Ashley Lemieux: Rewire Your Mindset, Heal From Grief and Trauma, and Start Again | Mental Health | YAPClassic

26:44I want to be writing. And it's really hard to be founder CEO of a product-based company that was on the trajectory that we were on and then also be able to do the other work that I really wanted to do. And so I had to make some really difficult decisions, but at the end of the day, what I've always wanted is to help people. And so whether that was through jewelry or now through writing and podcasting and my personal brand, I knew that I had to make a pivot. So I started writing more. And my first step was getting a book agent, which, and I'm such a believer in when you are in alignment with that next step, sometimes things happen to help facilitate that step.

27:31So once I made that decision, I literally opened my inbox the next day. And I had an email from one of the top literary agents in the country asking me if I'd ever thought about writing a book before. And I was like, okay, if this isn't my sign for the next step, I don't know what it's going to be. But there also was this grief of closing the chapter on my jewelry business. You know, we were sold in large department stores like Hallmark and we had really we had a large headquarters in downtown Phoenix. And so that also meant that I let I felt like I had to let other people down because my course was changing.

28:18But looking back, I can't imagine not making that decision.

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31:32Hala Taha:That's honeylove.com slash profiting. After you check out, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show by telling them that Young and Profiting sent to you. Experience a new standard in comfort and support with Honeylove and upgrade your bras, ladies. There's a lot of entrepreneurs out there tuning in that might not have a business that either fits their life goals, feeling burnt out. They don't even like working on their business anymore or their business is just not successful. It's just not taking off. You know, 99 % of startups fail. But a lot of entrepreneurs, we've got an ego where we feel like, well, we already put it out to the world.

32:06Hala Taha:Everybody knows me for this. What are people going to think if I shut it down? I had a blog in my 20s that became really popular. And I shut it down because I wanted to change paths. I wanted to go into marketing and all this other stuff. I wanted to go into corporate for a period of time. And I'm an entrepreneur. Again, I have a media company. But I shut down my company and everybody who worked for me, at the time I had volunteers, it was like kind of a blog that I basically like trained bloggers. And we were all just young, just doing it for fun, you know? And so they were all mad at me and I lost all my friends and I felt a little ashamed.

32:41Hala Taha:But I can imagine being older and having a real company with customers and products, that would be really hard. So I guess like how did you get over the shame of starting a company and kind of just shutting it down? You know what's interesting is that when you hit rock bottom in your life, which for me was losing the kids, there's nowhere else to go but up. And so I think that I was in a place in my life where I was at such rock bottom that I just freaking didn't care anymore. And I had to do things to get the life back inside of me. I had to. I describe it as feeling like I was dead, but I was alive.

33:24I was just a zombie through my life. And so at that point, honestly, I don't know if it's a good thing, but for that moment And it was because I don't know what else would have forced me to do this, but it was the only way for me. And I had nothing to lose. And I think a lot of times we get afraid of hitting rock bottom or what if it doesn't work out or what will I do? And honestly, sometimes it's the best thing because you finally make decisions off of what you actually want because you can't lose anything more than you already have. So that's what that looked like for me. And like I said, there was grief.

34:09There was sadness to it. And I also started to feel excited about something again for the first time in a long time. And so I just kept following that feeling.

34:20Hala Taha:And I feel like for other people tuning in, what I want them to understand is that nobody really cares that much. You know, like we put all this pressure about what is everybody else going to think? What are my friends going to think? What is my family going to think? Even people who are lawyers and doctors and who don't want to be lawyers and doctors anymore, who are so afraid of making a change. It's like, yes, it's going to be hard in the moment. But as soon as you figure out the next thing and you've got the next thing to talk about and feel proud of, no one's even going to remember or care if anything, people are going to be inspired from you.

34:53And it's just getting over that initial hump. Absolutely. And I think we get scared of this idea of starting over. I've put in so much time. I've put in so much money, so much resources. I don't want to start over. But that destroys our next step when we look at things like that. You're not starting over. You can't. You have so much knowledge now that has gotten you to this place. And so you get to now apply all of that into the next thing. And I think the place where we fail the most as entrepreneurs is we stay in the wrong place for too long because our ego gets in the way of it. And we miss out on really what could take off for us and feel in just such alignment that would not only help us, but other people to be able to serve others more because we are on a path that actually is working.

