SPI 841: How to Tell Stories to Attract Your Perfect Clients with Celinne Da Costa

SPI 841: How to Tell Stories to Attract Your Perfect Clients with Celinne Da Costa

Celinne Da Costa: When we are walking what I like to refer to as the timeline of our highest possible soul destiny, there are forces that will come to your aid that are beyond what your rational mind can ever explain. I believe there’s something out there that is benevolent, that does lead you in the direction where you’re meant to be when you’re connected to yourselves. When I’m on the right path, I will have a conversation with a perfect stranger, or I will see a sign, or I will ask a question and will magically get answered in a podcast I’m listening to that next day. The answers will come.

Pat Flynn: One of the most important things about your business is the story that you’re telling. Not just your story and how you grew up and how you got to where you are. I think that’s important. And I think in my experience, I know just exactly how important that is. You know, my layoff story and all those kinds of things that, that is important.

But the way that you shape that story and how it relates to who it is you’re serving is absolutely key. We’ve had people like Donald Miller on the show before from building a story brand. And I don’t think there’s enough learning that we can have about better storytelling, which is exactly why I wanted to bring in Celinne Da Costa on today.

Celinne Da Costa is a brand identity master. She’s a storytelling coach and she specifically helps people, mostly women, but I mean, her stuff is universal for how we can take our brand and actually relate to our audience. And I think that’s so, so important. Even on our website, she says become the best story you’ve ever told.

And this is going to be especially relevant if you are a coach, if you are getting services. Or have services to share and to offer and to serve with and you know if you have any coaching programs These are going to be pretty key. So whether that is you or not, this is still going to be very very relevant So let’s bring on Celinne Da Costa, this is session 841 of the SPI podcast.

This is a great conversation and you can find her at CelinneDaCosta.com. She’s an absolute joy and I know you’re going to enjoy this. Here she is.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Celinne, welcome to SPI. Thank you so much for coming on today.

Celinne Da Costa: I’m so excited to be here today.

Pat Flynn: It’s about time. You know, we have probably been in the same room together without even knowing it. We have a lot of friends who are friends with each other and yet here we are meeting for the first time. So this is an absolute pleasure for me.

Thank you again for, for taking the time today.

Celinne Da Costa: Yeah, I’m super excited. It’s been a long time coming, but it’s always the right time when the time comes.

Pat Flynn: Exactly. Exactly. And speaking of the right time, I think this is a perfect time to have you come on the show because a lot of us in this, especially when the new year comes around, it’s like new year, new you, you want to go bigger, you want to go bolder, but oftentimes it’s a lot of the things that are happening inside of our heads, the story that we’re telling ourselves that actually holds us back.

And this is what indeed you help your private clients with. You have some amazing things on your newsletter that we can already get some value from. We’ll talk about that later, but I’d love to know how you got here. What is your origin story and how did you become so obsessed with helping people become the best version of themselves?

Celinne Da Costa: So my origin story starts with a story that will be very familiar to the entrepreneurs out there, which is the classic I was in a corporate job and I hated it and it sucked my soul dry and I knew that there was more. to life than what I had been presented with. So what that looks like for my individual story specifically is I immigrated to the United States when I was a child, which I know is a surprise to many because of my English accent, my American accent.

But I immigrated when I was about 10 years old. And what this did is that it gave me a very interesting perspective on the culture that is packaged and sold around, you know, let’s call it the American dream. That so long as you work really, really hard and you do your best and you just go do the damn thing, then you get to climb up the corporate ladder and, you know, have your beautiful 2.5 children and life will be grand until, you know, one day and you go and you retire and you go travel.

So this granted this is very incredible marketing campaign called the American dream I totally bought into and as I was growing up in the States, I did everything that I could to become the person who could have it And so what that looked like was modifying my personality Making sure I checked off all the boxes making sure I understood what successful equaled in this context of culture and just doing it, just doing the thing all the way through.

And that’s what I did. I worked my butt off. I, you know, sent myself to an Ivy league university. I graduated from there, decided to go to New York city because that’s what everybody was doing. Got a corporate job as a brand strategist and one of the top agencies in the U S. And I went through the motions.

I ran on the hamster wheel. You had it. Yeah, I had it. I did the thing. And then guess what happened? How I felt didn’t change. How I felt inside did not change. And I realized that if I wanted to truly change my life, I had to do something radical. And I didn’t know, I was not aware at the time. I hadn’t started doing my personal development work.

