Growing Lean
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Growing Lean
From Dance to Conscious Leadership: Lori Darley's Story of Transformation and Success
Ever wondered how a dancer and choreographer transitioned to become a coach and trainer for leaders? On this episode, I, Deej, had the privilege to converse with the incredible Lori Darley, CEO and founder of Conscious Leaders. We treaded through her unique journey of transformation, unearthing her methods of overcoming challenges and her intriguing approach of fusing ancient principles with knowledge on brain operation into her coaching. Lori also shed light on one of her most unique experiences during her stint at the BNSF Railroad and her innovative strategies of integrating somatic practices and Aikido into leadership training.
Transitioning to our discussion on the daunting task of scaling a business, you'll hear Lori divulging on how she leveraged LinkedIn to expand not only her network, but to attract clients who resonate with her values. She stresses the importance of curating a community of leaders who are committed to personal growth, and the evolving shift of our world towards virtual work. Towards the end, Lori generously imparts invaluable advice for business owners on cultivating self-understanding, bearing responsibility for their actions, and crafting a compelling vision. This episode, brimming with Lori's insights on conscious leadership, is one you won't want to miss.
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Hey everyone, welcome back to the Growing Lean podcast, sponsored by Lean Discovery Group, an award-winning software development firm based out of Virginia. This is your host, dylan Burke, also known as Deej. I'm very happy to be here with Laurie Darley. She has been coaching and training leaders for the past 24 years and, prior to that, a dancer, choreographer and autistic director touring internationally for 20 years, she is the CEO and founder of Conscious Leaders. Welcome, laurie.
Speaker 2:Hello, so good to be with you, deej.
Speaker 1:Good to have you here. Thanks for your time, yeah absolutely so to get us started, can you tell me and us firstly about your history, because it seems like you've got such a great history. I want to know how you ended up where you are today with that background.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So you know, every ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a dancer. It was my way of expressing myself, connecting to that which cannot be seen. You know my spiritual way of. I don't know that you would call it worship, but it was my way of connecting to my source and I turned that into my career.
Speaker 2:I co-founded a dance company and had extraordinary experiences and ran a company and took me to trained professional dancers.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that I recognized during that time is that, you know, training high performance athletes is a lot like training leaders in business, and I had learned at a very early age that there was some connection between how we think and the reality that we experience, our own perception, and I was always very curious about that.
Speaker 2:Basically, in 2000, after hiring myself a coach to help me with my company and it was artistic and it was wonderful artistically but it didn't pay the bills I basically got trained as and declared myself and literally it was, I was inventing a future.
Speaker 2:I raised my hands over my head and said I am a transitions coach and I was trained by one of the just very well known executive business coach in. That does a lot of work in New York, in LA, dr David Zellman, who's now a dear friend and mentor and it was early on that I landed my first corporate gig. That also then landed me on no-transcript, as I say for a 15-year stint with the BNSF Railroad as a coach and class facilitator and did some curriculum development for them as well, and I rebranded as Conscious Leaders in 2015, not because it was a self-congratulatory look at me I'm a Conscious Leader but more as a stake in the ground for my own ongoing development as both a coach and also becoming and continuing my pursuit of being the best support and supporting others in expanding their own awareness on behalf of maximizing their impact. It's my belief that business can be a force for good in the world and it requires Conscious Leadership for us to be able to do that.
Speaker 1:I love that. That's amazing. I love that you've taken your whole lifestyle and your story and you've turned it into a business, a high impact business at that. It's really inspiring, Thank you. I want to know I'm sure you've had many challenges in the past 24 years. I want to know what have been the biggest ones, firstly in terms of getting started scaling and then ongoing challenges that you face regularly. How do you tackle them?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, it's funny wherever there's drama in your life. Have you ever noticed that you're there?
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:And so the biggest transition for me at the beginning was shifting from someone who had been classically trained and sort of like this idea of perfection and shifting from this idea of kind of performing to more of a stance, if you will, of sensing and of listening. And you know, it required me to really understand what some of the I'll say ancient principles of a well-lived life and what are. You know, sort of just learning more about how the brain operates. So there was an educational piece which was both conceptual and very practical in terms of how to literally coach, and I did a lot of that, quite frankly, on the job training, right, you don't, I've never been one to sit back and say, well, I'm not going to do anything until I actually have all of these credentials. I'm going to get my credentials along the way, which is what I did. And you know, suffer the poor folks who started with me early on. I look back and I think, oh gosh, I hope that I, I hope I serve them well. But you know, other challenges were things like when I was working for the railroad. I did know it's always what you don't know, you don't know that bites you on your buns, so to speak and what I didn't know about organizational development was that some organizations are more progressive than others.
