Unleash your inner heroine! Today, hosts Barbara and Joan Perry continue to explore The Heroine’s Journey, a powerful framework for overcoming obstacles and achieving success. The Heroine’s Journey Roadmap continues with steps 5 to 7. Tune in to learn how to better equip yourself to confront challenges, ignite your courage, and cultivate a supportive network to propel you forward. Discover strategies for gathering the resources you need to build a fulfilling and prosperous life and learn how to embrace the power within to create the future you deserve.
This series shows you exactly how to:
- Navigate your way out of the darkness, of worrying and stressing.
- Ignite the Courage and Strength that propels you forward.
- Live a life of True Wealth, full of Joy, Freedom, and Prosperity.
- Fire up your Self-Worth and Voice to serve.
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Uncovering the Secrets of the Walk The Journey Roadmap: Life Force Energy, Support Systems, And Gathering Resources
What a quick week. I was looking at the calendar. It’s hard to believe. These years are flying by.
That’s a big portion of the year already gone. Heroines have lots of work to do this year. I think we’d better get busy.
I think so too. This is exciting. We were counting the recordings this morning that go into this set of podcasts. By the time we put the bow on it, it’s going to be a great presentation, tying all of this baseline together and giving individuals a clear understanding of the mini-course and the full course as the invitations go out to participate in that. Do you have any comments that you want around that?
All I’d say is that for me, The Heroine’s Journey has so transformed my life. Not only transformed it out of the difficult stuff that I was in but also, when I hit any bumps in the road now and because I know the process of The Heroine’s Journey, it gives me a guidepost to go back and look at it and say, “What is it that’s not working at this moment that I need to tweak so that I live that joyful, freedom, prosperous, happy life that I choose to live while I have good years?”
Isn’t that amazing? Also, those huge mountains don’t seem like these treacherous ventures anymore. They’re more like hills that we can look at.
Yeah, because we develop in The Heroine’s Journey skills, tools, and talents that guide your way. You can say I have courage and strength. What it did for me is that they built the internal structure inside of me so that I was capable of handling the lions, tigers, and bears that might jump out in our path. As we know from having watched The Wizard of Oz when we were kids, which is one of my favorite all-time movies, Dorothy was on a path.
She didn’t know all the answers when she started down the path. It was just a yellow brick road. Friends came and met her and she understood the things that she had to develop and grow to get where she wanted to go. Our lives are very similar and The Heroine’s Journey is about taking the different avenues and skills that will lead us to the point that when she got to the wizard, it wasn’t so scary. She opened that curtain and said, “What was I afraid of all the way?” Our lives are like that too.
Actually, in the news right now, they’re talking about the man behind the curtain for the AI simulators. There isn’t just a program running. People are still manipulating it as it’s shaping it. We see it in our own lives as we become accountable for our outcomes and responsible for our lives. There’s still a little bit of funny business going on behind the curtain a lot.
I think you make a good point that we have to be responsible for our own lives because there’s so much manipulation going on. We have to be clear to see through that manipulation because I don’t want anybody, I know you don’t either, to hamper the God-given joy, love, and fun that we’re here to have in this world.
Discernment is key. That’s one of the threads that you’ve woven throughout the session and the teachings, to have people be aware of boundaries and how they impact them, and to choose for themselves.
The Heroine’s Journey is all about the freedom to ask new questions of yourself. One of those questions is, “If I own this life,” not my husband, my father, my brother, my employer, or anybody else. If I own this life, what does it look like?
The Heroine’s Journey is all about the freedom to ask new questions of yourself.
How beautiful that is and how scary it is.
That’s why you have to see if I own this life, and I’m not giving away pieces of it, which our culture teaches us to do all the time, if I own it, who am I? Where am I going?
Who am I? That’s amazing. Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked quite a bit about The Heroine’s Journey roadmap that you created. The core tenets of that roadmap are that it shows you exactly how to navigate your way out of the darkness of worrying and stressing. There’s an abundance of reasons why anybody on planet Earth right now might fit with that. The next is to ignite courage and strength that propels you forward. We’re not stuck anymore. We’re not being held back.
The third tenet is to live a life of true wealth, full of joy, freedom, and prosperity. I believe that we all desire on one level or another. The fourth tenet is to fire up your self-worth and voice to serve. That is where we’re giving back. We’re standing strong in our community, whether it’s via our family, the university, the schools, or whatever that looks like, but we’ve got to stand strong in who we are to help guide other people or shine the light for other people.
