Rediscovering Your Authentic Self To Thrive with Leah Beltz

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! --- Listen to the podcast here: 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. --- 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?” It seems like a very big daunting task to figure out what your purpose is. And so this takes place over a conversation that really comes from their own story and so I think that the bizarre thing or the different things is sort of people’s backgrounds but there’s this commonality of why people are seeking out The Dig. 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 “connectio