35:43And so that's something now I actually help women in their own clarity maps, in high level entrepreneurs, because this is one of the things I love so much is how do we help you pivot when you are in this season of having no idea what to do next? How do you find that clarity and the confidence and the strategy to support it so that you can move forward? Totally.

36:08Hala Taha:This is a great segue to talk about your latest book. So your first book was a memoir. It was called Born to Shine. And your next book is called I Am Here. And that's more designed to help others navigate their own experiences of grief and trauma. Clarity mapping is a big part of that. We're hopefully going to dive deep into that later on in the conversation. But first, you say the biggest life lesson that has come to your life has been the phrase of three simple words, I am here, which is the title of your book. Why are those words so meaningful to you? They're meaningful to me because for so long I didn't want to be here.

36:41And I did everything to try to avoid the feeling of being here, whether that was numbing out with social media or food or traveling or spending money or working too much or being in bad relationships. Whatever that thing was to distract me from the other pain is what I latched onto. and once I got to this point, we were actually in Europe on one of our runaway escapades of trying to escape it and I remember being in Milan and next to me sat a mom and a daughter and she had just lost her tooth and she was about the age of the daughter who we had lost in the contested adoption and I remember watching the joy between the mother and the daughter over this lost tooth And I just started sobbing.

37:36Any composure I had left, it was gone. I wanted those own moments with this human that I loved so much that I knew I was never going to have again. And so I remember I got up from my spa and I started running towards this little apartment that we were staying at. And it was as if someone put a brick wall in front of me and was like, stop, you can't keep running like this. You can't. You have to face these feelings. And I probably looked like a crazy American Taurus, which I totally was. But in the middle of this square there, I threw up my arms and I yelled, I am here. I am here. And I just started crying.

38:22And I just, that became this mantra for me that I still hold onto of, I don't want to run away anymore. I want to be here. I am here. And so now what does that look like? And how can I support myself to be able to get through these things so that I don't keep running away from this life that I've been given?

38:42Hala Taha:Yeah, that's a really powerful story. Like I can just imagine you in the street just having that moment. And then now, years later, you've written a book with that title to try to help other people. Do you feel like entrepreneurs deal with grief and stress differently than other people? Or do they have certain personality types that enable them to get over things more quickly, potentially? This is such a good question. And it's hard, right, putting people into these buckets. But something that is very common among entrepreneurs is that they're very high achieving people. They want to achieve. And one of the ways that we can cope with grief is called a maladaptive coping mechanism.

39:28So there's two types of mechanisms that we can use to cope. Adaptive, which adaptive is something that is positive that actually helps your grief. And the other is maladaptive, meaning it's not good for you, but we do it anyway because we don't know what else to do. One of the maladaptive coping mechanisms that a lot of us have and a lot of entrepreneurs have is work and working too much. And so I see a lot of entrepreneurs who throw themselves even deeper into work to avoid their feelings. And they can become really successful from doing that. And it's something that the world praises and we look at as a huge success.

40:06While meanwhile, there can be these layers of emotions that are hurting them, that's driving this just really unsustainable work. But that can make it really, really hard to get to this healing place. Something else that's really interesting that we know is the difference between men and women. and the grief, the way that we move through grief. So a lot of men, and obviously when I say this, right, I'm not saying every man and every woman, this is just an average across the board. There's going to be people who don't fit into these buckets, of course. But what we know about men is that men often throw themselves into work.

40:50They talk less about how they are feeling and And they want to spend more time in the action of staying busy. Whereas women, we want to talk about it. We want you to sit and listen. And we want to talk about it because that's our way of processing, of retelling the story, of trying to help ourselves understand what has happened. And so then if you are in a relationship where both of you are grieving so differently from the other, we can see a lot of marital or partnership conflict because of that. So I don't know if entrepreneurs, you know, if there's a specific grief style for entrepreneurs, but men and women for sure.

41:40But then for the group of entrepreneurs who we know just love the work and the achievements, I would base my best guess on what I know about grief on they are probably a lot of them throwing themselves even deeper into work, meaning that they're not facing what is actually going on in their life. It's a dangerous combination. So good.

42:04Hala Taha:Yeah. And I can relate to that even for myself. When I started my business, I started it in 2020. And I started it while my dad was in the hospital battling COVID and I wasn't allowed to visit him. And I, and he passed away after a month in the hospital. It was like the most devastating thing. I literally watched him die, not even like on zoom and wasn't able to even see him until he passed away. And it was very traumatic. He was buried with his clothes on and his shoes on and his cell phone. It was like just the most traumatic thing. And for years, I just worked and worked and worked. So I'm better now because I actually hired my business partner, Jason.