As a PS, I would add one more thing. That is I choose heroines to be around me now because it’s much more fun to be around heroines. As you stepped into heroine and other good friends of mine, I feel so blessed by being part of the strength, courage, and determination that they bring.
The 13 Steps: A Recap
Other women have the light on and know that even if we’re not 100% on the path that we choose to be on, we are on the path of The Heroine’s Journey and helping to shine the light for the people. In the last couple of weeks, we talked about the 13 steps. Step 1 is the status quo. Step 2 is the crisis. Step 3, we got into the challenge. We talked quite a bit about that darkest moment. We also talked about step 4, as you’ve outlined, character revelation. Is there anything else you want to talk about on any of those four before we move into 5, 6, and 7 today?
I think the important thing to know is that there are 13 steps. We all start on step number 1. If you’re on step number 1 right now, our hearts go out to you because The Heroine’s Journey is not for the faint of heart. The Heroine’s Journey is for us to grow and learn, and be the full people that we can be.
Step 1, status quo is living your life thinking everything is perfect and nothing is going to change, and then step 2 comes along. That’s when the crisis appears seemingly out of the blue. You didn’t even know it was coming, but something in one of four areas seems to just rock you off your boat. That would be either health, financial, your sense of self-worth, or in my case, it was people. I didn’t have people discernment that kept me out of the gutter, so to speak.
Step number 3 comes along, and that’s the challenge. You realize that you don’t like it, but there’s a new reality. You don’t even know how to adjust to it, what to do, or how to go forward. The truth is you’re now stripped of the old. There’s no ability to maintain the full self and you’re in this new sense of the world that you’re living in.
Step number 4 is character revelation. It’s that time when you realize it’s for all of us. It’s a time when we maybe for the first time hear the heroine’s cry in us. That’s that resilient, I can do it, I don’t like these circumstances, but watch me cry. That is innate to all of us. We listen very carefully to that cry because it is the motivator to get us on going forward. Today, we’re going to talk about step number 5, call to the crusade. How do you feel about that one?
When I was younger, I liked programming and video games. I always chose the ones that were the crusade, but it’s a little different because I thought I would sit down for a moment and play this game and leave. I’m excited that we’re called to the crusade, but very nervous about not knowing what that crusade or what that journey or path is going to look like.
I think that’s very well-spoken because the circumstances are dire when you’re in the crusade. You get a sense that there’s no way out but to go through. You cannot turn around and swim back into the womb. That’s a feeling I’ve had many times in my life. No, I don’t want to go forward. Can I just go back there where it was much more comfortable and can I swim back in?
You cry and are wounded. You’re suffering, but one thing you do is decide not to let it take you out because you have this primal instinct for preservation. In the crusade, you take a stand for yourself. You ask yourself, “Like it or not now.” I’m not saying you have to like it at this point because you probably don’t but you have to deal with life as it is.
You’re being forced into new realities at this point. Another important thing is that there are some tasks that you have to get done. It’s hard because you are wounded, hurt, feeling victimized, begrudged, and all that. At the same time, crusade means you also now have to start to put yourself in a position to go forward. I used the analogy of standing on the top of the cliff, which is where our perilous moments seem to make us feel.
You can either roll off and fall on the rocks below, or you can start to realize that hoisting your wings on and flying into the blue sky is the better way to go. It’s big and it’s scary. You’re forced with some new tasks that you have to dig deep and find that fire in your belly or that fierce feminine. That’s what it is. It’s your fierce feminine fire in your belly that now is going to produce new courage and strength for you to take that journey into the wild.
I like the idea too of confronting new realities. That’s a good summary of what this crusade is. Everything becomes different and new. Even something that we thought we had experienced or overcome before, once you’re on the crusade, it’s going to be presented differently in a different light to give you another choice or another way to approach it.
My background is in machine learning and AI. I very much liken it to my experience with the cars in driving for one of the key companies. If there was something in the middle of the road as an example and I was monitoring a vehicle, the vehicle would decide whether it would stop or go based on the data queues it was picking up from its eyes and ears. However, once it made a decision, it would continue to loop around the block several times and go back to that spot to see what other input, dynamic, or scenarios might come up that it could learn from for future access.
