It's a life thing!

One more time.

That's right.

Time to celebrate. Hi, everyone.

It's Rebecca. Silence. And Leah Valencia. Key talking to you today about inspiration. And what do we mean by that? I want to know. Leah wants to know, are you living? Are you walking around the planet half alive? Are you waiting for your life? We are going to talk to you today about inspiration, and it is so much more than you think. Welcome, Leah.

Thank you. I am so excited and honored to be here. Let's do it.

Let's do it. Leah, what do you want people to know about inspiration?

So I loved how when we created this concept to just that inspiration is about life and really just soaking up the beauty of what's around you and not thinking of it in a competitive way, not measuring yourself against it, but really looking at things that you enjoy or you aspire to be or that you find beautiful and saying, oh, a piece of that is possible for me. And really knowing that it's within you to do whatever your heart desires and learning from others and life and environments and everything around you.

Yeah.

What do you think? Inspiration. When you think of inspiration? Because I know you have a great mindset around inspiration.

Thank you for asking me that. And I just want to. Your word. Pieces. You know, I think life does come in pieces. And for those of you watching how this came about, you know, I met Leah by chance, and we just developed a relationship over the past year, I would say. And this woman and her jewelry. The jewelry. Each is a piece, right? And our life is full of pieces. Moments. They are pieces. And what are we doing with them? And Leah and I decided to call this segment It's a life thing, because what else is there? It's life. It's not the circumstances. So for me, inspiration is the fuel that runs through us in the pieces, in the moments, in the circumstances, and. And I think our most underutilized resource. I see inspiration as a tool. I don't see it as a concept. I see inspiration as something that I've got access to in me that's going to enhance the pieces of my life. And what I. Is that when we need any peace of our moment to be different than it was or different than it is, we suffer.

Love that.

That we can have both suffering and inspiration at the same time.

So I love. Okay, I'm excited because I love. That is a different concept which I'm really loving, where inspiration is within side of you instead of external factors. Oh, that's really good. Because normally you're looking outside of yourself for inspiration, but you're saying it's already here. And it's these pieces that you take throughout your life to manifest those into your heart's desires, into getting into a better place, a better mindset out of where your tragedy came from. Oh, I love that.

I think we should be talking a little more about tragedy. I mean, for me, my relationship with inspiration was born being pregnant at 34 years old with a cancer diagnosis, feeling like I just got ripped out from under me. I had already survived so much trauma and abuse, and I had felt like all the personal growth, work I had done had given me this opportunity to have a different life. Then, boom, pregnant cancer. It felt like a cruel joke, like maybe all that hadn't been worth it, right? But I'll never forget Leah lying in bed with cancer. And I'm rocking Leah Valencia Key jewelry right now, by the way. In these, these. These pieces, I don't think bring me inspiration. I think they connect me to the inspiration in me. So I just wanted to say that about this journey jewelry. Love that with cancer. Just had a baby. Couldn't even hold the baby because I had one surgery after another. 12 surgeries, chemotherapy, new baby, hair falling out. All of how I had identified myself was gone. A health coach, a CEO, a wife, a mother, a coach. I thought I knew who I was. And then I'm literally in bed going, this is the most uninspired I've ever been. And then I heard something. I don't know who it was or what it was, but I heard this guidance that, well, how else are you going to really meet yourself in this lifetime?

Oh, that's so good, Leah.

I heard it. You get an opportunity to meet yourself now. It's easy, Rebecca, to be inspired when everything's going well. It's easy to be who you want to be when you've got your life set up exactly how you want it. But do you really believe these messages that you've been teaching? Do you really believe that you can coach people if you don't know who you are? And what if you don't really know who you are? And that cancer gave me the gift of was a wake up call. I didn't know who I was. I knew what I wanted for people and how I wanted to be, but I wasn't connected yet to the source in me.

Thank you.

That could bring me home to me, no matter what circumstances I was facing.