42:50Hala Taha:And now I'm able to kind of like just have a life and everything like that. But for years, I really did just throw myself into work. I'm so sorry to hear that. I didn't know about your father and you opening up about that is so beautiful and so hard. And I think that where we are at now going into 2025, a lot of people aren't realizing what happens around the fifth year of grief. So if we go back to 2020, we all had these moments where we're in a pandemic, but then we're all also experiencing these personal losses, the loss of your father, the loss of my baby, the loss of what other people have gone through, right?

43:34So then the past couple of years were like, I don't know how to cope and no one is teaching me how to cope. So I'm going to do what I think is going to help me best. And because of my personality, because of what I want to build, I'm going to throw myself into work. And then you're like, oh my gosh, this company I just started, it's doing well. It's growing. It's great. And you can kind of run on that adrenaline high for a moment until you start reaching these achievements that once the novelty of it starts wearing off, you can find yourself in this place of, I accomplished what I wanted to. I thought that this was going to feel differently than it does.

44:17And that is a very common feeling that a lot of entrepreneurs find themselves in is I won the award. I hit the financial goal. I have the growth of the company. I thought that I was going to feel differently than this. What is wrong? And what is wrong is, is that we have this grief that can't be pacified by these external validations in our lives that we think are going to pacify them. And so now as we head into 2025, which is five years after this major traumatic event for most people in the world, year five is the year where you take a pause and you start really looking around and being like, where do I fit into life right now?

45:07And how do I want it to go moving forward? It's like one of the first years that you really begin to take a breath because there's a little more time and space between now and then. But as a result of that, a lot of emotions can start coming up as you realize that your life has continued to move on, but emotionally parts of you still feel like they are stuck in the past. And so, so many people right now are burnt out. They're burnt out on work. They don't know what to do next. And it's because we never gave ourselves the opportunity to slow down and to sit with our grief for as long as we needed to.

45:50Hala Taha:It's so true. And it's like so bittersweet because I'm so happy that I did all this. Like I built my company is going to hit eight figures next year. You know, like I built this crazy company. It's amazing. Yeah. Like, thank you. Like I built this awesome company and I have an awesome team and I love my life. But I really did like to your point, there was a period of time where I was like, I can't just keep running on fumes and I need help. I need a business partner I need to kind of delegate and have some balance because you just can't do that forever. And I do think sacrifice is important, but you can't do it forever.

46:26Hala Taha:No. Yeah. It's not sustainable. So then how do we create a sustainable way where we can build what we want and love it while also acknowledging what it is that we've been through and what does that dance look like for my life and what is it that I'm needing? And, you know, part of that, part of your gift of grief that probably came was your ability to grow this company to what it is now. And, but now part of what might come next is, okay, I've, I've built this. And so does that mean that there's a little bit more of a buffer for me to have some space and some resources to really make sure that I'm filled up inside so that my insides match all of my external accomplishments.

47:17And that's something that was really hard for me over the past couple of years. I remember I would tell my therapist, I'm a huge advocate for therapy. I'm like, everyone should have a therapist. So I love talking about it to tell people, no, it is so normal to go to therapy. But something that I would often tell my therapist is my insides don't match my outsides. Like what is happening around me, what I have in my life is so beautiful. But inside, I feel like there's this just chaotic exhaustion that never goes away. And it feels so out of alignment with everything that I see externally in my life.

47:55And I need those to start matching up with each other. And so my hope is that going into 2025, a lot of entrepreneurs are going to kind of hit this pause button where we can all kind of get a little bit more in alignment so that our insides match our outsides. But when that happens, moving forward, we are able to serve and grow even exponentially from what we've gotten to, to this point, because we're going to have the sustainability, the internal resources to be able to do so.

48:28Hala Taha:So let's get into some of that. Let's get into aligning our internal with our external, like you were mentioning. So one of the things that you talk about in your book is that we need to reframe our thoughts. First, I want to get clarity on like what thoughts actually are. Do you mean our current beliefs and like current thoughts or are you talking about memories or those two different things? I'm talking about our current thoughts. So what we know about our thoughts is we have somewhere around 90 ,000 thoughts a day. And out of those thoughts, it's somewhere around 80, 85 % are negative. And the majority of those negative thoughts are reoccurring.