For me, the crusade of confronting new realities is that loop back and opportunity to step into a new world, but you still are going to have your same friends. You’re going to have the same family. There are a lot of things that are the same within that, but now you can approach that new reality with a different set of skills, goals, or tenets. That’s empowering.
You remember that moment because both of you and I have been through it, where you suddenly realized you were getting divorced. You didn’t much like it, but you then had to figure out, “What’s my next step here?” I cannot just make it all go away, as much as I would like to. The reality is this train is going down the road. You started to say to yourself, “What does that mean?” Somehow I got to muster my courage and strength here because somehow I’m not going to die on the rocks. I’m going to fly.
This is where you said, “Come on, the game is on.” This is it. We’re living it and we can choose. I know that we have opportunities to invent ourselves along the path. For me, this is a point of reinvention. For most women at this point, we’ve already had our successes. We’ve climbed that now. We’ve amassed quite a bit of wind under our wings in our lives. We have an opportunity now to reinvent what that’s going to look like moving forward.
Step 5: Called To The Crusade
I’d like to point out that in step four, as we covered a minute ago, that was about believing in your self-worth. Now in step 5, the new learning here is resourcing your life force energy. You have to draw all those energies that support your courage and strength to get you moving on the path. You cannot waste any energy here because you need it all. I remember thinking I could not do anything else because I needed everything I had to manage my own life, just to get my own self going down the middle of the road, maybe just to get me out of the gutter on one side or the other because I flip-flopped between them. Step number 5 is about resourcing your life force energies so that you can move forward.
Before we move forward to step 6, which is one of my favorites, I wanted to mention one more here. It’s one that you and I talked about last week even, assuming the best. We notice that many people who we have even thought to be our support will turn and not be as supportive or not standing in that space. They can even be very demanding when they’re holding you back and telling you, “You need to stay in that space,” or “Who do you think you are?”
That comment around that. For me last week it was, “Barbara, you need to assume the best.” Yet as we talk about discernment, we can have a happy outlook on life but we’re still moving forward and we need to discern what the best interaction is going to be for our life today. As that train continues down the tracks, what is going to be the next station, and whether or not that’s beneficial for us.
We can have a happy outlook on life, but we’re still moving forward and we need to discern what the best interaction is going to be for our life today.
What you’re saying there is that you have to decide what supports your life force energies and what takes stuff away from your life force energies. If you’re compromised, you might stay stuck on The Heroine’s Journey for a long period of time. This is about resourcing your energies and being able to see what’s giving me more energy and what’s taking my energy away because I’ve got to move forward here.
That’s beautiful. That’s number five, call to the crusade. You confront new realities. Number 6.
Step 6: Angels Show Up
We love number 6. This is my favorite. Step number 4 was about claiming your self-worth. Step number 5 was about resourcing your life force energy. In this step, it’s about building good people around you. When angels show up, now your support system is starting to be clear to you. Step number 6. Don’t we love this step because you’ve been through so much? You’re hurt, you’re wounded, your head got so much in it, and then step number 6 comes along. It’s like, “Thank you, God, because I needed some relief and some help.” Step number six is aptly called Angels Show Up.
It is so amazing. This is our whole support system.
You don’t imagine that it could happen. You think you have to do it all and you’re on the path alone but unexpectedly, people show up out of the blue because they have new resources and new perspectives for you that are going to help you get down the path further.
One of the amazing things is we’ve learned that it’s often not your family member or your best friend or somebody who’s in your circle of influence that you think you can rely on. It’s not a judgment but often they don’t know how to show up or they cannot in that moment. This is why the concept of angels is so important. It’s people out of the blue who step in to guide us, help us, or pick us up.
I’ll tell a quick story. I was at church one day and this heroine’s voice said to me, “You need to meet that person.” I was like, “No, I’m going to stand over here in the corner.” I did not think it was a good idea. The voice said to me, “Go, now.” I was like, “Okay.” I timidly walked around the corner and this person didn’t even speak to me. I went back to stand in the corner again. That voice said, “Go, go.” It was the impetus that I needed to be moved.
I did. I walked over again and as it turned out, I ended up talking to this person. This person has truly since then been an angel in my life, helped me, guided me, and suggested the next steps I needed to take. I was in the gutter at the time and this person helped me to get back in the middle of the road. It’s such an important step and it’s part of what has to happen. We have to trust that people who do want us to succeed will come along.
