Grief's Revealed a Gift: Birthing My Business Passion

Darlene DeMoss, CEO of HBH Recovery, epitomizes resilience and purpose-driven entrepreneurship. 

Stemming from personal grief, Darlene found an innovative way to guide others through their own losses with intentional love expression. When others were retiring, Darlene was launching HBH Recovery as her own business, challenging the conventional ways of doing life. Three years into it, she has the audacious goal of assisting 10,000 individuals in their grief journeys. This episode dives deep into Darlene's transformative journey, highlighting the profound business lessons of turning personal pain into a larger mission, the importance of breaking self-imposed barriers, and the belief that age is never an obstacle to dreams.

🔗 Links to connect with Darlene:  
💔➡️❤️ https://hbhrecovery.org/

RECOMMENDED readings and programs:
➡️ The Grief Recovering Method, https://www.griefrecoverymethod.com/ 

🧠 On Mindset - Soundtracks: the surprising solution to overthinking, https://www.amazon.com/dp/1540900800/ref=nosim?tag=unexpectedl0e-20

💬 On Communication - The 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication: Apply Them and Make the Most of Your Message, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BZBD1HZ4/ref=nosim?tag=unexpectedl0e-20

📈 On Scaling Your Business through Synergies - Who Not How: The Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork, https://www.amazon.com/dp/1401962327/ref=nosim?tag=unexpectedl0e-20

🎧 Listen to the show:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/66x3kimKtCA4dSHE51IOEj?si=486ebbd41f284f3d
🍏 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/un-expectedly-successful-the-podcast/id1691434992

💌 GET IN TOUCH WITH ME

🌍 My websites - herpathtopurposeandprofit.com and ascendostrategies.com
📧 Partner With Me - griselda@ascendostrategies.com
1️⃣ Her Path to Purpose and Profit:
Join a community of like-minded women. Business coaching for aspiring women entrepreneurs and launch their venture.
Website: https://herpathtopurposeandprofit.com/

Who I AM:  
I am Dr. Griselda Martinez, your transformational business coach, podcaster, public speaker, and author, passionate about walking in my purpose and helping aspiring women entrepreneurs find theirs. 

Before being here,  "I had made it" in my career. Yet, I remembered that the corner office or the big salary was not the end goal.  

Instead, I knew I could have a much bigger impact by working with other women like me to find their purpose and use their businesses as a mechanism for its deployment. As a result, businesses are founded and rooted in purpose and passion that contribute to their community.
Subscribe now and join the un-Expectedly Successful tribe! 

Let’s go!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Unexpectedly Successful. Join us to hear their raw and genuine stories of women founders who have created their own pathways to possibilities. Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Unexpectedly Successful, and today we have a powerful conversation to be had, and me, from my personal perspective, I'm a little hesitant about the topic. But I'm brave enough to have our guest speaker today, ms Darlene DeMoss, who is the CEO and founder of HBH Recovery. And what Darlene does is she helps people change their perception about grief so that it makes it easier to talk about it. So that's where I'm a little bit hesitant about from my own personal perspective. But let me share a little bit about Darlene. She is a veteran of 20 years in the Army. She's also a licensed minister and she's very proud of having found her purpose in her calling later in life and we'll dig deeper into that perspective. But please thank you for being here with us, darlene. It is a pleasure to have you.

Speaker 2: 1:19

Thank you for having me dear. I'm just so honored to be here with you guys today.

Speaker 1: 1:24

All right, well, let's dig into the raw and January stories of Darlene. So, darlene, what is it for you to be, darlene, for me to, be Darlene, is to be someone who sympathizes with the pain of others.

Speaker 2: 1:42

I've empathized with the pain of others, I should say, and I've been like that from a small child. But I'm also someone who kind of, because of my upbringing in a dysfunctional household, I kind of took the easy path in life, growing up and never really did anything outside of the box, never tried anything outside of the box. I joined the military, which is a place that has rules, and I like the rules, I like the structure, and I got to a point in my life after I retired and a few years later, after my sister passed, that I realized, ok, what do I do with my life now? What is my purpose? Because once you see someone else go through that transition, then death becomes very real, and so I was like I don't want to leave this earth and not have fulfilled my purpose, and so I prayed and God spoke and my life turned around.