I love that because I feel that we all have trauma and tragedy and hardships and. And life experiences. That's why we are saying it's a life thing. And so what's the mindset when you go through those? Are you victimized? Is it the end of the world? Is it woe is me? Do you want to live in that or do you. I love that. Rebecca. Do you want to meet yourself when the times are really hard? Because. And I know it's cliche, but you grow from the dirt, right? Beautiful things, plants grow from the dirt, grow from compost, which is trash and garbage that creates these beautiful things. And when you think of these metaphors of life, we as humans sometimes forget that these challenges, as extreme as they are, when you can click your mind into, well, then how do I meet myself to bring myself, A, out of this place and then B, to a better place, is where inspiration meets life and where another form of living, and I call it a testimony, lives within you because not on this planet for ourselves. So not only do you get to meet yourself, you get to bless someone else through meeting yourself, because there's someone else like you, Rebecca, that wasn't able to meet herself in those moments and could feel that it's over. But because you were able to find that inspiration and find your way out and change your mindset of how to manifest through, now you can coach and inspire and bless other women who don't know that it's possible. And that's like a double blessing, which is magnificent.

Oh, I love what you're saying, and I'd love to hear you say more about how to use the dark. Right? How to be with. I think one of the things that attracts me to you more than anything is I know you're not this glamorous, beautiful, bright light that is pretending like she hasn't also been through the dark. Right?

Yeah.

Rare breed, Leah. I think especially for women to take our dark and turn it into glory. And that's what I see representing for me. So I'd love us to just talk a little bit about our relationship with the dark and how do we use it and be with it to grant us access to even more inspiration?

Now I will, because so I. The dark has inspired my light. Exactly what you said. And I think when we run from it, it's this flicker of light that can blow out at a moment's notice. And so my dark is starting being raised in poverty. But when I say poverty, I mean nothing. I mean violence, alcoholism all around me. Not in my necessarily family, but in the environment. I live homeless for years as a young child with my mother, my sister, and my brother. No place to go, just empty and so society would say that I shouldn't even be sitting here with you today. Right, Rebecca? And it was the light that my mother clicked on for me when I was super young, about fifth grade, and she asked me and reminded me, do you want to follow or do you want to lead? Do you want to follow what's around you? Do you want to follow in the darkness? Like, we get in these moments, we're born in these moments, we experience these moments. And so that wasn't my only dark moment, but that was the birth of my dark moment. And so do you want to stay in that? Because that's what you'll become, was what her question was. Or do you want to choose to lead? And I love that question because she was like, do you want to lead? And I'm thinking like, oh, wait, leader. No, not lead other people. Lead your life. Yeah. And when you lead your own life, that's when you click on the light. Because then you understand. Even in the most darkest moments, when all odds against you, when society around you is against you, when your body physically is against you, when everything is against you, the beauty of understanding you have the right to choose a mindset and a direction of being is healing in itself. And so that was healing for me in that moment. And that clicked my light on. And when I found out I could choose and I could lead my life and I could decide even through the roughest challenges, I just start to choose joy. What I mean, joy is like, okay, this is horrible. What can I learn from it? Like, yeah, it's dancing like it is, right? And acknowledging the hardship. Like, when people see me in yellow and smiling and dancing, it's not because I'm saying that there's no hardship. I probably just finished crying, right? But through the cries and the tears, I decided, okay, so I want to be in this tear moment, or do I want to click on the joy? And so my collection, my second collection I titled was Rooted, because I think that's really what will help always reset us to where we want to be in life. We've been giving the power to choose. We haven't. We don't have the power to decide what's going to happen in our lives. 100%, right? Like, we don't know if we're going to lose our job. We don't know if we're going to get an illness. We don't know if people are going to be against us for whatever reason. We can't control that. But we can control the choices of who we decide to be in every moment of our life, which I define as being rooted. So at that early phase, I'm like, okay, so if I can choose and if I can lead, no matter what I see around me, no matter what people are telling me I am, then I'm going to choose to be rooted in love. I'm going to choose to be rooted in joy. Joy is different than happiness. Happiness is fleeting, meaning someone could tell me something really bad. My happy is gone, but my inner joy, meaning life will be okay, will always resonate. I'm rooted in that. I'm rooted in light. Meaning you can walk in a room and decide to smile where everyone is serious, where everyone is in this very morbid mode, and you can decide just to turn on a smile. And when you turn that smile on, it's literally infectious. When you turn on, okay, what are we going to do about it? The sky is falling, but what are we going to do about it? That's literally infectious. And so that's what the joy and light of life is to me, that power to choose and defining what you're going to be rooted in in the most roughest moments. So you can click into that mindset.