49:07So then these negative reoccurring thoughts that we have every single day are creating this belief system, this internal world where if we say, I'm not good enough, or I'm never going to get out of this situation, or man, I make stupid decisions, or I don't like how I look in the mirror, whatever those stories are, become truly what we believe about ourselves and the world around us. Now, of course, it is impossible, right, to live in an internal world where we don't have negative thoughts. We're human. That's part of how our brain works is we assess danger and we try to figure out where we fit into things and how we feel about things to try to keep ourselves safe.

49:53But what we can do is start acknowledging those thoughts and then start reframing them so that we can create different habits and thought patterns that allow us to have a different internal world. So for me, that's one of the reasons I started using I Am Here because I was just conditioned to be like, I want to leave. How do I get out of here? I want to escape. I want to escape. So then my belief had to become, I'm here. I'm here right now. I'm safe to be here. That was then. This is now. And really becoming your biggest advocate for helping yourself reframe your thoughts.

50:37Hala Taha:So walk us through how we can kind of keep tabs on like, what are the negative thoughts that we actually have? And then how do we uncover their positive roots? Okay. So I love this. One thing that I always suggest to my clients that I work with is just for even if it's an hour out of your day, a whole day would be amazing. But even if you only had an hour, take out the notes app on your phone or have just a little journal with you. And anytime you notice that you have a negative thought come into your head, I just want you to write it down. And I don't want you to have any judgment on it. I don't want you to judge your thoughts, right?

51:14Because then we can get into this cycle of like, oh my gosh, I'm so dumb for thinking that or what's wrong with me? No, we're just going to be observers of the thoughts that are going through our head. And once we have all of those down, what I like to then do is try to get to the root of where those thoughts came from. A lot of times thoughts that we have right now came from things that we heard when we were little, things that we began to believe about ourselves from when we were really small. Sometimes the origin of the thought doesn't

51:50Hala Taha:even come from us. So if you're able to sit with it and really be able to go back to the first time that you can remember hearing it or feeling it or thinking it, a lot of times you can bridge that gap and realize that that did not even come from you. So once we do that, being able to sit with, okay, this is what I believe, but this is what I would like to believe instead. This is my current thought, but this is what I would like to believe instead. And I keep it as simple as that and as gentle as that, as we are working through these and being able to write down what we would like to believe instead.

52:38Then being able to be mindful, whether it's Then the next hour after that, after you have the thought come in, whether it's I'm not good enough, being able to call it out. Okay, I understand that right now I'm believing I'm not good enough. And I acknowledge that. But what I would really like to believe instead is X, Y, and Z. and that helps us create a pattern where we kind of can get help ourselves get out of this routine of having these thoughts that we don't even realize are happening and we can stop them and call them out and then we just gently tell ourselves what we would like to believe instead so that that becomes something that we begin to start thinking about does it take time of course it does but after those two hours I promise you you are going to experience a shift in feelings that you might not have felt for a really long time and uncover thoughts that you might not even know that you have.

53:41Like you can reach the end of the day sometimes. A lot of my clients will be like, I don't know why I feel this bad. I just do. I don't know where it comes from. I don't know why I feel so lost in the roles in my life. And we do this exercise. And after an hour of them writing down everything they've been thinking, they're like, I didn't realize that I'm so hard on myself. I didn't realize that these are the things I'm consistently telling myself. So that's a really good place to start.

54:11Hala Taha:And are there common thoughts that people have and what would be the positive reframing? Like just so people have like examples. Yeah. So one that is really common that I would argue the majority of people struggle with is I'm not enough or I'm not good enough. So for that one, it's really important for us to do some work on where did this come from? When did I start feeling this way? Why did I start feeling this way? Did it come from me? Did it come? Is this something I picked up on from someone else? And then being able to answer the question, well, what would it even mean to be good enough?

54:54And what areas of my life do I feel like I'm not good enough that I can begin to focus on? So one of the things, one of the ways that I like to reframe I'm not good enough is I am enough for all of the needs that my life has of me in this moment. I am enough to take care of all of the needs that my life has for me in this moment. And again, being able to find evidence, something about our brains that I think is really cool is that our brains look for evidence that what we are doing is working. That's why journaling can be so powerful because we need to see something is written down. So when we write down our thoughts and then what we would like to believe instead, but then kind of keep a log to see our progress of, oh my gosh, today I only thought about this 10 times instead of 20 or whatever that is, it signals to our brain, hey, this thing is working.

