Twelve years ago Thelma and Louise aka Maria and Carina flew to the US...
… to take part in a three day event about prosperity in Denver, Colorado (part 1).
If this sounds odd, it´s because it was. Odd and at the same time an adventure of a lifetime, for my bestie Maria and me. But how on earth did two Finns end up in exactly the kind of event that Barbara Ehrenreich critizes so heavily in her book Smile or Die?
Twelve years later I am still a bit baffled about how I managed to not only talk Maria into coming with me, but how I even managed to get us funds for the travel expenses from our University. Maybe there is some truth in all that manifesting sh** I mean thing people are talking so much about. Writing this article is my way of founding it out. Let´s start at the beginning.
In 2006-2007 I participated in a Life Coaching program. Not the kind you get a certificate from but I did get a Diploma and I did learn a solid amount of skills and also a tonne load about myself. Hands down one of the most intense personal development courses I have ever taken.
At some point, maybe a couple of weeks before graduating our teacher showed us a DVD that we all then watched together. I think most of you can probably guess which one I am talking about - yes it was indeed The Secret. We had a lot of discussions about the film and I remember being very sceptical about the message and the whole set up. It felt way too American for me. Can you start seeing the irony here?
Being a curious soul and at the same time not sure about what I wanted to do with my life as I was slowly approaching my forties I did what any dutiful employee would do when they are unhappy at their workplace. Feeling quite bored with my work and with a lot of free time between tedious tasks, I started googling. Did we have Google in 2007? Anyhow, I started searching on the Internet. Searching for everything and anything I could find about The Secret, Bob Proctor, Mary Morrissey and the rest of the people interviewed in the video. And thus begun my journey down the rabbit-hole.
Suddenly not only the Law of Attraction entered my world, but now there were several other alluring laws. And I stumbled upon more and more coaches and entrepreneurs that seemed to be living a much more exciting life than I did. Six-figure female entrepreneurs having webinars. Some of which I actually befriended on Facebook and started communicating with and others whose newletters I still subscribe to. Most of them probably ended up doing completely other stuff in the end.
A new chapter opened up in my life and the idea of starting my own side-business felt like the most natural step to take. This must have been the golden era of webinars. I listened to a painful amount of them, taking notes fervently (my cupboard stashed with almost 60 notebooks is proof of that) and sometimes ending up bying the stuff that was sold during those webinars.
In the graveyard of my cupboard there is still a pile of DVD:s and handbooks and workbooks that I bought and never read, listened to or watched. For some reason I find it difficult to get rid of them. Curious me thinking that maybe one day I will go through all that material and end up being rich and famous. And happy. And succesful. And maybe I am missing out of something valuable if I throw away the pile of stuff that has long passed expiration date.
Silly me. What am I holding on to? Unfulfilled dreams, shame for bying the stuff in the forst place. I did even buy the The Secret as a book and kept it until just a year ago when I started purging my book shelves. So why still keep on to those dusty DVD´s?
Thanks to a wonderful course based on Julia Cameron´s The Artist´s Way led by a woman organizing NIA-classes an idea started to slowly grow during those intimate meetings with the little group of women that gathered together once a week in the dark November and December evenings back in 2010. Ok, this was far too long a sentence. How do you split it up? Help!
This seed of an idea combined with something I heard on one of those many webinars lead me to contact the NIA woman and well the rest is not exactly history but sort of.
We came up with a concept that we called the Tea Salon which was a mentoring program for women who were trying to figure out what they wanted to do in their life and were interested in starting a business but weren´t really sure about their business idea and needed a safe space to discuss it and develop it further.
The first Tea Salon took place in my living room with 6 women. Together with my business partner (well I did not officially have a business yet) we did what everyone nowadays tell you. We planned the content of every session as we went along and did not even had a website when starting to advertise for the program.
There is so much learning from this adventure and what it all lead to that I think I spare the rest of it for a post on its own.
You might wonder, what on earth has this Tea Salon thing to do with Thelma and Louise going to the US? Nothing actually. One thing simply lead to another and during the same winter as we organized the Tea Salon I also signed up for a program called the Prosperity Tribe. And that lead Maria and me to finding ourselves in the middle of huge hall in April 2012 at a four star hotel in Denver, Colorado among screaming people trying to catch dollar notes flying around in the air.
To be continued…
I can’t wait to read about the next part of your adventure! 😊