Leah, that's so beautiful. And as you're talking about roots, I mean, roots grow in the dark.

Yes. And in the dirt. And in the dirt. Yeah.

And I think it's easy. I mean, especially it's 2020 right now, and it's a hard year, and a lot of people are going through darkness and maybe even hopelessness. And I want to just talk about how you can keep living.

Yes.

Even if all you've got is your next conscious breath, if the best you have is just take another breath, just breathe into life and know that the dark could be, if you choose to see it this way, access to more life. If I'm in the dark, I'm still here. And that's what myself. As I get sicker and sicker through my treatments and as the days went by, the pain increased, I decided three things about inspiration that I'd like to share. And the first was that I had to have something to keep looking forward to. And this is why inspiration is a tool, because it is, if you choose to play it this way, if inspiration gives me access to more life, life that I can look forward to now I've got something to live for, not just the pain consuming me. Right. So I decided I had an older child. I had a gorgeous second marriage. I had a beautiful community and a message about life for people. And I Thought I've got to keep breathing into the life I'm looking forward to in the midst of the pain in the darkness. And the second thing was about letting my best be enough. Inspiration is just in my world, my best in that moment and my best in any given moment is enough. Even if it's just breathing, even if it's just staying alive that day, even if it's just letting myself cry.

Oh, love that you know?

And our best is enough. And the third thing is what Leah was talking about earlier I agree with. For me, remembering inspiration is my access to service. I can't be who I want to be for people. I'm not just wanting to feel how I want to feel, be who I want to be, live who I want to be for me and my small little life. Like I want to meet people, impact people, live with people, love with people, grow through the dark with people. To me, that would mean I got the most out of my life and that's what I want. And all of you watching, we want you to get the most out of your life. Even in whatever situation you're finding yourself in now or whatever situation from your past may still be haunting you or even a situation that hasn't even happened that you're afraid is going to happen. Life back now.

Yes, I love that and I love the tips because it's so easy to say these words but when you're in it, it's but how? Like that all sounds awesome. Leah and Rebecca, thank you. But how. And so thank you for sharing. Then what do you do? And so I'll add, what I do when I'm in those deepest, darkest moments is I'm always looking to try something. And I think the challenge is we get this grand picture and you think you have to be at the biggest end of the moment versus the start of the try wherever it is. Meaning financially you have nothing and you think you're thinking toward having the money, but you have to do something. So whether it's me try another occupation or try like trying five or six things that knowing everything may not work but one may stick, you know, so being open to non perfection and being open to the action of physically doing something, if it's a physical thing, then not thinking so far into wanting to completely be healed because that'll make you depressed, but actually physically doing. What can I physically do right now that's going to help my health? Is it me just getting up and walking for a minute instead of staying in the bed and withering away? Right. If I Can't walk, is it? Moving my hands up and down five times and celebrating turning some music on to recognize that I am living. Because when you, like you said, Rebecca, when you decide to choose life, then you need to act in life. Right? Right. So if you're gonna. If life is where you want to be, because you can choose to live in a dark or in the light and really live in the moment. I always say that, like, fear and depression are real and they're nothing to be ashamed about. And it's okay to have them, and it's okay to have it in your brain. And I say bring it with you. That's my number one thing. Like, sometimes it's unrealistic to get rid of the fear. Sometimes it's unrealistic to get rid of the depression. But in the depression, can you drag it with you to go jump up for joy and do a happy dance? Because physical action, I know Tony Robbins says that always make a move. And so it's not just a word. If you've put yourself in a place. If you go out to get the job, that probably will deny you, but you go out and get another job. It's not the denial that you. You've got to. It's not the negative, because the negative is going to happen. It's the action that you're celebrating. And if you continue to do an action and always celebrate the action, not the response of the action, because life is going to do the response for you. I believe in higher power. Your higher power is going to bring what's for you and bring you out of that place. But you're making that action so that you're not staying stagnant because nothing can move in stagnation. And I probably made that word up. I'm good for a word makeup, but nothing can move and just sitting. So I encourage you right now, make action, pull fear, depression, illness, everything along with you and decide to choose life. And. And I don't know what that looks like, but just do something, anything.