55:51This is a good path for us to continue to go down, which is another reason why I recommend writing things down. Another one that's really common is anger. And anger can show up in a lot of ways in our lives, especially when you're grieving, because anger is easier to feel than sadness. A lot of times, anger is a mask for sadness because we're too afraid to feel sad or we haven't been taught or culturally, you know, some people aren't allowed to show their emotions or men versus women, you know, with gender and what's expected of us in the society, anger can be something that masks a lot of other feelings.

56:33So something that I always think about with anger is what do I love so much that I'm trying to protect that is making me so angry right now because I feel like I've lost control of it. So for that one, I think that a lot of times the root for anger is actually love. I'm angry that I lost my kids because I love them so much. I'm angry that this person hurt you because I have deep respect for you as a human being. Whatever that is, a lot of times it goes back to love. So if I can start reframing my anger, allow myself to feel it, but then understand it's coming from a place of love, how then can I fuel that love?

57:22Anger is needing action. It's like it's signaling to us that there are alarm bells going off. We want to be in control of something that we don't have control of. So then how can we can take control to bring action to it. Who do you love? What do you love that's causing the anger? And then how can you show up for them? Or how can you be a part of that cause? Or how can you use your voice to help them? And so helping do that can help kind of shift our anger to actually have action behind it.

57:54Hala Taha:That's so good. So basically, whenever you're angry, there's actually something that you love and you're really passionate about behind that, if you can figure that out and lean into the love part instead of the anger part, that's really great. And sometimes though, healing requires you to get pissed, right? Like there are people who probably have wronged you and you have every reason to be upset at it. You have every reason to just be so pissed off. And so I say, let yourself be pissed off. But at some point that has to move through you. Otherwise the one who becomes the most affected by it is you.

58:31Hala Taha:And sometimes it's a love for yourself, right? So it might be just like pouring into yourself because you love yourself. How about trauma? How do you reframe thoughts and memories related to trauma? You know, this is a hard one because I want to first explain the difference between grief and trauma just so that everyone's on the same page. So you can experience grief without experiencing trauma. So you can have grief, but there's no trauma attached to it. But all trauma has grief attached to it. Okay. Does that make sense? Kind of. How do you experience grief with no trauma? What's an example?

59:12So me and you could go through the exact same situation. Let's say we were at the exact same event and something really bad happened. Based off of my life experiences, how I'm wired psychologically, my previous trauma, my previous grief, that event could be something that completely traumatized me. Whereas perhaps that event didn't traumatize you at all, but just gave you grief. So a person can go through the same exact thing, but not have trauma while the other person does have trauma. Got it. So there's no like definition of, well, this is what trauma is. This is what it isn't. It's your reaction.

59:57Trauma is your reaction to an event. So as you're trying to process through trauma, we all need different things. And this is where I say, you need the help of a professional. because so often our brains are like, if you broke your arm right now, where would you go? The hospital. You go to the hospital. Like no question. I'm gonna go to the hospital. Well, if your brain is feeling like this brokenness because of trauma, so often we feel shame and we don't go get help, but we should also be going to a professional that knows how to help us be able to heal our brains. So there's things like EMDR, which literally helps you heal your brain.

1:00:44There's psychiatrists, there's support groups, there's places where you can feel safe to go get that help because it is really difficult to get through trauma on your own. And a lot of times it's so hard to that it kind of carries with you throughout your whole life. You know, I think right now a lot of people on, at least online, have been starting to talk more about generational trauma and, you know, why things are passed down from one generation to the next. And it's because trauma literally physically changes your DNA. And when no one is taking a breath to be like, I want this to end with me or how do I heal?

1:01:29It continues to be passed down through habits, through our reactions, through what we then teach our children, how we teach, how we treat them. And so I always recommend professional help for trauma. Makes sense.

1:01:45Hala Taha:So something else that you talk about in your book is fear, right? So fear is something that I think a lot of entrepreneurs go through, especially. We work in very uncertain areas most of the time. We don't really know what's going to happen next. So how do we reframe fear? What do we need to know about that? So I don't know about you, but for me, in entrepreneurship, fear can show up in so many different ways, but I realize I'm not actually afraid of that thing happening. I'm afraid of something totally unrelated, but I have attached fear as the label to the current problem because it's masking something else that I just haven't dealt with.