I wasn’t aware of the science or art of change. I wasn’t aware of the biology of change. I didn’t know any of these things. I just intuitively knew that for me to shift, the story had to change. And that’s when I decided to, I had this radical crazy idea one day of doing a social experiment in which I challenged myself to circumnavigate the globe by couch surfing using human connection.

What that means is no website, no CouchSurfing.com, never used it, never been on it. It meant literally talking to people and going through those six degrees of human connection and just friends, friends of friends, strangers I met on the road. I threw myself into this experiment and I said to myself, every day I’m going to do the three things I love the most.

I’m going to meet people, I’m going to travel, I’m going to write. And if I commit to doing what I love the most every single day, then the universe is bound to show me where I’m meant to be. I I’m bound to find my purpose. It’s only a matter of time. And off I went fast forward a year later, I grew a social media following.

I started writing for Forbes, Entrepreneur. I started getting featured on big podcasts, people approaching me to share my story, telling other people’s stories and entrepreneurs started to approach me, my friends, friends of friends saying, Hey, how are you growing this really engaged, large following you’re not, you don’t even have a, real job.

Like, how are you doing this? How are you gathering this visibility and attention and, and hype around your mission? I was like, I don’t know. I’m just telling a story and long story short, they asked, Hey, can you take a look at my business? And I started to look at people’s business and started to get in there to support these entrepreneurs with what is that real story that you’re trying to tell through your brand, through your messaging?

Like, what is it that you really, really want to say? What matters the most to you? And, and why do you want to speak what you want to speak? And I just started going for it, and it took a life of its own, and before I knew it, I was growing a coaching business, helping leaders to tell their most authentic story with the world and to connect that to not only their sole mission, but also to their business growth, you know, because telling your story does lead to a huge catapult in income and influence and impact.

So yeah, you know, when people ask me, how did I get into this? I didn’t choose it, it chose me and I decided to follow the signs.

Pat Flynn: Amazing. And we, we will be diving into storytelling a little bit and how to tell our story and how that attracts people that we want to attract. But I’m curious, you know, the dream was the American dream, but today I think a lot of people dream to do exactly what you did, which is to just get up and go and do the thing and be free, if you will, and discover or rediscover yourself.

I mean, immigrant child, I imagine, I mean, did you have parents who were like, no, like, you’re crazy. Your boss must have been like, what are you doing? Tell me about the negatives that were happening around you that were trying to pull you back into this life that you thought originally that you were supposed to be a part of.

Celinne Da Costa: Yeah. When I had this idea. It felt so insane that it took me a few months to even allow myself to have this idea. I mean, it was baking for quite a while. When I started telling people about it, at first I was very quiet. I just told my like close friends. Thankfully, my close friends were very supportive.

That’s why they’re my close friends. But then I started to, you know, I was like, okay, well, it’s time to tell my mother. It’s time to tell my father. And that’s when I started to get a lot of objections. When I started, you know, telling the close family friend, my mother absolutely freaked out. My dad is a huge traveler, so he was, I was a little freaked out, but he, he was like, okay, I think you can do this. He was more accepting of it. But I faced, oh my gosh, Pat, massive amounts of resistance. People told me I was crazy. People told me I was, I could get killed and worse things that I won’t speak into. They told me that I was like high smoking things that like, they’re just like, what are you doing?

You, you have such like, yeah, yeah, why don’t you, why you don’t stay. You’re just gonna throw everything you’ve ever worked for away for this, and you’re gonna be unemployed. And I, I wasn’t even like, oh, I’m gonna go start my business. I have a vision for a business. I’m gonna be an entrepreneur. Like, I had no idea I would be a business owner.

It wasn’t even remotely on my mind that I could have the capacity to own a business. It was so far away like dream that I didn’t know I had. And so it was just massive amounts of resistance and a lot of people questioning me. And it was hard. And you know what? If it wasn’t for that strong, strong feeling in my gut, which over the years I have learned to cultivate and I believe is the secret weapon to entrepreneurship, that feeling of like intuition of this is possible for me.

If it wasn’t for that, I would have buckled. I don’t even know how I didn’t buckle, to be honest. Cause, cause that feeling was that strong, that feeling in my soul. It was a soul calling. It’s the best way I can describe it. And I almost buckled so many times, but the feeling was stronger than all the noise.