So good, Leah. And I love to expand a little bit on what you're saying from my perspective, that the fear doesn't go away. Anxiety, depression and circumstance. Right. But you don't have to let the emotional pain or suffering win if you're alive. And I think this is what you're saying. That's how I'm hearing you, Leah. Like, keep living. If you acknowledge it, just like you would a little baby.

Yes.

Down, like, okay, I guess we're hanging out right now. And here's what we're up to. So you're coming because we got.

Yes, exactly. It's like a mother with a baby. I don't have children, but that same thing, like baby's crying, not gonna leave and not acknowledge baby. But I gotta cook. I gotta get on a zoom call. I gotta do yes. And you. That's exactly it. And I feel like we don't acknowledge, we don't embrace it. It's okay. It's okay. All of these life things that don't feel good and that are in the parentheses of darkness or negative or hardships, it's okay because that's life and we're, we cannot, I don't care. The most richest person in the world has hardships. Now, we may not compare them to our hardships, but they're hardships nonetheless. So wherever you fall in the spectrum of life, know that there are going to be these moments. But then how do you move into the light? Just embrace it, Bring it along with you and do something.

Amen. And here's the deal. That darkness, that opportunity to root into the you you want to be in your darkest moments is what will have you feel free no matter what currently facing. And that is your right, is to feel free and to not be afraid of the dark. To know that you finding you in the dark is where you will if you choose to have the highest opportunity to meet yourself.

I don't think the last thing I want to add to that is really staying internal. Because you've decided, I'm going to choose life, I'm going to fill in the blanks. But if you look to the outside world, people, things, family, news, media, whatever the outside world is, it can click you. If you're following what others and things are saying and doing around you, it's going to spiral you back down. And so I encourage you. I know it's really hard to do, but I really stay inside of myself. Like I'm listening to where I decided to be. I'm hearing my inner gut because the doctor is going to say it's not possible. Your peers are going to say you can't do it, but your society is going to say you have to have X amount of money to be this. And all of these things are going to probably be saying opposite against what you know to be true inside. Believe you don't believe anything else around you, outside of you. If something inside of you said I'm going to get better, if something inside of you said I can accomplish that dream that almost seems impossible, it's true. Your higher power didn't put it in you because it was a joke. It's actually true now. It's in you to listen and do the work and do the healing, not other people. I think that's so powerful.

I think it's so powerful, too. And that was my experience with cancer. I don't think I'd be alive if I had continued with chemotherapy. I quit. That was a very difficult choice. And I'm not saying anybody out there that that's a recommendation. I'm saying inside, like Leah saying. And I decided what felt true for me.

Yes.

What was going to grow me the most, what was right for me. And nobody could give me that answer. And yes, you know, the odds were against me. And I made a very controversial call that I believed saved my life. And there was no answer except the one that was inside of me that I didn't know if it would work out or not. And I think that's so important too, as it's a life thing, as we go for the lives we want and only we can do that for ourselves.

Yeah.

Nobody can create the life you want for you. Right. It will mean a lot of inevitable failure and falling down.

Yes.

And criticism and ridicule and being misunderstood and told over and over and over again that what you're doing doesn't make any sense or won't work out. I just decided at one point to, you know, go for it or die trying.

That's what I.

Go for it or die trying to.

Yes. That's. I mean, I say that about my dreams. I'm like, here's what, I'm either gonna accomplish it or I'm gonna pass away first. But it's gonna happen. And I'm gonna fail so many times in between. But my happiness, my joy is lying. And that I chose my thoughts and decision. Education is beautiful. I always get educated. I always listen. I always look for knowledge. I'm a seeker. I'm a maven. But after I get that knowledge, no matter what it is, I then take that knowledge and go inside of me and say, what part of that knowledge feels good to me? Where does that knowledge say I should take it? And then I make that move on what's in me. So even if it fails, I don't have to point the finger at someone else. I failed because I thought that was good for me. And I'm fine with that. I'm okay with repercussions of a decision as long as I made a decision.