1:02:30One of the ways though that can help us reframe fear is by doing the thing that we're afraid of. Our anxiety doesn't go away when we avoid the things that we're anxious about. Our fear doesn't go away when we avoid doing the things that we are fearful of. In fact, it just continues to feed it, right? So a lot of times we need proof, our brains need proof that it's not something we need to be afraid of. And we need confidence that it's something that we can handle or walk through, or that if things really do go south, I have confidence in myself that I'm still going to be able to figure it out because that's what life is, right?

1:03:14No one's life goes exactly according to plan. That's not what life is. It's what we want it to be. But then when we find ourselves shying away from doing what we really want to be doing or really leaning into the areas of our lives that we know would light us up, but we are afraid of it not working out or us doing it wrong or losing everything, that fear just keeps getting bigger. So the only way that we can start reframing that is by taking action on the things that we're afraid of.

1:03:50Hala Taha:And when it comes to action, a lot of people are afraid of failure, but as we all know, failure and growth kind of go hand in hand. You have this awesome quote, you talk about dirt as a fine place to start growing. I love that. So can you elaborate on what you mean by that? Yeah. So, you know, I think that so many of us we're afraid of getting knocked down. We're afraid of falling flat on our faces, but it is in that dirt. When your nose hits the ground, the only way back is up. And a lot of times that is the best place for us to be able to really start our growing journey. I cannot think of one entrepreneur who has not experienced a significant setback or failure that then also helped them lead to the next steps of their career, right?

1:04:47It's like, how could you expect to know exactly what to do if you never learned what not to do, or if you never learned what didn't work? Or of course, like we have to fail and no one wants to feel it. But it's also in those moments where we can really get a jumpstart on, okay, I figured this out the hard way. And now I'm going to do X, Y, and Z and have a clearer path forward this way.

1:05:20Hala Taha:Honestly, I feel like people who are willing to fail, they're just so much smarter. And I meet so many people and the most successful people that I know just go for things and they do it and it fails and it works and it doesn't work. And they just keep trying and trying and trying. And then they just get so much experience and they're such a well-rounded, skilled person. And then you've got other people who are just kind of afraid of making any sort of change. They stay in the same sort of mundane job where they don't learn anything new and then they're stuck and they don't really move in life, you know?

1:05:53And they stay stuck. And then the next year, I, cause I hear from a lot of women who are like, I feel stuck here, but I don't know what to do. So I'm just going to stay here. And then a year goes by and you still feel that feeling. And to me, that that's way more uncomfortable than trying something that doesn't work out so that then I can find something that does rather than feeling like I'm on this hamster wheel, that's not getting me anywhere. And I know what's not getting me anywhere. I would much rather be the person that fails a million times to figure out where I actually really want to be than the one who just feels like I'm stuck on Groundhog's Day every day that I wake up.

1:06:39Hala Taha:Totally. And so I think a great way to close out this interview, which also ties to what we're just saying, which is figuring out what you want to do with your life, is learning how to do a clarity map, which you talk about in your book. So first off, tell us about the five daily questions. You mentioned that you have five daily questions that you came up with years ago. What are these questions and how do they help us identify what matters before we move on to the next step? Yeah, so you can do these questions in as little or as much time as you want every morning. But the first one is, what is my intention today?

1:07:11The second one is, why am I worthy? There are so many of us who, when things are going good in our lives, we can start sabotaging ourselves because we feel like we're not deserving of it. We are afraid of life feeling good again. We're not good enough to receive it. And so being able to sit with, why am I worthy for this is actually really helpful to allow yourself to keep moving forward in a positive way in your life. The third question is, who can I serve today? Sometimes it's going to be yourself. This is a really good place to check in of, are there needs that I'm not meeting for myself? or how are my employees today?

1:07:48How is that stranger behind me in the grocery store doing? What about my partner? When's the last time that we had a check-in? That's a really, really beautiful place to figure that out. The next one is what can I set down today or what can I let go of? You guys, we carry so much heaviness throughout our day, whether that's the fear, whether that's a responsibility for something that is completely off out of our hands, whether that's sadness for something that we can't control, but what can you just set down for that day so that you have energy to do these other things? And then the very last question is, how does the truest version of me show up today?

1:08:30I used to ask myself, how does the best version of me show up today? But then I realized I would change my answer based off of, well, what is the best version of a mom or what's the best version of an employer or what's the best version of a partner? And I realized my answers were based off of what I thought other people needed and wanted from me. So I changed it. And I now ask, who is the truest version of me today so that I can show up as her and lead from that place of authenticity and give the world who I am instead of letting the world dictate who I am? So those are the five questions I start with.