You have to trust that people who want you to succeed will come along.
I’ve mentioned before as well my story in San Francisco. I believe that when we vocalize that we need help, people will show up. They’re often strangers or people that we don’t know. It might be somebody coming in your front door when you’re walking down the street and they’ll say, “I have an extra something.” It’s exactly what you need at that moment. One morning, I got up when I lived in San Francisco. I was going for my morning run, and I opened up the door of one of the blue U.S. postal mailboxes.
Right there it said, “You are beautiful.” It was a day that I hadn’t woken up feeling as great as I could have. I let people know that I’d never opened that door before that day or after that day. Yet somebody at some point in time had taken a pin and written in there “You are beautiful” and I knew that was a gift exactly to me at the moment that I needed it. Angels show up in all forms to support us in that moment when we need it.
These are people who believe in you. When I was at this stage, many people around me didn’t believe in me. I had to let go of them because to move forward, people who believed in me was a critical thing that I had to understand. In step number 4, we talked about how in that step you’re claiming your self-worth. In step number 5, you are resourcing your life force energy. Now, in step number 6, angels show up to support you. You’re building that support system around you of the people who believe in you, care for you, and can help you on the journey.
We’re excited to celebrate with you when you get to the point of the journey because we talked in the earlier steps that the top is lonely. Leadership is often not the place where you find most of your friends, but as the angels show up and help lift you along, you have your core group moving forward.
In this step, you’re ready to humbly receive. You are self-revealing in this step because you have to tell people, “I hurt here. This is where I am. This is what’s going on.” As part of that process, you accept you are human. We all have times when we’re up and times when it’s more difficult. When it’s more difficult, we need the people around us who believe in us to connect with us at that time and know that we need their support. Your angels are there to encourage your flight. They’re saying, “Get up, get going. This is not the end of the story. There’s more to your life. We want to see you go to your best self.” As we know, this is just step number 6. There are seven more steps on The Heroine’s Journey.
On to step 7 then. Gathering your provisions. What does this mean?
Gathering your provisions. This is critical. It’s to acquire fuel for your flight. That’s when you sit back and you look around and you say, “For me to get off the ground at the top of the cliff, put my wings on, and fly, what is it that I need that’s going to support me?” You draw in your life force energy to sustain yourself on the journey. Your heroine must have plenty to go on, and there’s plenty around us if we gather it.
Our perilous moments seem to make us feel like we’re standing on the top of the cliff. You can either roll off and fall on the rocks below or you can start to realize that hoisting your wings on and flying into the blue sky is the better way to go.
You communicate to the universe, “I need this to go forward, I need that to go forward.” Some of those things that you will need are you will need the resources of your self-worth. You will have to assess your skills, tools, and talents, and ask yourself, “What’s here that I can use to create prosperity?” Now you’re in a position where you have to say what’s out there that is the bounty that I need to produce so that I can go forward in my life.
Step 7: Gathering Your Provisions
You’ll have ample fuel as long as you’re careful only to use as much as you gather. These are financial resources, energy resources, and people resources. It’s all the things that you need to source so that you can go forward. Step number 4 was claiming your self-worth. Step number 5 was sourcing your life force energy. Step number 6 was building your support system. Step number 7 has a whole lot to do with your money and living within your means so you have what you need.
I adore the quote that you put in step 7. I’m going to read that for a moment here. Gloria Steinem said, “Rich people plan for three generations, and poor plan for Saturday night.” How absolutely true that is. Even for individuals like you and I who have been in the financial space for our careers, we understand that there are policies right now that do not necessarily support that. We have to stand not only for our generation but for the generations to come.
I’d love another quote that says, “Poor people buy entertainment, rich people buy education.” Step number 7 is about gathering the resources you need to go forward. Some of that is education because you have to be able to do things in a different manner than you did in the past. We all know that famous quote, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” It doesn’t happen. As you gather your resources here, it’s so that you can have a different life. It’s the life that you want to create and lead because it’s our birthright to live in abundance.
It’s our birthright to live in abundance.
It is. I think it’s important to note here too, that you and I came prepared for this conversation. The amount of education that we have invested in ourselves to come to this point is quite notable for somebody who was also on this journey. You didn’t wake up one day and just come up with this path, the course, the steps, and everything that you’re gifting to the world. Although you’ve commented that it’s very innate and it has come through you as a gift, it’s not just you coming up with the concepts, but a gift through you to the world.
