I did The Dig that the Wordle was space and I was like, “Oh, my gosh,” I took like a screenshot of it, I was like, “This is incredible,” so little things like that started happening. But the most important thing that happened is that really how we determined the idea of space or that my word is space is what it represents for me, and I know that we’re on a podcast so you can’t see this but I’m kind of like making a big circle with my arms here, kind of like I’m creating space with my hands, and when I would tell people about The Dig and I would tell them that my word is space, I would make that motion and they would look at me and they’d go, “Yes, that’s what I think of you, I feel like you are this person that is always creating space,” and so I took that along with what I love doing and what I have been doing in my career, most of my career, which involves a lot of training and coaching and facilitation and sales, all of that really was about my ability to create and hold space for other people. And it was going through The Dig and understanding my Dig word and the other things that make up how I operate that brought all of this together. And so, The Dig really inspired that and I built on this idea of space and what it means to create space for others, to hold space for others, and I’ve tied that together with individual’s growth, their personal leadership journeys so I encourage people to honor the space that they’re in and I do that by creating space for them to be seen and supported as they grow.
Now, do you often encounter clients who don’t have that in the rest of their lives? If you consider work, family, social circles, other obligations. I know that corporate America or the world of work seemed like it was progressing for a little while. I think the last couple years kind of have been a step backwards a little bit so I know that there’s a lot of people in the work environment where there is no space for them, at least not to be authentically who they are.
Absolutely. You bring up a good point that there is a lack of space. So when you look at sort of the shadow side of it, when you think of space, you maybe think of abundance, but there’s a lot of different aspects of it and so I think that one reason people may be coming to do The Dig is they have this sense of something more but they’re not either giving themselves the space, like they’re not giving themselves the permission and the time to explore it and so having a conversation around The Dig and taking them through this process is really eye opening for them.
And is honoring the space an individual pursuit or group pursuit?
Hmm. I like that question. I’m going to say that it’s both. I would say that honor the space represents a lot of different things. One of the things it represents is an individual honoring the current space that they’re in and what it is they’re trying to pursue but sort of looking at where they are now, but honoring the space can also take place if you are in a team dynamic or a family. What space are you occupying as a group and what are the team dynamics or family dynamics there that might play into it? And the other portion of it is I do a lot of training and facilitation and so the key thing around facilitation is creating a space for other people to be successful. So it has a lot of different meanings so that’s why I cheated and said the answer was both.
I mean, in a lot of places in life, it is. It is a “yes, and” type of situation as opposed to a “no, but” or “not that,” because when I think of people who feel like their space is not honored, one thing I wonder is this combination of, okay, are you, as you put it, honoring your own space? Are you giving yourself space to be yourself? Are you permitting that? But also, are the people around you honoring your space? Are they letting you be who you are as opposed to trying to turn you into something that you’re not, which we, unfortunately, still see so much in our culture today?
Absolutely, we do and I was just thinking, Stephen, one of the issues that you’re really passionate about is this idea of screen time and being present and I think Honor the Space also represents this idea of being present. Can you honor the space that you are in, whether that’s a physical space, you’re out in nature, are you on your phone or are you noticing the flowers that are coming up? Just that physical space around you too so it has a lot of different meanings. But I see that similarity to what you’re passionate about too,
Now, does that also include an emotional space? Because without mentioning any specifics about any specific individuals or things going on in my life, I will just say that I describe my current state as eight different types of somewhat interconnected drama and so, when in that space, whether you think it’s because of the new moon or any other phenomenon that’s going on, is that part of it is also honoring the fact that right now, I’m in an emotionally intense space at this current moment and I need to just honor the fact that that’s happening, regardless of whether or not I like it or regardless of whether or not society will tell you, “It’s a Wednesday, you shouldn’t be feeling that way,” and all that other stuff?
Yeah, absolutely.
And I use the word “honor” because it’s not about having to accept it or say yes to it or say no to it but honoring, for me, is also like an acknowledgement. You’re just acknowledging and honoring the space that you’re in. Share on XA lot of times, most of the time, for a lot of people, you’re not in a space that you want to be in but you have to honor and acknowledge it because there’s a reason that you’re in that space, right? Is there something for you to be learning, is there something for you to be giving, is there something you need to be receiving, and so just that acknowledgement and honoring where you are, especially when you are not wanting to be there.