Pat Flynn: I remember when I got laid off and I was presented the opportunity to become an entrepreneur. I had so much in my head telling me, well, then I’d be wasting the years I spent learning architecture. Right? I put all this time and money, my parents put time and money into schooling for me to do this thing that I’m doing, but here’s this new opportunity.

How did you not weigh the sunk cost of what you had already invested in this American dream that you’d built this incredible job that you have? Was there not a thought of just like, Oh, well, I’m actually throwing that away. How did you weigh heavier the opportunity versus what you were losing?

Celinne Da Costa: What I believe in is that when we are walking what I like to refer to as the timeline of our highest possible soul destiny, there are forces that will come to your aid that are beyond what your rational mind can ever explain. And I believe that God, universe, mother nature, source, whatever it is that you believe in, it doesn’t quite matter. I believe there’s something out there that is benevolent, that does lead you in the direction where you’re meant to be when you’re connected to yourself.

And maybe that that is just your higher self in the future pulling you into the now. Who knows? But what I have witnessed in my life again and again and again ever since I decided to walk this path Is that when I’m on the right path, I will have a conversation with a perfect stranger or I will see a sign in a restaurant, or I will ask a question and will magically get answered in a podcast.

I’m listening to that next day. The answers will come. And I remember having a conversation. I was connected to a man who actually his name is Leon Lagothicez. He is the author of the Kindness Diaries, now a great friend of mine. And I got connected to him because somehow he’s my friend tweeted my blog and he saw my blog and we got into a connection and a call because he had also traveled the entire world and done some crazy things in his journey.

And I remember getting on this phone with him. This was around the time that I had this idea. And I resonated with it so much. I’m like, Oh my God, this is so similar to this idea that I’ve had. And I asked him, like, why did you quit your job? Why did you put everything on the line to do this crazy, crazy journey?

And he was significantly older than me as well. And so he had way more years behind him. He had more to lose. And he said to me, you know, Celinne, if I could give you any advice, by the time I quit and decided to, you know, embark on my mission, I was in so much pain and I was suffering so much. It was a choiceless choice.

I had to do this or the consequences were dark. If I could advise you on anything. It’s make the choice from a place of joy and from a place of I get to do this instead of waiting until the moment where there isn’t a choice. And in my work, both in my personal journey as well as you know, I support so many clients who are going through enormous transitions at all different kinds of levels who have built the In like super successful business that now they feel they’re a prisoner of, or they’ve built this like huge influence and have millions of followers, but feel like they’re showing up and they’re stuck to an identity that they’ve outgrown or, you know, they’re feeling like they’ve created so much success in their life, but they’re still feeling unfulfilled and empty inside.

I have the gift in the, like, it’s such a privilege for me to be able to sit in these private rooms with so many high level leaders, because I don’t just have to make my own mistakes. I can also learn from other people’s mistakes. And what I realized, like, his words stayed with me because I didn’t know it then.

You know, my soul was guiding me, and I was completely not, I was unconscious about what was actually going on. Which is honestly better, because if I had known, I probably would have been even more scared. You know, in this case, ignorance is bliss. But it was one of those things where I had this deep rooted feeling that if I don’t make a move, I will stay exactly where I am, and my life is going to look very similar two, three, five years from now.

And I don’t want that, because I know that road leads me to more misery. So I just knew that I have, I have to. It was a choiceless choice. I have to move forward to give myself the chance to change my reality, and that’s exactly what happened, and it’s happened again and again ever since. Whenever I’m afraid, whenever I feel tiny little niggly feeling of, mm, I’m stuck, or it’s stagnant, or it’s feeling like I’m comfortable where I’m at, no, it’s like that really gentle fire. It’s not as hot as it was back in 2016, because I’ve already, I’ve learned a lesson and I know when that little fire starts to burn, it’s time to make a change.

Pat Flynn: Thank you for that background. Wow. You know, I’m hearing that having the perfect job that pays the perfect payroll or having the millions of followers, like some of your students have, or having this success and fame, more money is not the answer to fulfillment and success. Yes. What is, across your clients and yourself, what is happiness and fulfillment, really?

Celinne Da Costa: I’ll give the answer from my perspective, my experience, disclaiming that, you know, I don’t have the answer to it all. And I’ll share what my experience has been of touching this place again and again and again. Is that the first thing that it is, is a choice. And what I mean by that, it’s, when I was in college, I struggled with depression for two and a half years.

