Breaking Free from Limiting Beliefs with Taylor Lehn

Have you ever been in a situation where, if something doesn’t work, it feels like going back to square one? This might make you question where and what you should pursue in life. One thing that prevents us from reaching our potential is limiting beliefs. What’s holding you back, and how can you begin shifting your mindset? In this episode, I’m joined by Taylor Lehn, the founder of Black Raven Coaching. Taylor shares her story, starting as an aspiring coffee shop owner and eventually finding her true calling as a wellness and spiritual coach. We dive into the importance of building community and the value of in-person connections. Along the way, Taylor talks about the power of following your passions, breaking free from limiting beliefs, and creating a life that truly aligns with who you are. --- Listen to the podcast here: Breaking Free from Limiting Beliefs with Taylor Lehn Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One thing that’s really important to me, in case you haven’t heard it in some of my other episodes, is bringing community together, bringing people together actually in person more and more. We have a lot of online platforms where people are connecting with one another and that’s great and that’s beautiful, but one of my goals going forward is going to be, and has been for years, is how do we reestablish on this community feel, someone to feel like you’re a part of something and that you’re actually interacting with the other people in your community. My guest today, Taylor Lehn, is a life coach and a local wellness event coordinator and the founder of Black Raven Coaching here in Denver, Colorado. --- Taylor, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me. Well, thank you for joining and I want to start a little bit by going into your story. Obviously, when you started this whole journey, you had a very different idea about what you were going to be doing. Oh, definitely. Ever since I was young, I always knew that, as far as my career was concerned, that I just needed to be my own boss. So, entrepreneurship was always where I assumed I would go. However, when I was younger, I had almost no clue what I was passionate about and finding something that I could pursue that would actually fulfill me for my entire life seemed like a very daunting task. So, when I went to college, of course, and I studied entrepreneurship and economics and the only thing I really knew I was passionate about per se was, funnily enough, coffee. I’d always been a coffee snob throughout high school, into college, while going through college, when it came time to find a job, coffee shop barista was the number one. So I dove into that and loved it, absolutely loved it. Knowing that eventually I wanted to own my own business once I got out of college, I really pursued that path of becoming a barista, really thinking that opening and owning my own coffee shop someday was what I was going to do. So I spent about the next six years or so after college really pursuing that. However, as I learned the trade, met some amazing baristas, worked my way up to becoming a coffee shop manager, really learning the ins and outs of what it takes to get a coffee shop started and to keep it running, it is a lot of work. I would say owning a coffee shop is one of the most difficult businesses you could pursue. It usually takes a coffee shop about five years to even break even. Really seeing the inside of it, seeing the people who are at the top of their game and what they had to go through and struggle through just to keep their business and their dream alive, I started realizing that that might not actually be what I wanted to do for my entire life, and that left me feeling very confused and really just not knowing what step to take. I didn’t know what else I wanted to do. Yeah, that’s a tough spot to be in, to be honest. And I think a lot of people out there listening probably have encountered that or know someone that they’re close with them that have encountered that spot where it’s like you had your mindset on something, maybe you had a passion that started from like when you were a kid, and then, all of a sudden, something about that path just didn’t work out for you. Yeah, whether it’s a challenge that came up that you couldn’t get through or whether it’s just an interest or a passion that no longer fuels you the same way. When you thought about this, you thought about the five years that it would take, essentially, kind of where you’re thinking, was it that the passion wasn’t enough to overcome that challenge and that you need to go somewhere else or did something else pop into your head that told you, okay, this is a sign that I was meant to do something different than coffee shop? In the year 2020, which is about when I was starting to realize that the coffee shop, owning my own store wasn’t what I wanted to pursue anymore. I was still working in the coffee industry. And then, of course, COVID hit, and all barista jobs just disappeared. That kind of threw a wrench in my entire plan anyway, although I do believe, looking back at it now, it was a turning point that was really good for me. I think I needed a reason and a very big explosive thing to happen to kind of steer me away from that. Of course, when COVID hit for everybody, we were suddenly all staying at home, and that really gave me some time, just losing my job, not knowing where to go or what to do or how I was going to make money, feeling really fearful and also feeling just really defeated and really in this place of I had no idea, no idea what I wanted to do. And I think the struggle when you’re there is you tend to just want to chase money. When you’re in a place where you’re like, “Well, I don’t know what I’m passionate about anyway, so I might as well just go out and try to pursue something that is gonna bring me a lot of money,” but everything that I could think of, I tried a few different jobs, I tried working in insurance, spent a little time trimming cannabis for a dispensary, all these things, and I just could not figure out what I wanted to do and it’s just a really tough place to be in when you feel like you’re wasting your time, you feel like you have no skills, you feel like all the time that you put into this one thing and it didn’t work out, you’re just kind of like at square one. Luckily, maybe, I don’t know if it was divine intervention from the universe or from YouTube’s algorithms, but I started getting a lot of self-help videos popping up on my screen, especially like spiritual stuff about manifestation and how to reprogram your thoughts, a lot of Bruce Lipton and Joe Dispenza kind of information and that really got to me, that really hit. For the first time in a few months, it really sparked my interest. So I just went down the absolute rabbit hole, watching YouTube videos, listening to podcasts, reading books all about this, everything in this spiritual self-help world, like how I was just desperate for any information on how to get out of this unstuck place that I was in. When you go down the rabbit hole, as you describe it, in your view, a sign or an indication that this is something that really interests you, like when you find out you’re looking into a certain topic and you want to just keep going, is that something that anyone that’s out there that’s feeling stuck in their place should be paying attention to? Yes, I always tell people that they really need to be paying attention to what gives them that spark, what they are interested in, and the more that you can follow your interests instead of following what you think is going to keep you safe, you’re going to start to discover a little bit more about who you are and what you really want and what your values truly are.Share on X You talk about a lot of people going down this path of what you think is going to keep you safe, and I think that there’s tons of that instinct around what’s making money, what’s the most obvious thing, and that path can often lead to something relatively unsatisfying. You know that moment where you come in and you just imagine yourself 10 years from now still doing the same thing, and it’s suddenly like, whoa, right? That’s kind of how I was feeling with the coffee shop, with pursuing my own career in coffee, is it really felt like it was a dead end pursuit and I felt like if I had continued down that path, that I would get 10 years into it and then just feel so unfulfilled with where I was at. A lot of people, they get on this path where they go to college, they choose a major, they pursue that major after college, they get 10 years down the line in their corporate job, and they hate themselves. Again, kind of what I was talking about before about how I was feeling when COVID had hit, a lot of people feel like that all the time, even before COVID, because the path that they chose wasn’t their passion and yet they feel so locked into it that they’re unwilling to leave. And when you’re unwilling to leave that place, that unhappiness and that unfulfillment leads into everything, your relationships with your partners, your kids, your family, your friends, it just bleeds into everything. Yeah. I mean, it could bleed into your health too, because my serotype is that people are numbing their feelings with some combination of drugs, alcohol, perpetually being busy, and people will go one of two paths, either, okay, suddenly I’m drinking, doing an edible every night or something like that, or I’m just going to really, really lean into an unhealthy amount of fitness where I got this crazy regimen, right? Yes. And yet nothing you do actually satisfies. Yeah, and that’s a tough place to be in, because it’s like there’s so much invested in it and so you had maybe a smaller version of it,...