Speaker 2:And I was brought in to the railroad to because of my first corporate experience between sort of this management and union environment in a chemical plant and the conflict that was there because of that. The railroad had just recently started a leadership program and that was the year I was brought in was the first year that first line supervisors who are mostly at that time our folks that had either come up through the union or through the military and it was a vastly different population and nothing like I had really ever well, except for that one time dealt with. And I was a newly credentialed somatic coach, which means that I was at finally gained some skills around embodiment if that makes sense and becoming an embodied leader. And what it gave me freedom to do was to actually enter into the emotional space, the emotional territory of our human endeavors, to be able to support people and not be a pretend therapist. So it gave me my own sort of way of operating.
Speaker 2:I tried to incorporate that colleague of mine. We partnered and we developed a whole program and been approved and it was crushed by the coaches who were very uncomfortable we were actually our own training in somatics incorporated the concepts of Aikido, which is a defensive martial Japanese martial art form, and we weren't doing Aikido but we were doing it in a leadership context. But it did mean contact, physical contact, and it was way too soon. What the organization needed and what our module actually turned into was a primer on emotional intelligence, and that was what was appropriate, and that was one of those things that I didn't know what I didn't know, but boy did I learn a lot then, and it was a great failure for me to actually experience that. Let's see your other. The second back half of your question was about scaling. Is that right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what have been the challenges in scaling to where you are today?
Speaker 2:It's the classic on the business or in the business kind of thing. I don't think that there's probably any surprises there, but right now I'm using an organization who has special sort of breaking the not breaking but working with that's a better term working with the algorithms of LinkedIn to, just, you know, elevate my, my offer and in such a way that gets me out of my, you know, sort of protected post COVID. I know who my clients are. I work with two other consultancies and so when you're doing work with other consultancies, what I'm helping them do is scale their business Right, and so I'm focused on more on. I'm still working with them and probably will for a while, but scaling my business is about, you know, really focusing on the offers of conscious leaders.
Speaker 1:Okay, amazing it's. It's amazing to hear your story. I'm really enjoying learning more about your history. What, what is your overall business strategy is? Do you get most of your clients through LinkedIn? That what you said.
Speaker 2:That hasn't been the case in the previous years, prior to COVID, and through COVID, I just had clients show up.
Speaker 2:You know, I didn't have to do any biz dev and so I was just servicing my clients, right. And then occasionally I'd have a conscious leaders opportunity. I worked with various companies a you know a company that a marketing company, a you know a healthcare organization, under the banner of conscious leaders. So it was, it was. It was a blessing, quite frankly, because then I just showed up and did what I do really well, which is coach and lead and facilitate and transform people's lives. And now I'm in that space of enrolling people and that's my word for selling, which is a completely different, I'll say, approach to developing my business I'm. The thing that I'm currently hoping to take to scale is my conscious leaders wisdom circle, and that will be a. It's a peer support group that does both leadership development and master mining exercises to tap into the collective wisdom of the group and create sort of a innovation lab where people get to develop themselves at the same time as leaders.
Speaker 1:Okay, amazing, that sounds awesome. So you only started using LinkedIn after COVID? Is that because you wanted to scale, because you wanted more business, or did people stop coming to you through word of mouth?
Speaker 2:It's a great question. So when I chose to step into this wisdom circle thing, I had quite a good following. I wrote a book called Dancing Naked Claiming your Power as a Conscious Leader back in 2016. And so I had done a little bit of a lot of Facebook and LinkedIn kind of posting, but I was sort of hovering at that same realm and I was, as I was thinking about filling the wisdom circle, I thought, oh great, I'll just check into my network and sure, it's going to be easy, greasy. Well, it's a, it's a, it is. It's not.
Speaker 2:You know, it's not $100 an hour coaching gig, it's a year long journey and it requires and my standards are high in terms of who I'd like to attract Conscious capitalists, social impact investors, purpose driven leaders, servant leaders, people who have a purpose higher than themselves and they want to have a positive impact in the world. And they're also on a little bit on their journey as a, in developing themselves. In other words, they don't faint when you say well, how, how how much self awareness do you have about yourself when you're in conflict? How emotional, you know, how are you able to manage your emotions? What emotions? So, um, so I'm, I'm. Are you familiar with the Strengths Finder?