And then there’s also an external aspect of it, so honoring the space of the other people. So, for example, like right now, we’re having a conversation and I’m honoring not only my space of where I am, how I showed up to this, but also what drew me to this topic, et cetera, but honoring your space to, I don’t know, like take the conversation into the areas where, you feel your passions are.
I like that aspect that you bring up around it’s that external piece too and you can almost think of it like honoring the space is another way to talk about boundaries. I think boundaries are something that I see a lot of my clients struggle with, like setting their own boundaries and pushing back when those boundaries are being violated, especially in the workplace. There’s just work being pushed, pushed, pushed, and those boundaries are just ignored and so I like this idea that you mentioned of like what it means for other people is to honor someone else’s space too, and that’s why it’s not Honor My Space or Honor Your Space, it’s Honor the Space.
And what’s the challenge with honoring the space of a person that is not honoring your space and not honoring your boundaries?
Oh, Stephen, that’s a great question.
I would say that the biggest challenge is deciding to respond instead of react. Share on XI think when we react, there isn’t that thought that goes into it. It’s just sort of that initial thing that comes out, which may not be the best version of us or how we would want to handle a situation so I think the challenge when you feel that your space is being, whether it’s eliminated or trunked or whatever it is, is to how do I take a moment and pause and respond in a way that there can be a resolution as opposed to react to it?
So, in that sense, it seems like the first piece of space that needs to be honored is someone’s desire to step away. Say you’re in a conversation and things get a little bit heated, for one reason or another, and one person will just simply say, “Hey, I need to step away, I need to go for a walk, a drive, a bike ride, journal, meditate, whatever it is I need to do,” and as long as we can honor that space in order for people to catch up and find a way to, as you say, respond rather than react.
Yes, I would agree with that.
And so your journey in starting facilitating The Dig from when you took it yourself and leading to Honor the Space, what are the biggest challenges that you’ve experienced along the journey?
I think the biggest challenges come from starting up your own business. So a lot of things that are tied to that. A couple years ago, I never would have imagined starting my own business. I liked and wanted to work for an organization that was structured and I just need to show up and do my job and make an impact. But this idea of taking something that I’m so passionate about and bringing it to more people, in order to do that, I’ve formed my own business to do that. And so most of the challenges for me have been like how do I do that? What do I set up? And those are things that, thanks to the internet and friends and communities and stuff that you can figure those things out, but one of the biggest challenges for me personally is putting myself out there, even though it’s something that I believe in and I think other people can benefit from.
And I think that’s an experience a lot of people have, whenever kind of putting yourself out there in any way. I remember the first time I put myself out there was really innocent. It was just posting, publishing my first blog, just a blog entry, but there was still like some sort of like a nervousness around it, like why am I publishing this? Why would I think random people on the internet would care about my travel blog? Something like that. So what are you experiencing when you are about to put yourself out there in one way or another, whether it be going to a networking event or publishing some content on your website, et cetera?
I think it’s very similar to what you described as like right before you made that big blog post, it’s this — well, going back to the vulnerability piece too, you’re being very vulnerable and so, for me, there’s a couple things that happen. There’s usually some sort of like physical sensation, whether my hands get sweaty or I just feel like this nervousness in my stomach, and then there’s the psychological aspect of this voice of doubt or the saboteur that keeps talking and so it’s like these things working but being able to honor that space, acknowledge what’s happening, and say I have the ability to change that narrative, I have the ability to shape what I want. I don’t always have the way to sort of like I don’t know how to make my hand stop sweating, but I think it’s those things and just giving yourself a little pep talk and then, whether you need to count down or what, but like just that two seconds of courage to click that button. And I went through something very similar just not even a week ago, I had a lot of people giving me advice on getting my business started, they kept saying, “You need to be using LinkedIn, you need to be using LinkedIn,” and I said, “I know,” it feels cringy, I don’t have this good relationship with this platform at the moment and so I needed to kind of build myself up to it. And so I finally set a deadline, I said, “May 1st, I am going to just post something,” and so you asking me what it feels like before that, it’s very, very recent, I spent way too much time crafting, what? Like three or four sentences. And then after you do it, you’re sort of like does anyone even care? Like no one cares. Why did I worry about it? Not that they don’t care about me or want to hear what I have to say but it’s like not to the level of which I was stressed about it.
Yeah, the idea that if you post something that doesn’t resonate with someone, they’re just going to scroll through, right? They’re not going to remember like, “Ugh, this person has such a cringy post. I can’t believe she wrote that.”
Right, right.