I had chronic depression. And so I, I’ve had this feeling when we, when we tell people, like, you just need to choose to be happy. It’s not fair all the time, because sometimes someone’s listening and they’re like, what do you mean? I’m, I can’t, like, I, I’m so unhappy or I’m so disconnected. Let’s make it even easier.

Let’s make it even more accessible, which is a choice of who. you’re going to be every day leads to happiness and fulfillment. And what I realized is that, you know, following all these years, like over a decade of personal development and studying from these incredible masters and the absolute wisdom of what these masters have to say, it’s all true about, you know, like, It’s all in the now, it’s all in the present, it’s all about, like, who you are and being in that space of love and kindness and connection every day.

Yes, these are all true concepts, but if we want to make them more accessible, until the day that I’m forever living in unity consciousness and I’m just like 24 7 in that place of peace and bliss, until that day. There’s a process, there’s a journey. And what I have found with my clients, with my own personal experience, is that they kept looking to the day when dot, dot, dot, the day when they have a seven figure business, the day when they buy their dream house, the day when they are speaking on that stage that they’ve been dreaming of speaking on.

And what happens is that that day comes because you work for it. Cause you, you, you bust your butt. Getting there. And when that day comes, it’s just like, on to the next thing. On to the next thing. Oh, okay, sure. You don’t get that elative, like, oh my god, the heavens are breaking, and I, it’s, I’m in absolute trance and ecstasy, like, the moment that you get on that stage.

It’s just normal. It’s because it’s who you’ve become. And so what I found, the most important way to actually stay connected to that sense of happiness and fulfillment isn’t in the goal, but it’s rather in the daily practice. And it’s something that it took me a really long time to wrap my head around because I refused to believe it at first until I had my own personal experiences of hitting the goal, hitting the goal, hitting the goal, and being like, this isn’t changing how I feel inside.

And so identifying how you want to feel inside is step number one, which, you know, to me, my core, I call it with my clients, I call it like, what’s the emotional cocktail that you choose to drink every day? If you could have a drink, if you could have a sip of your emotional state every day, what is yours?

For me, it’s a cocktail. It’s love, joy and freedom. That’s the kind of cocktail I want to sip every single day when I’m living my life. If I am living in a state of love, joy, and freedom, everything I want in my life is going to work out because I’m going to feel the way that I want to feel. So no matter what happens, I’m going to get what I want because it’s how I feel.

However, if I am not operating in love, joy, and freedom, my job is to get back into alignment and return to love, joy, and freedom. That’s where home is. So if I’m feeling miserable and stressed and cranky, my job is to become aware of that, regulate my nervous system, come into my practice to return to love, joy, and freedom.

When I feel that way, then I make a move. Then I take action. And a lot of people, they, and even, you know, when we speak about this perpetual chasing, this perpetual hamster wheel, you’re taking action from a space of being cranky, tired, miserable. And then you’re surprised that you’re not getting the results that you want in your business, in your life, in your love life.

It’s because you’re taking an action from a state that is out of alignment with the state that you wish to be in when you receive the thing that you desire. So it’s nonsensical. You’re taking a left when the thing you want is to the right. So your job is to stop being, going to the left, turn around, get back to the starting point, and get to the right again.

All that wrapped up. The short answer is choosing how you want to feel on a daily basis, not putting it over there in the future when you get that thing, but putting it right here today in your current state, even if the evidence hasn’t presented itself yet, and then implementing a daily practice through your habits, your behavioral patterns.

and your belief systems so that you’re plugging back into that frequency every day. And if you pop out, you know how to get back in. So it’s very nitty gritty, small steps that are intentional, focused, and precise.

Pat Flynn: That way you are attributing your self worth and value to the actions that you take and who you are today, not whether or not, I don’t know, the algorithm says that video did well, or somebody chose to hire you to go on that stage or not, or the result went this way or that way.

That doesn’t matter. What matters is you did the thing that aligns with who you want to be and who you believe you are. And that was a lesson that I recently learned because I’m an Enneagram 3. So my sense of self worth often is so much tied into how other people feel about me. And, you know, there’s a good side of that and there’s a bad side of that.

