Day 151: Laura Neff
“I also believe that underneath all of our individual unique purposes we have this common purpose of unfolding our authentic selves and our own potential by a series of conscious intentional steps throughout our lives. That’s our common purpose, and so to me, inspiration is just about keeping people awake on that path.”
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Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Laura, for agreeing to be part of the Project today, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?
Laura Neff: Yes, I can. Thank you, Toni, for having me, and I’m just enthralled at this Project that you are in the midst of creating.
Toni: Well, thank you.
Laura: My name is Laura Neff, and it’s such a big question to be asked to introduce yourself. I thought about it and at first I thought well, of course, I’ll just talk about my business. And then I thought “Wait a minute, she’s asking me to introduce me, so that’s a little bigger.” So I am a strong and curious and striving woman. I am a wife to the love of my life, Robert. I am a friend to some amazing women. I am a daughter and a sister and an aunt and a great-aunt. I’m a caretaker of a fabulous little dog and three cats and two funny chickens, and I am also very proud to be the owner of a coaching business which is called “More In You” Life Leadership Coaching.
Toni: Fantastic. Well, thank you for that. So, Laura, when you think about the word inspiration, who do you think you inspire and how do you do that?
Laura: Another big question. I actually have really been pondering this question and talked to a friend of mine about it recently, because it’s hard for me to narrow that down. And I asked a friend, a close friend, and she said “Well you know, you’re kind of an equal opportunity inspirer,” because when I am awake for this ride of my life, there’s really nobody I don’t try to inspire. And I don’t mean I run around and, you know, wave flags and go “Hey, life is great! Aren’t you great? We’re all great!” But to me, I was thinking about this word “inspire,” and it really led me down the road of thinking about this common purpose that I believe we all have.
I believe we each have a unique purpose, but I also believe that underneath all of our individual unique purposes we have this common purpose of unfolding our authentic selves and our own potential by a series of conscious intentional steps throughout our lives. That’s our common purpose, and so to me, inspiration is just about keeping people awake on that path.
So if I did have to narrow it down, though, a couple of the groups that I know I inspire are … one is my potential clients because they see … especially folks who are in corporate America and want out – I am inspiring to them because I’ve done it and lived to tell the tale and am thriving and fulfilled. And I’m continuing to stay fulfilled, trying to stay fulfilled, so they see me as a good example of somebody who’s actually done that.
I know I inspire other coaches, seasoned coaches who have been in business for a little while because, you know, it’s been a tough year or so and this economy — as you know, as everybody knows — and there’s just something important to me about just keeping, you know, plugging away and making this thing work because it is such important work that we’re up to here.
When people see my website and see all the stuff I have going on, it’s inspiring to them to keep going. And the same goes for up-and-coming coaches or people who think they want to get into coaching. I love coaching them because they’re just … they have this pure excitement and it reminds me of why I’m in this business, and so it just becomes this big inspiration fest when we work together.
Toni: Oh, well that sounds fantastic. So professionally, there’s a lot of equal opportunity going on as far as the inspiration I would imagine.
Laura: Yes.
Toni: Now with how you interact professionally but also personally, how do you think you help other people then to explore their own potential?
Laura: You know, one way I help others explore their potential is I take a stand for not being someone who colludes with people’s sneaky fears that keep them small. So for example, my friends know that they can’t make a little side comment that kind of cuts them off at their own knees without me saying “Wait a minute, hold on – can we just look at that real quick?”
So I’m not always in their face about it, but at the same time the people around me know that I’m not someone they can get away with that stuff with. So in that way, it’s a constant pointing to really like pay attention to what you’re saying and how you’re holding yourself and your own potential. Be really aware of that, because each one of those small digs that our fear does to us holds us back.
Toni: Right. So I’m almost hearing you act as a mirror, you know?
Laura: Like a challenging mirror.
Toni: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely; and so by doing so, what do you think that does for them?
Laura: It wakes them up.
Toni: Okay.
Laura: I know … I know for myself, when I … if I’m the one making those comments and one of my colleague says “Hey, what did you just say?” it kind of makes me snap awake and say “Oh, yeah, what was I saying? That’s not what I meant! That’s not how I want to feel about this.” Yeah, so I think it wakes them up and that’s … so this whole thing of Life Leadership that I’m up to has some key elements at its foundation, one of which is consciousness. And we’ve got to be awake for this ride in order to make the choices that are gonna get us to the place where we really want to be.
Toni: Well thank you for that. Now Laura, let’s talk about you. What do you need to be inspired?
Laura: Oh, I need a lot of things to be inspired. One thing I really need is focus. Life is so full and so full of so many amazing things, I can’t imagine ever being bored again, which is good news and bad news because I can fill my plate with so many fantastic things. It’s like going to a great buffet; too much of a good thing is still too much. So focus is really important for me in terms of my own inspiration.
My community is essential, absolutely essential for my own inspiration. My friends, my colleagues, I think it’s one of the top two best things about being a coach for me is the community, because I am steeped with colleagues and friends around me who will not tolerate anything less than my own unfolding in a really authentic way.