1:09:12Hala Taha:Love that. Love that. So as we close out this interview, what should we be doing at the start of the new year when it comes to making lasting change and working through grief, depression, trauma, loneliness? What can we do as like a new year's resolution this year? I love this. This is one of my very favorite things. We start with setting an intention. So I don't set goals and I don't set resolutions ever in my life. I set intentions and I base my year and how I'm going to move forward based off of how I want to feel inside. And a lot of us haven't checked in internally for a long time. Like, how do I actually want to feel?

1:09:54Do I want more peace in my life? Do I want more clarity? Do I I want to feel like love is driving my decisions. What is that feeling? And I write that on a piece of paper. And then around that, I draw four boxes for the different areas of my life, for emotional development, spiritual development, finances or business, and then my relationships. And in those four boxes, I then set intentions for each of those four categories that match my overall life intention so that I can have a strategy in those four life areas to move forward in a way that's going to support how I am feeling right now in my life.

1:10:38And if that's something you want more of, we do a challenge every January about it. I talk more about it in my book and in my podcast, but check in with your feelings and then map out a life that supports your feelings instead of starting with your goals. and that will help you feel more fulfilled once you bring everything to life.

1:10:59Hala Taha:That's great advice. I think that's fantastic. So like really just focusing on your intentions, not your goals. So Ashley, I had such a great conversation with you today. I end my show with two questions that I ask all of my guests. The first one is, what is one actionable thing our young and profiters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? Ooh, this is such a good one. I would say invest in your mental health. there's that return of being able to really understand who you are and why you are how you are is going to profit you more than anything else in the long run and help you build a sustainable business and this one can go beyond business and finance what is your secret to profiting in life Oh, wow.

1:11:44This is a good one. Okay. I'm like, what is my secret to profiting in life? My secret is to create peace as my priority.

1:11:54Hala Taha:Being able to - You didn't get to talk about this. This is so important. Yeah. Yeah. Being able to live with peace as my decision maker and as the feeling that surrounds me, that has allowed me to profit in every area of my life more than anything else that I have ever tried to do. And so I base every decision off of, is this going to invite peace in my life or is it going to be something that prevents me from feeling peace? That's the thing is pursuing peace to have a profitable life in all of the areas that you want to feel it in. And when you say peace, because I didn't get a chance to ask you about this and I actually really love this.

1:12:37Hala Taha:So like when you say peace, what is a feeling? Like what is peace to you? Peace to me is the feeling that can't be bought. It can't be mimicked by anything else. It can't be something that someone else gives you. Peace is this internal feeling that comes when you are in alignment with your life, with who you believe your higher power to be. when you are able to make decisions that invite in more peace, whether that is setting types of boundaries or whether that is letting things go that make you kind of feel chained. Peace to me feels a lot like freedom. And there's a lot of things that can kind of chain us that make us lose it, whether that's like we feel chained to our job or to social media or to comparison or to toxic relationships or to these habits we just can't get out of the cycle of doing because they've just become a part of who we are because that's what helped us cope for a long time, but now it's not serving us anymore.

1:13:48There's so many chains in our life that we can have that prevent us from experiencing more peace. And so to me, peace is something that you cannot receive from any other outside source or thing.

1:14:04Hala Taha:So good. I feel like that's my favorite advice from the whole episode is to make decisions based on if it's gonna... No, the whole conversation was amazing, but that really spoke to me in terms of like making decisions based on what brings you peace and not. Is this gonna bring me peace or is this gonna make me feel unaligned? And honestly, it's so simple. And honestly, you can make faster decisions and decisions that support you more based off of that answer of doing the gut check of, is this going to bring me peace or not? And that's how I base every decision now. And it's changed my life and my business and my family's love.

1:14:45Hala Taha:Yeah, I love that. Ashley, this has been amazing. Where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? Gosh, thank you so much, first of all, for having me. And I would love to meet all of your young and profiterers. You can come find me on Instagram at Ashley K. Lemieux. We love hanging out over there every day. You can also come and listen to my podcast. It's called Healing Her. And if you are wanting more support on your journey, you can go to my website to see what that looks like at AshleyLemieux.com. Amazing. Ashley, thank you so much for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast.

1:15:19Thanks for having me.