But that’s a dangerous place to be because I am fully reliant, my mood, my energy is reliant on how other people feel about me. Receive me and that’s, that’s like you lose a lot of control in that, in that regard, you know, luckily I’ve surrounded myself with a lot of people who do lift me up, who helped me be the best version of of me that I can, but I’m learning now that as long as I can just be with myself every day and do the things that I know align with who I want to be, it doesn’t matter what happens.

I did the thing that I believed was correct for me. And that to me is joy and success and happiness. Now it took a lot of unraveling of a lot of, you know, my history to do that. It took a lot of psychoanalysis and going into my past to go, well, why did I default to that? How do you work with your clients or how do you imagine a person listening to this to go, well, they’re already telling themselves stories about why this can’t happen to them or why they don’t deserve something.

It might be a money story. It might be, you know, a failed launch once in the past. How do you coach people through those past traumas to help set themselves up for success?

Celinne Da Costa: It’s so dead simple, but as you know, simple does not equal easy. And sometimes things are so simple that the brain wants to make them complicated.

The simple version is like we today, like you, me, we are a product of our conditioning. And even when you think about when you look at human development from the ages of zero to seven, we haven’t developed that critical thinking filter yet. We are these walking, talking, subconscious sponges. What we absorbed growing up, our parents or caretakers, the ways that they related to money, the ways they related to success, the ways they related to each other, to love, the social economic environment that we grew up in, the culture that we grew up in, all of these things are factors that have shaped us to believe because what we are, you know, who we are from a personality standpoint is how we think, how we feel, and how we act. That’s what the personality is. The ego, we can call it. Our personality is a collection of how we think, how we feel, and how we act. And how we think is influenced by what belief systems we were conditioned to, to believe in such as money doesn’t grow on trees or, Oh, it’s, it’s, you know, rich people there.

They only out to get you or every man will betray you at some point. Like whatever that story is that was passed down to you. That’s, that’s the, the emotional inheritance that we get from our, our parents, from our ancestry. And so we come into this world pure clean slate, and then we get all kinds of shaped by, by these external factors.

And at some point, hopefully, we wake up and realize there is more to me. There’s more to me than this. And this is what we can, you know, refer to as spiritual awakening or just becoming more conscious, becoming more aware of who we are and realizing that we can no longer react as just being a byproduct of our past.

But we, as human beings, as souls, I believe, we get to that point where we’re like, no, I am here to become all that I’m here to be. And that’s when we start having a conversation about what is your mission? What is your why? What is your contribution to the planet? Because we are designed, the needs of the spirit are growth and contribution.

We are designed to grow and we are designed to contribute. We are not designed to navel gaze and like be just be trapped by our conditioning and our past. And so when I work with clients, you know, many people, they come to me when they’re in that state of transition, they’re in that state of either first wave, second wave, third wave of awakening, and they’re realizing, wow, I’m meant for more.

And I know that I have more potential. There, there’s a massive amount of potential that I have and I’m not living up to it and not living up to your potential is freaking painful. It is like a slow death. It is existential crisis to the max. Not knowing that you’re here for more and not living up to it because you’re not thinking, you’re not acting, you’re not feeling in accordance to that future version of you that you know in your gut that you’re here to become in your lifetime.

And so there’s a disconnect. This is who I want to be and this is who I am right now. How do we bridge that gap? And it’s not about adding more when that disconnect is present. It’s not about like, Oh Pat, you just need to get smarter or you just need to like get more skills or you just need to, to mature more.

Yes. Those things are all great. And they’re part of the growth journey. But what the actual key to this process of shifting into a higher identity and evolving beyond yourself into something greater and more soul aligned is that you need to let go. You need to release, you need to free yourself of things that you used to think were the truth for you.

And you know, I’m going to tell you a secret. You know when they talk about limiting beliefs? All beliefs are limiting. All of them. Every belief you have is a limitation that you’ve set upon yourself. And as we grow, we create larger and larger beliefs to hold the next level of our growth. But it’s a freaking ninja skill to be able to identify those beliefs and let go of them when you have grown out of them.

And so when I’m working with clients, it’s really about looking at where is it that you want to go next. It’s not all that you can be. It’s just, let’s stretch you all the way to where you can stretch to understand what is that next evolution of you look like. That version of you, that personality, How does he, she think?