By 12 seconds later, they’ve already moved on to either a different piece of content or whatever other thing has distracted them.
Exactly. There was someone that I was talking to earlier in the day before I posted and she posed the question to me, she said, “Really what’s the worst thing that can happen?” Like the absolute worst thing that could happen, and I thought, well, someone could post something awful about me and repost it and tell all these lies and tell people not to listen to me and as I was saying out loud, I was like, “That’s ridiculous,” and so it’s just kind of going through that cycle and saying that and thinking of the worst case scenario and saying it out loud to think what’s the likelihood of that actually happening? And to your point, what likely happens, it’s literally like a fingerprint of a scroll is all the acknowledgement that someone that’s not interested, that don’t get it.
And you live in Chicago and forgive me if some of these references are a little bit out of date because I’ve been in Denver for a while now, but if someone were to say to you that at, say, the Empty Bottle or the Double Door, there was a band, $20 cover, and the band name is Two Seconds of Courage, would you buy a ticket just because you feel like it was meant to be based on your own experiences?
Absolutely. I love that question. Yeah. I’m a big believer in sort of like manifestation and there’s this energy that we have to trust the universe with, and things like that just are signals that we’re in the right direction, just like the Wordle being the word “space” not long after I got — I was like, “This is a sign.”
You know, you talked a little bit about your methodology, kind of like what will you do to kind of overcome that moment of fear. How has that worked out in general since you’ve kind of started employing your, I guess, two seconds of courage, the results of what that two seconds of courage in those particular segments have kind of brought to you?
I would say that, first and foremost, it’s always better than I imagined it would be. I was going to say it’s not as bad as I thought but I’m trying to put a positive spin on it so I would say it’s never as bad as I had made it out to be in my head and so I think the more I can do that, the more I can reinforce it, just the practice of doing something that scares you a little bit and like, “Oh, I’m okay,” and kind of build up that tolerance and practice around it to remember that when you’re faced with the next thing that might be a little bit scary.
Yeah, because there’s always going to be something and I always think of, like an even older book reference. Have you ever heard of a book, I think it’s from like the mid-80s called Feel the Fear, Do It Anyway?
No, but it sounds great.
I read this like a long time ago but one of the things that she talks about in this book is this idea that everybody has a comfort zone and this comfort zone is either being expanded or contracted, based on your actions. And so as you expand it, what was once a really scary thing to do now seems somewhat trivial but you’re still expanding it so as you expand it, you’re still going to the next thing and as you get to the outer edges of this new comfort zone, you’re still going to be doing something scary and that’s kind of a process that continues onward.
Yeah, I like that analogy. It’s almost like when you go outside the boundary, the boundary extends a little bit. It kind of keeps getting bigger. And you and I are here making these hand gestures and no one can see it.
Yeah, sorry about that, yeah.
Yeah. And, Stephen, you mentioned being in Denver and I forgot that you were there. The woman who founded The Dig is actually local to you. She’s in the Boulder area and has develop The Dig over the past 10 years and it’s something that she used with clients. She would have clients that were speakers, like TEDx speakers, or authors that would come to her and she would help them with their story and what she was finding is that she needed to really help them unearth their story, like dig out the story, and it became this process that became its own thing. She was doing it for 10 years and then wanted to scale on it and talked to some folks about becoming certified facilitators to do it and so I just feel privileged to have gone through The Dig and now get to bring it to other people too.
That’s amazing. And your story is one around passion, and what’s the interesting thing is that people have many different reasons for wanting to start up their own thing. Some people just want to escape the office, the nine-to-five, and some people want autonomy and stuff like that and it sounds like your story is very much around like I was, to some level or another, content with the structured, standard corporate job but this thing came along and I’m just so passionate about it, I needed to bring it to the rest of the world. How does that make your story of taking this and bringing it to the level where you need different from, say, your standard or these other categories of entrepreneurial type of stories?
Yeah, I think, to be fair, there is a piece of that story that’s missing that I may not have shared with you before but the catalyst for this was going through a layoff.
Oh, yeah.
What’s interesting is I don’t know that I would be pursuing this passion right now if it hadn’t been for that layoff. I certainly didn’t choose it and, in that moment, the world crumbles and you don’t know what you’re going to do. I had recently gone through The Dig, gone through the certification, and I remember when I was doing that, I thought, “How am I ever going to have time to pursue this when I’m working full time?” and then, 60 days later, I had all the time in the world. I think of paradox a lot with that. I was in this place of I had just lost my job and so I was, on one hand, I was hurt and sad and disappointed, but on the other hand, there was this part of me that was hopeful and optimistic. Learning to live in that space and really — space. Learning to live in that space —
It was a mistake, right?