However, a lot of that comes from mastermind groups, key mentors, and all this education that you and I have reached out to. It has not necessarily been community education or the public school system, but rather an education that you and I have found off the beaten path. We find mentors who have gone through this step before us and are willing to reach back and guide us, just as we’re doing now.
You’ll remember that we met in one of those programs. I also remember that they used to say that it was either the Peaks or Prozac. It was either we grow or medicate ourselves. When you’re in that crux, the change, and the pain, those are the two roads. We want to choose the Peaks and not the Prozac. That is the path of a heroine. A heroine knows that she has to get up and get it on. Nowadays, when I just want to stay in bed, just forget the whole thing, and I just want to crawl back into the womb and have it be like it was in the past.
I had to sit down with pen and paper. I had to get my journal out and I had to say, “What do I have here?” I have an education. I’ve gone to these different courses. I’ve got X amount of dollars in the bank. I have this group of friends. I had to assess what my resources were at that point. I also had to be realistic that, “I’m missing some resources. Where do I go find those?” I now had to put a puzzle together that was going to deal with a reality that was.
I was getting divorced at the time. I had some changes that I had to make, like moving out of my house. I had to know what I had financially, and what I could access to do the realities of life, like pay the bills and the things I had to do. It was a time when I had to gather knowledge of everything that made me up so that I could then say, “How do I leverage myself to that next rung on the ladder? How do I put my wings on to fly?” It’s because heroines heroine up.
I want to pick out a part of that conversation too. You talked about the puzzle pieces. For many years, this is a common question we get. We’ve been taught that the quality of our questions determines the quality of our lives. Often the quality of the questions for other people are not quality questions. For instance, they will ask, “Why did this happen to you?” or “Why were you singled out?” They try to turn anything into more of a victim mindset.
I had to very quickly move away from, “No, this wasn’t towards Barbara. This wasn’t a why-me scenario because that wasn’t going to help me.” As I grew, I would tell people, “I’m looking for the puzzle pieces to put my life back together.” Until I find out what happened in each piece of that puzzle, I don’t know because I was completely blindsided. Those are the resources that I had to start with. Not starting forward on a new life or a new house. I had to start with finding those puzzle pieces as an investigator to put them back together, and then duct tape it all the way around.
Use bubble gum and whatever you find just to keep it together. Again, highlighting those steps, we had claimed your self-worth, we gathered your life force energy, we developed a circle of people around you who will support you, and now in step number 7, we assessed your resources and a big part of that is living within your means. As we go forward we’re going to dig much more deeply into that. When we get into crisis, I always say that money only becomes important to women when it intersects with life. When it came to the point that I knew I was going to get divorced, I had to look at my checkbook and say, “What’s going on here and how do I deal with it?
As we spend the next week gathering our provisions and creating a list of what resources we do have on our side, I know that next week we’re going to focus on steps 8, 9, and 10. Is there anything else you want to leave the audience to at this point?
I think if you’ve gotten this far, then you might be asking yourself, “What step am I on?” Whether you’re on step number 1 or step number 4, we want you to know that we’re here to guide you on The Heroine’s Journey. There is a next step in front of you that you’ll dig more deeply into and it’s going to leverage you on your path going forward.
Happiness, heroines. We want you to go to your best self, to joy and prosperity, and this path can lead you there. The 13 steps of The Heroine’s Journey are very important to understand because they put your past into perspective. You’re going to be able to live more comfortably with that story. You see Barb and I laughing here when we cried before because we have put it into perspective and it’s not handicapping our journey forward.
Also, because of The Heroine’s Journey, the 13 steps had a roadmap for what to do next. That’s what we’re here to talk to you about because what The Heroine’s Journey gave is hope for the future. To live into your glorious best self, enjoy prosperity and freedom, to live the life you dream of living. Why waste any time getting there?
Join us next week. As Barbara said, we’ll be talking about steps number 8, 9, and 10. There are 13 on The Heroine’s Journey. We’ve gotten through the more difficult ones so far because by now, you can see that you’re starting to wake up, gather the things you need to move forward in the journey, and from here on, you’re going to start to develop and grow this glorious life that you want to live. With all that said, journey onward.
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- WalkTheJourney.com
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