How do they feel? How do they act? Who are they? Let’s anchor your future self in so we know where we’re going. And then we look at the gap of where you are now and where that future self is. And that’s where the inner work, I have a process called the rewrite your life method that I take my clients through, which is, let’s look at what are the belief systems, habit patterns, and stories that you’re telling yourself, they’re keeping you anchored into your current identity. And this is a deeper process that, you know, involves neurolinguistic programming and hypnotherapy and energy work and just really, you know, neuroscience, like really getting into their brain and understanding like what is keeping them back.

But the short version is we identify what are the limiting belief systems that you’re engaging in, that are keeping you locked into the current identity. Because if you believe that the more money you make, the more people will take advantage of you, then forget about that, I want to hit seven figures this year goal.

Because it’s not safe. You’re subconscious. is not registering your goal as safe and therefore you won’t get there because you will continue to self sabotage yourself and you will continue to find problems people and situations that where you’ll either lose money or you’ll mess up the launch whatever that reality that will replay itself so that you can stay at the current level because it’s not safe for you to grow.

If there is a habit pattern that you’re engaging in, that’s anchored into that belief, so you have the belief, then you have the habit pattern. So you believe that, you know, if you make more money, people will take advantage of you. So the pattern is that you will make a lot of money. And then you’ll find the next contractor that promises you the world and you’ll mess all this money in them without asking the right questions, without actually, like, properly interviewing them.

And then all of a sudden, you’re out of a bunch of money and the contractor didn’t deliver what they said. And you’re like, Oh, you see, they’re always out to get me. Like, I will never be enough.

Pat Flynn: Now it’s confirmation bias comes in.

Celinne Da Costa: Exactly. And then the next thing you’ll do is you’ll make meaning out of your pattern, which is you’ll tell yourself a story.

And that story will look like, you know, every time that I always go for it, go for my goals, people always come and then take advantage of me. And it’s because, you know, when I was young, my father, he would do this to me. And, and, and my mother used to talk down to me and it comes from my child and they’ll, they’ll create a story to assign meaning to the behavioral pattern that’s anchored into a belief system that most times they picked up unconsciously.

Sometimes not even through trauma. Sometimes it was just a kid pushed you in the playground after you gave him your lunch. Like it can be something really innocent. So the process of unwinding that in those layers, the layers, the way I teach it is beliefs, patterns, stories is we identify the story, the meaning that you’re giving to it.

We find the pattern, which is. It’s rooted in your daily actions, so you have to change your daily practice as well. There’s steps you gotta take every single day to change how you’re acting and behaving. And then we trace it back into the belief system and we, we release the belief system which is anchored into an unprocessed emotion.

So that’s, that’s the road map to releasing trauma in a very short version.

Pat Flynn: Can you tell me a story about a client, you don’t have to say a name, but somebody who had a lock, you helped them through this, they finally were able to let go. And then where are they now?

Celinne Da Costa: So I’ll share a story of one of my dear clients.

She hired me originally. Actually, funny enough, she found me because I had worked with Amy Porterfield and then she did a testimonial, and then this client found me and she was like, oh, cool. You know, I am a she’s, she was in process of writing a book, which is her life’s work that she was consolidating into a book.

She was 80% done with this book, and she had huge visions. She’s like, I wanna turn this into a business, and it’s gonna be my keynote. And she was absolutely stuck what she thought was writer’s block on one of the beginning chapters of the book which basically tied the whole book together. So she hired me saying, Hey, I need help telling this story.

I’m trying to finish this book. I’m not able to finish it. I don’t know why, but I’ve been stuck on it for months. So we go deeper into it and turns out the chapter she’s stuck on is a chapter around self acceptance. Where she talks about the importance of accepting yourself in order to, to be able to, to unlock your voice and find your courage and, and put yourself out there in the world.

Because her book was all around how to help people heal in the workplace. And the importance of accepting yourself in order to really make the most out of this process. And when we dug deeper in and understood what’s happening? Why is it that you’re stuck? Turns out that this is, you know, again, it’s such a spoiler alert that isn’t.

Turns out the reason why she couldn’t write this book is because she had a huge block within herself because she was not accepting herself. Her father had recently passed away and he was very abusive and it had left all of this pent up resentment, anger, grief that she hadn’t fully processed in her system.