— and honor that space really has pushed me, it gave me that nudge that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have taken.
And then what are the typical types of clients that you work with? Do you tend to work with individuals or groups of people at work, people in HR-type roles?
I would say a little bit of everything. The Dig, in particular, is a one-on-one experience so think of it as one-on-one coaching. I have so many folks that come to me and they say, “This is great but I need something for my team. Can you do a Dig of my team?” and when they want that, I explore something a little bit different. I take them through another exercise called Head Heart Core, which examines sort of a framework that people can use to extract the most authentic versions of themselves at any given moment very quickly. And so that essentially is what I’m doing with The Dig on a one-on-one basis, but when you take that framework and apply it to a group, to a group setting, it gives them a framework and a common language for them to speak and act from a place of authenticity. So it’s individual work, group work, we just kind of tweak it and tailor it depending on what the needs are. But in terms of the types of clients, I would say it’s industry agnostic. It’s not like this exist in one industry but not the other. It’s more on a human scale, it’s people that are either early in their careers, they’ve gone through education and they’ve spent all this money on an education but they’re not really sure if that’s what they want to do, or someone who’s midlife and they’re just like, “You know, I’ve been doing this my whole life, this isn’t the thing,” and they need to pivot. And then I’ve also worked with clients who have just retired and they’re like, “My whole identity, my whole life has been this thing and now it’s not. What am I now? Who am I now?” And so it’s interesting that it applies in a lot of different stages of life.
And if someone were to do The Dig in two different stages of life, because I know the first part of it is scoping out life experiences, could it end up being really different for, say, someone that does it when they’re 22 and then does it again when they’re 42?
You bring up a good point and I think the difference there is the volume of lived experiences, right? When you do it at 20, you have 20 years to reflect on. When you do it at 40, you’ve got 40 years to reflect on so there’s a lot of other things. But what’s interesting about The Dig is it’s different from your values or your morals, which I think can change over time. Those are things that you choose. Going through The Dig, what we do is identify your operating system, like the way in which you operate. I think that evolves over time, but it doesn’t necessarily change significantly. So, your operating system and your Dig word might vary a little bit from age 20 to age 40 but it really is identifying this underlying energy and vibe and frequency and how you operate. And that is who you are.
And is it possible to do The Dig on, say, someone that’s six years old that does not have that many lived experience? Or is there a cut-off where you’d say, “All right, it’s too early, you don’t know who you are yet”?
I would say given that it’s based on the digger, the person that is like going through The Dig, their ability to share their life story and reflect is a big part of this. I’m there to facilitate the process. I would ask the question, someone at six years old, do they have the capacity to articulate and share their life story enough to be able to respond to reflection? And so I think that, as that person matures and the more lifespan they have to reflect on, the better you are at identifying those things.
And now, you mentioned people doing this in the context of work teams and one of the challenges we often have is communication styles, communication patterns, just how the work team gels together. So, if a work team itself is kind of having some communication troubles that may be leading to a little bit of tension, what do you think is the best thing to do? Is it up to the leader to start out and figure out their own operating systems and then kind of look into it? Or are we going to look at each person individually so that the leader as well as the other people in the group can kind of understand like, “Okay, well, maybe this method of communication, this method of encouragement works well with this person but it doesn’t work well with that person”?
Right. I think the best thing to do, acknowledge there’s a situation, whether that is the role of the leader or the role of someone in the team to say, “Hey, we have an issue. Can we acknowledge that we do not communicate well or that we don’t operate well or gel well?” or however you want to say it. And I think that there are a couple of different ways to go. One is kind of looking at, on an individual basis, if each person goes through The Dig on their own and then collectively, they share their operating system, they share their Dig word, it gives you a better understanding of how the people in your team operate. That could take a little bit of time because I’ve had people ask me this and what I advise to do first, I had mentioned just briefly a moment ago about this framework called Head Heart Core and this is an easy framework, a common language that gives a team that something that they can enact the same day. And the idea of Head Heart Core is that we have different truths that live in our head. These are the facts.
We have different truths that live in our heart. Share on XThese are sort of the emotional components. And we have the truth that lives in our core, which is our deep desires and vision and wants. And when you’re able to communicate using all three of those, then you get a better picture of a situation or a person. So, I always use that with teams, they’re struggling in the moment, we need something now, we don’t have six weeks to go through some training, what can you help me with now? That becomes a framework that is simple enough to help people construct a conversation.