And then there's no regrets.

No regrets.

And that's possible to live with no regret. And I. Yeah, I wish more people could experience that. And Leah, I just have so much respect for you going for it. I think that inspiration gets even more defined when we use life as the ultimate educational experience. Right?

Yes.

Let's grow because of every moment instead of living in spite of our moments.

Nice. Love it. Live.

It's a life thing.

It's a life thing.

I know it's been hard year. I know you've been through your own personal hell. And Leah and I have both.

And still will. And still will. I'm still yesterday it was hard. I mean, it's a life thing. And give yourself a timeline to sit morbid or be in your feelings. Bring your feelings with you always. But sometimes you do need a moment to sulk it out. Right where you're like, I can't even move because this is so hard. Okay, I have 24 hours. And then after that we're gonna pick you up. You're not gonna go anywhere, but we're gonna bring you in. You in the accent. And so I think embracing that reality is beautiful. I'm so grateful that we get a chance to share our life and our love of life together because it's so beautiful. When I create the Valencia key jewelry, I created it in the concept of unlocking that bravery and that light and that togetherness because I know life is the same but different, the same for all of us. Meaning you're going to have peaks and valleys. I'm going to have peaks and valleys. And if we can have a togetherness moment to where we are wearing these pieces, knowing like Rebecca is over there choosing life, if she can choose life today, even when I feel like I can't move, I'm going to put my ring on, I'm going to put my bracelet on, and I'm just going to choose to move because I know other people are out there doing it and living too. So if they can do it, why can't I? That's my number one thing. If I can do it, a girl raised in nothing, where society said I should be on drugs, destitute, off the radar. If I can sit here today, then I know you can. If Rebecca, you can come through one of the most challenging the life threatening experiences in health and in your own life and be sitting here today, then everyone can do it just as much, you know? So I think it's so beautiful.

I do too. And I love. I had to just fix my blinds because the light just started pouring in. Yes, we can't forget that there is so much that's out of our control. And if we're trying to get to that result or beating ourself up because we're not there yet, we're missing the ride. You don't know when that moment will be. When the light finally comes in.

Oh, nice.

That it's gonna come. Then you live for it. And in my experience, it's never not come when where there's that final, oh my gosh, now it's happening. But if we're going through the motions of our life, if we're avoiding the darkness, if we're dimming down our own light because of life thing, that's your right. But you also have the right to live beyond survival mode and to thrive. And Leah, I hope you do this again.

I am have to.

Every moment I get with you and I'm so grateful to share this morning with you, this time with you, with everyone watching and you know our hearts are with you. We know it hasn't, but there's so much beauty to look forward to if you use life in the moments of life to be even more alive and.

Use our inspiration and other people's inspiration and wearable pieces. Whatever you can do to help, whatever you can do. Because I know it's inside. But sometimes you need clickers and reminders and so maybe it's hearing our voice, maybe it's seeing our light, maybe it's wearing jewelry, maybe it's joining an instructional coaching session. Whatever it is that can help you take one more step is a beautiful thing because you do have another step. And you can dance, you can celebrate, you can do all of those. And we're here for you to pray that wherever your life is desired to be, it will be.

And we're so much better together, right? We are cheering you on and we're cheering each other on.

Yeah.

And it's easy to see the limitations and to buy into them, but you're stronger than any perceived limitation. And the limitation is just a moment and you're still here. So you can outshine and outlast that moment. One thing that you're going to do today to live more inspired and we'd love to hear from you, you know.

Yes, Rebecca.

I'm Rebecca. Silence. Join us in our path of living inspired and tell us one thing you're going to do today after watching this to live more inspired. We would love to hear from you. And welcome back. It's a life thing.

It's a life thing.

Closing thoughts.

Well, live life. It's okay. And you've got this. I love you.

I love you, too. You've got this. I'm going to just repeat what Leah said. We're in this together.