And so she was in this place of like harboring all of these very dense, painful emotions in her body and she was not looking at them. She wasn’t addressing them. Instead, she was like, Oh, that’s just going to put that in the corner. I’m just going to plow ahead with life, which is what so many people do, especially when they haven’t learned the importance of emotional regulation and emotional processing, not just for your wellbeing, Pat, but also for high performance, since we’re talking about entrepreneurship here, if you don’t care about your wellbeing, which hopefully is not people in this podcast, but at least, you know, if you care about high performance, know that healing is on the path to high performance. And so she had all this pent up energy and it was literally blocking her creativity because creativity is, is inspiration. Inspiration is, the word says it, inspiration in spirit. It’s spirit coming through you. It’s you being able to actually channel something that’s beyond your little personality self.

It’s about getting connected to something bigger than you. That’s where all creativity comes from. She couldn’t do that because she was too busy. Her body was too busy processing all this pent up dense emotion. So what we needed to do was, first thing first, is recognize, acknowledge, hey, you’re not writing because this thing is about self acceptance, and one of your values is integrity. If you, one of your core values as a human being, because one of the things I do with my clients is value work to help them really understand what their values are, because that’s the blueprint for any successful, fulfilling, sustainable business, is knowing what your values are.

One of her values was integrity. Of course she’s not writing this thing. She’s out of integrity with herself. So she can’t write it. Her soul won’t let her. It’s like, nope, you shall not pass until you figure out how to iron this out. That was the first piece. Then the second step is, let’s go in. Let’s go into the basement and see what’s going on here.

So I walked her through this process where we went into her subconscious. And again, I work with hypnotherapy and just going into that past timeline. And finding that little girl who was so freaking terrified and so scared to express herself through this book, because if she did, she would get hurt. So there was a very real wounded child inside of her that believed, It’s not safe for me to publish this book.

It’s not safe for me to talk about this. Because if I do, I will be beat. I will be hurt. Bad things will happen to me. Which she was, in the present day, projecting as, people will judge me. People will, you know, it’s going to be a witch hunt. And she was projecting that, that deep rooted fear into what she thought would happen if she published this book.

So we had to go back in there and give her the tools to really reparent herself in that way and to feel from a very fundamental nervous system level that it’s okay, this is in the past, this is not the present. Processing those emotions, so there’s a process I take my clients through to just safely go into that original grief and that pain and move it through their nervous system.

It takes about, I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but when we are not in the mind, it actually takes the body maximum about three minutes to process an emotion. The longest emotion that it takes for a nervous system to process is grief. It takes around three minutes to process it through the body.

Everything else is a story that we give it. It’s a meaning, which can go on for decades. And so once she processed that, we brought her back into the present timeline, and we got her connected to the bigger why she’s doing this. Who is this going to impact? Why is she even bother writing this book? So this is deeper like sole purpose work and getting her really clear and connected to the bigger picture of what she’s doing.

Once she understood why she was doing what she was doing, then we did the story work, which is what’s the story that you want to tell around what it means to accept yourself. And how do you do that? By being authentic to where you are now, instead of what she was trying to do, which has been a story that she was far away ahead than where she actually was.

But the most potent truth was actually her saying, I’m still in the process of doing this for myself, and here’s where I’m at, and here’s what I’ve learned, and here’s what I want to share with you in this book. Once we unblocked that, her chapter came out in just like a week or so. It just flowed out of her.

She finished the book, she published it, it became a bestseller, and fast forward to two years from that, it is now an online course business. And she is now getting paid multiple thigh figures to be a keynote speaker at really like top companies around the world. And she is now running workshops and doing keynote speaking on that book and that book started all of it.

And so now she’s able to freely express herself, build a business that is founded in her sole mission and have a book that is changing the life of thousands of people, not to mention the keynote and the corporate workshops that she’s running. And it’s all now centered around something that she is fully embodied and she feels fully confident in.

Pat Flynn: That’s amazing, Celinne. Just congratulations to her and to you and your clients and what they are working through. I mean, this is deep stuff. This isn’t like an episode you can go, okay, like, here’s the next tactic. It’s, it’s a lot of inner work that needs to happen. I think this is something I’ve learned over time is it’s a lot of mental health that’s required to be able to be the best version of myself and you know, a lot of times you need some outside help to be able to discover or see these things. This is why I love the mastermind groups I’m in. These are people who are very honest with me and they see things that I don’t because I’m in the middle of it and it’s just a nice way to get reconfirmed that yes, this is so important.