Speaker 1:The what Sorry.
Speaker 2:Strengths.
Speaker 1:Finder.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a. You know, it's one of those assessments that you do and you name your top five strengths and one of my top five strengths is a maximizer. So, put very simply in dance terms, I was not interested in in, you know, teaching two year olds how to stand in first position in a strip mall shopping center and have to deal with parents. For the rest of my life I wanted to deal with the talented and gifted at the special high schools, so a bit of a snob when it came to dance and the.
Speaker 2:The wisdom circle is not about working with people at the beginning of their journey, but not just not at the wisdom circle level. So I needed to expand my network and I needed to get more trained. I knew what the concepts of enrollment were, but, you know, true enrollment is not about pushing, it's about matching right and making sure that that person really has an experience of value, that I don't have to sell them right. So I'll take them through a conversational experience where they get to have a breakthrough. And then I pose the question so can you imagine a community of leaders around you who are committed to you having breakthroughs and who you also can use your own wisdom and support others as well. So there's a real symbiotic relationship that and intimacy that gets built and, quite frankly, after I've been a big fan of music and this is what drove me I'm I'm a bit fed up with the virtual. I want to be in a room of beating hearts and, hopefully, breath that doesn't stink 100%.
Speaker 1:That's been a huge shift is the sole virtual world. But yeah, the one thing you mentioned that I want to ask more about is that you do a matchmaking sort of process. So, with that being said, do you, do you decline people from making use of your services?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's super interesting because most of the time when you're scaling a business, you want as much business as possible, even if you know they're going to be a tough client or. But I guess for the type of work you do it, it's important that you believe that they are the right fit.
Speaker 2:It's the curation. It's the curation of the community. That is my heaviest lift.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Right. So psychological safety does not come. You can't buy it in a bottle, right? It's something that has to get co-created, and we are. I think we're all feeling a little awkward when we're with people. After so long not being with people, do we need to go back off camera? Sorry, I just I wanted to see you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, no, I prefer it. I agree. I remember, like even still now, when I'm going to my friends' houses and greeting their moms. I don't know if I should like fist bump them, elbow them or hug them Like we used to hug them. We used to hug and kiss them all the time and then this shift came where we just stay away, we elbow touched them like from far, or fist bump them. It was like it's been a weird, weird time, but things now slowly are feeling a bit more normal, which is great.
Speaker 2:Just in time for COVID to come back and visit us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's crazy times. Yeah, I want to ask you. We are running out of time, unfortunately, but before we go, I do have a few more questions. I want to know if you were to rate your level of satisfaction with your business today out of 10, what would that be?
Speaker 2:Eight.
Speaker 1:Eight. Okay, and if we were to meet again in three years' time and I'd ask you the same question, what would you want it to be?
Speaker 2:Well, I know for a fact that most people don't want to say 10, because it sort of seems like it's the end of the line. And the truth is I could say 10 right now because there's so many ways that I'm satisfied with it. But there is this new adventure called collective wisdom, and so for me, a 10 would be that I'm not only doing the wisdom circle, but I'm doing a circle for entrepreneurs. I'm doing circles for people at the beginning of their leadership journey, who really need to be introduced to things in a safe space without feeling lectured to.
Speaker 1:Okay, 100%.
Speaker 2:So I'm a big fan of improv. I use improv to help people get out of their fear of failure and looking good Like just you know, just be a mess, Be a mess, fail. The more you fail, the quicker you can get to where you want to go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. I think as long as you don't take failure as an option to quit and you learn from it, then it's not really a failure in my view.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I want to rephrase See you in court.
Speaker 1:So sorry, we are unfortunately out of time, but before we go, what is one piece of advice you would give to business owners looking to succeed In general and in your industry as coaches?
Speaker 2:It's all about you, so do your own work. First, understand what makes you tick, understand what triggers you, take responsibility and ownership for what's yours, and then create a compelling vision and encourage people to own their own results.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Thank you so much, laurie, and thank you for being on the show. What is the best way for people to reach out to Laurie Darley if you have any offers for them to take advantage of or if they just want to follow your journey?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm on LinkedIn at Laurie Darley, or however they handle it at on LinkedIn L-O-R-I-D-A-R-L-E-Y. My website is Conscious Leaders. You have to know how to spell conscious at c-o-n-s-e-i-o-u-s leaders plural dot u-s, as in conscious leaders are us. My email is lori at consciousleadersus Amazing.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, Laurie.
Speaker 2:You bet, did you?