And I think along the lines of that, another thing I have to have for my own inspiration is to continually summon up the courage to walk my own talk and take my own medicine and stay in my own work in my own life. That’s … growth and learning are really key values of mine, and the internal piece of that has to come before anything, so I stay in the work. I’ve got to coach myself. My husband and I go to this fabulous couples therapist just for kind of preventive maintenance and to continue learning and growing together and, like I said, I’m surrounding myself with people who are in that as well … so, yeah.
And then the other thing is the occasional leap out of the ordinary, out of my ordinary. So like a couple of years ago, I had lost touch with … really lost touch with my own strengths and who I was at my core, and so I went to Thailand for six weeks and volunteered at a wildlife rescue center. So I literally like went to the other side of the world with people who didn’t know me.
Toni: Fantastic.
Laura: Yeah.
Toni: That is fantastic. So let me ask you – that was really cool the way that you spoke about knowing that you needed to do something different and then you went and actually did it. And you also mentioned early in the interview that you did step out of corporate America and start your own coaching business and that you can say that, you know, “I did it, so I know what is involved in doing it.” But Laura, have you always been this focused on being awake and being conscious and aware, or was this an evolution or was there a turning point for you?
Laura: That’s a great question. There were two really key turning points. One when I was 25 years old. I had been in corporate America for about two-and-a-half years, and I wound up in the hospital for a total of about three months with a very bizarre spinal fluid leak, internal weird thing that nobody could figure out, and then I was on bed rest for two months after that.
So I found myself lying in this hospital bed, a young … for all intents and purposes a very young and vital and vibrant young woman, you know, in the prime of her life and stuck there. And it really made me think about, you know, “I’m given this gift of energy every day; how am I using it? Am I using it in a way that if I continued to use it in this way … forty years from now if I looked back, would I be really proud of what I was leaving behind, and would I be able to see the thumbprint that I had left?” So that was one turning point because I very quickly was like “Ooh, you know, I don’t think that I would be.” So that kind of started the waking up process, I think, just asking those questions.
And then the second turning point was about five years later. My dad passed away, and he and I were very, very close. He … if there’s any gift he … well, he left me lots of gifts but a big gift he left me was this legacy of “Don’t compromise. Hold to your values. Choose from that, especially in the face of external pressure, to do otherwise.” Because he had made some choices in his life that down the road he looked back and thought “Geez, I really would have done that differently if I hadn’t been compromising.”
So that was ultimately … his passing really just again like woke something up in me. And literally the first day I was back in the office, my whole team was in Dallas for an all-day meeting, and I was in this ugly, windowless conference room here in Charlotte and, oh, I was just dying on the vine. And I remember just sitting up and literally just hitting mute so that they couldn’t hear me and looking around this room and I said out loud, “What am I doing? What am I doing?”
I just grabbed a piece of paper and just started … words just started pouring out about … I didn’t know what job title I wanted to have next, and it took me a while to get to this profession of coaching, but I knew what kind of skills I wanted to be developing. I knew what kind of … it became more about quality of life, like “What’s the life that I’m looking for?”
So those were two really big turning points in terms of my own just being awake in my life.
Toni: Well thank you so much for sharing that, because there’s a lot of people that listen and read these transcripts and they will – around the world – and they will go wow, yeah, you know, that is something that they need to take on board. So how do you explore your own potential? What do you need in order to do that?
Laura: Not to sound like a broken record, but I really need community that holds me accountable to that. You know, the people in my life know that that’s what I’m up to. You know, I’m the first stop for that. You know, I’m accountable for it first and foremost, but on the days that I slip, I know they’re right there behind me propping me back up saying “Come on girl, go, go!”
Toni: So it’s like your cheerleaders.
Laura: Yeah, yeah. And another thing I need to explore my own potential is time outside. I have a great little dog, and we have a beautiful nature preserve near here. And in the middle of even the busiest day, I will stop, take her out to the woods, she runs through the woods and I walk and think, and it really just helps ground me in the midst of an “ahh” kind of day.
So those are two really big things and, along the way, I think just challenges that stretch and scare me every once in a while. Every couple of years I’ll, like I said earlier, I’ll fling myself out into the world into some foreign country or some kind of something that really makes me stand on my own two feet and use all of my resources and do that.
Toni: There’s a couple of key words that I’m hearing you say in this interview and it’s really … and I underline them as I go along with these interviews, and there’s certain words that pop out for me and “courage” popped out for me, “legacy” popped out for me, and “challenge,” as well as the word “awake,” and I think that that’s what I heard from you in this interview is that is what you do for others. You help them to have the courage to be awake so that they can challenge themselves to reach their own potential, and that’s what I took away from this interview from you.
Laura: Definitely; and along the way, especially in terms of my work, along the way we’re looking at what’s keeping them from that, so we work a lot with fear as well. Like “What’s that subversive fear stuff going on behind the scenes that really keeps you from just full throttle, being awake and moving forward in your life?”
Toni: Well, Laura, thank you so very much for the information that you’ve given about yourself and your own journey and being part of the Get Inspired! Project. We will have a link to how to see your website and what you do at the bottom of the interview, and so for just showing up today and saying everything that you’ve said, thank you so very much.
Laura: Toni, absolutely my pleasure, and kudos to you for this Project. And I can’t wait to see who else you interview and soak it all up. Thank you for the inspiration.
Toni: Thank you, and take care of yourself.
Laura: You too. Thank you.
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For more information about Laura Neff: www.moreinyou.com
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