I know that you work with a lot of people. You also mentioned that I believe you have a lead magnet or something that you can offer people here. That’s maybe a little bit more tactical, but related to storytelling. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what that might offer?

Celinne Da Costa: Yeah, definitely more tactical. I so recognize as we’re speaking into this, that this is really deep. And one of the things I also want to share is that for a lot of people, the inner work can feel really cumbersome and really scary and really overwhelming. But what I want to share is that one of my goals, one of my missions during my time is to demystify it and to make it really simple.

This lead magnet will start to do that. But also when people go on my website there’s a lot of products that I have that is all designed on how can we make this simple, obtainable, and fun. And so the lead magnet that I have is all around how to share your irresistible story so that you can attract more of your soulmate clients.

And what I love about this lead magnet is I take you behind the scenes of what it is that I do with my private clients, what this masterclass does. It’s, it’s a video masterclass, it’s less than an hour, and it’s going to teach you the key principles of what it is that you need to know in order to tell a really magnetic story.

As a brand that will attract the right people to you. It’s very practical. It’s very tactical and it will show you also what are the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs are making that are actually keeping them inauthentically expressing on the internet. And what are the reasons why you might not be connecting with the right audience where you might not be having people knocking on your doors asking to buy from you. So what it does instead is it shows you my four step framework of how it is that you can craft a story every single day in your content to really put yourself out there and to do so in a way that’s authentic and is connected to you. And it’s very simple. I promise you it’s less than an hour of your time.

And if you go through the steps that I share there, you’re going to get a really clear picture of what it’s like to tell your story. I recently had a client before she hired me, she went through this masterclass and she said she took the principles that she learned from the masterclass and use them on her social media literally the next day and she started to get clients. So it’s something that’s going to support you right away. I’m very confident of that.

Pat Flynn: Thank you. So where can people go to check that out?

Celinne Da Costa: So they can go to CelinneDaCosta.com/freemasterclass. My name is Celinne, so it’s one L and two N’s. I know that’s a common mistake.

So I always flag it for people who want to explore my other offerings. I have some courses as well as my one on one coaching. You can go on CelinneDaCosta.com and all the information is laid out there.

Pat Flynn: Beautiful. Thank you. We’ll have all the links on the show notes page. Celinne, thank you for your time today and for getting deep with us.

This is something we don’t often talk about because we get pretty tactical here in the show, but every once in a while, it’s such a refreshing and also needed thing to hear. So thank you for that. And wish you all the best. Looking forward to when we cross paths again to actually seeing you in person and shaking your hand and saying hello.

Celinne Da Costa: Hugs.

Pat Flynn: Yes.

Celinne Da Costa: Shaking my hand. I’m a hugger, but you know. I’ll respect your boundaries.

Pat Flynn: But I don’t want to assume, you know, you never know.

Celinne Da Costa: Okay, well, we’re in now. We know.

Pat Flynn: We’re hugging for sure.

Celinne Da Costa: For sure.

Pat Flynn: Thanks, Celinne. Appreciate you.

Celinne Da Costa: Thank you.

Pat Flynn: All right, I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I really love just the idea of a soulmate client.

I just love that, right? That’s like a perfect client. And I love how she framed that again. It’s just her expertise and learning how to tell the story and connect that soulmate client, especially if you are a coach or you offer any services or consultations. This is going to be especially helpful for you, and I definitely recommend checking out that free masterclass.

If you go to CelinneDaCosta.com/freemasterclass, you’ll see that less than an hour to take, and she has a lot of other things and just great stories to share. And she’s such a wonderful person. Highly recommend to check her out again. Thank you so much for listening in.

This is session 841. If you want the show notes and things and resources that were recommended here, you Just go to the show notes page, SmartPassiveIncome.com/session841. You’ll get all the links and everything that was shared again. Thank you, Celinne. I appreciate you again. I cannot stress enough how important the storytelling is.

And it’s not just the pictures that you paint and the movie that you’re kind of taking your audience through, but it’s the words you use and how that relates and how that then goes into and naturally gets into an offer of some sort. That’s how you do this the right way. So it doesn’t even have to ever feel like selling.

It’s not aggressive. You’re not even asking. You’re sharing a story and a person wants to come with you on that story that you were sharing. So anyway, thank you so much. SmartPassiveIncome.com/session841. Thank you again, Celinne. I appreciate you.

Cheers, everybody. Take care.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!