And you talk about Head Heart Core. Is it about finding a balance between or kind of synthesizing all the three aspects of how we’re communicating?
If you are someone that only operates in the head, I’m only getting like a fraction of the true authentic Stephen, right? Because, Stephen, I know you have emotions, I know you have core desires, but if you communicate strictly from the head, I’m not getting the full picture. And so what’s interesting is as a person that is on the receiving end of communication, sort of identifying is this person a head person? Are they a heart person? Are they a core person and how can I meet them where they are? Do I want to try to move them from one place to the other? And also when I’m the one communicating, if I want to give a full picture, like I’m definitely a heart person, I’m going to come in with all my emotions and someone they have to say ask me some specific questions to kind of get the full picture.
And of this Head Heart Core balance, is there one or two of these aspects that society is encouraging people to ignore in some context right now? Is there a way that societal setup is pushing this out of balance?
You ask such great questions.
Well, thank you.
This is a good one. So, is there — let’s see, if we’re thinking about head, which refers to the facts, we think about the heart, which is the emotions, and the core, which is your very deep desires, what comes to mind If I’m just answering sort of on the spur of the moment, I think the head piece, which is the facts, is what we’re really struggling with because of all these different sources of news and information and needing the ability to siphon through it to know what’s true or not true because those things influence the rest of our lives so I would think that that’s one of the ones that’s challenged the most. Now, I could argue for all three of them but I would say, if I need to give you an answer right now, Stephen, it’s that.
With your work with various different types of clients, you talk about three different stages but also teams and stuff, what is the impact that you’re hopeful to have on the world?
The whole world. Bring this full circle to you mentioned Pitbull at the beginning and sort of that it all starts with that true self discovery of knowing who you are and I think that most people go through life and they don’t know their true, authentic self, they don’t know who they are, and if I can help people understand that, if I can help them see that, give them that clarity, then they’re able to have that confidence in how they show up in the world. They’re able to be authentic in the way they connect with people. So, if I have that ability to help people find their true, authentic self and show up in that way so that other people are encouraged to do that as well, I think that’s an impact I could be excited about.
Yeah, and there’s kind of that ripple effect. The impact of what someone’s doing oftentimes is not seen right away or sometimes not even like 100 percent seen because it impacts how that person goes and interacts with the next person they interact with and the next person they interact with and so on and people tend to make better impressions and happier memories when they come from their authentic selves.
Absolutely.
So, I also wanted to ask you, if anyone listening out there wants to work with you on The Dig, is there a good way that someone listening could reach out to you, get a hold of you?
Absolutely. My email address, which — can I say my email address? Or my website is honorthespace.com. I’ve got a new website that’s coming soon. That one will direct you to leabeltz.com, which is my information site so stay tuned for more details.
That’s amazing. And then for anyone that wants to adjust anything about their lives today based on listening to this episode, what will be the one thing you would say someone can start doing right now?
Just keep going. Momentum.
Just keep going. I love that and I love how simple that is. Leah, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, sharing us about this process about your specific unique story toward getting to where you’re following something that is your authentic path, as many of us are kind of looking to do. And I’d also like to thank everybody out there who’s listening for taking your time listening to Action’s Antidotes, checking out, and hope to check out some other episodes and check out Honor the Space as well.
Thank you, Stephen.
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About Leah Beltz
Leah is a certified facilitator of The Dig®, and founder of Honor The Space, where she supports people in their personal leadership & professional development journeys. She is a passionate Co-Active Trained coach and skilled facilitator with over 23 years of experience across global organizations. Leah spent more than half of her professional career at Google where she honed her leadership and relationship skills as a successful seller; and became recognized as a senior facilitator for Google’s award winning global sales onboarding program. Prior to that, she held communication and sales roles in the non-profit and telecom sectors. Leah is also a top facilitator for the #Iamremarkable movement which empowers individuals to celebrate their achievements. She enjoys yoga and running; and blends her core value of authentic connection with her passions for nature and photography, expressing it through LoveMoreSeries.com, a movement urging people to be present so that they can See Love, Share Love, and Love More. She has no kids, no pets, and a lot of passport stamps. Leah is a certified facilitator of The Dig® & Head.Heart.Core.®, methods created by Erin Weed (www.ErinWeed.com) to discover your true authentic self.