Speaker 1: 2:39

Wow, wow. So tell us a little bit more about your upbringing. You mentioned that you went into like you did not want to get out of the box, so tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker 2: 2:50

My mother and father were both alcoholics, so I grew up wanting to create order out of chaos, and so I was always the one trying to make sure everybody was calm, everybody was happy, so that there would not be the chaos that comes from living in that type of household. And I took that need for order into the military. I was already in ROTC in high school, and so I took that into the military. And once I retired from the military I went into different admin positions where that gift for creating order out of chaos was needed. I could go into an organization and just kind of rearrange the administrative things that they were doing. So I've worked in the corporate arena, I've worked in nonprofits, I've worked in government, I've worked in just about every kind of arena doing that. But when you're stuck in that place where it's always order, order, order, the creativity that God's put in all of us doesn't flow easily. And so that's what was missing from my life, and I knew something was missing. I didn't know at that time that that's what it was.

Speaker 1: 3:59

Okay, all right, so perfect sayway for my next question is when did you have this crazy thought of having a business and becoming a business owner yourself?

Speaker 2: 4:10

Well, you know, I never, ever, thought I'd ever be a business owner. It was something that was too unsure for me. It had too many moving parts that I couldn't control. And then my sister actually, she was my God's sister, but she was like a big sister to me. We moved in together and she was miss entrepreneurial, she was into all kinds of business ventures, and so she started pulling me in and I kept saying no, no, no. But she kept making me go to her meetings and talking to me about her business and things like that, and I dippled and dabbled at it, but I didn't really become serious about having a business until after she passed in 2020.

Speaker 1: 4:52

So, darlene, in your website you talk about how you became a business owner in this particular area for coaching and grieving. Can you give us some context of how the moment of your life led you into business ownership to serve with this gift of yours?

Speaker 2: 5:13

Well, my sister and I lived together for over 20 years and she had gone through two battles with cancer lung cancer she never smoked, but she had had colon cancer and it had moved to her lungs. And each battle she won. And then it came back for the third time and I kind of knew at the beginning, just from her response, that this was probably going to be the last time. And going through that with her for about a year, my whole focus was making sure she was taking care of, making sure I did everything I could do to help her, making sure I did everything I could do to get her the right medical care and all those types of things. I quit my full-time job and got a job as a contractor so that I could vary my hours depending on if she needed me and when she passed away. She passed away in 2020, in February of 2020, and then COVID hit in March, and so there was no funeral, there was no people coming by the house, none of the kind of support things that you normally get during that time, and I wasn't really grieving like I had seen on the movies or seen on TV, or even heard or seen other people do, and so, having had been in therapy, I said maybe I just need to talk to my therapist. And I talked to my therapist and she says well, you know, you were kind of prepared for this, you know, and you had been praying about it and you were kind of prepared for this and maybe it would just come a different way. It'll come different. And I still wasn't satisfied with that.

Speaker 2: 6:54

So, just to make sure that I wasn't suppressing something, I started doing research about it and I came across the grief recovery institute and they had a lot of great articles about grief. And then I saw that they had a training program and I felt like God said do that. Because I had been asking God what do I do now? What do do my life now? Because my whole mission in life for you know, the last 11 years had been her and making sure she was taking care of. So it was like all of a sudden I had no purpose. I could still go to work and do those things, but where was my purpose now?

Speaker 2: 7:29

And when I ran across the grief recovery institute and the grief recovery specialist program, god said do this. And I went to the course and it was eye opening and I was like, oh my God, they don't teach people this, they don't teach people that there are tools you can use to help you deal with grief. And so I took the basic course and then I took the advanced course, and then I just started inviting friends to come go through the course with me just so I could practice and make sure it worked and see how it worked, and you know those types of things. And next thing I know HBH recovery was born and HBH stands for heal, baby heal, because I'm a mommy and everybody's my baby. So yeah, that's how we got there.

Speaker 1: 8:16

Wow, wow. So that's a beautiful story, darling. So one thing is for you to have gone through that healing process yourself, right. Another one is to get the certification. And then what? May you actually take the step to actually create a business to provide these services to others?

Speaker 2: 8:39

They encourage you to do that in the training program. But it was like the best part of the training program was you went through the program like a client, so you did everything a client would do, so you actually, we actually walked through our own grief in this program. You know we picked, we picked what grief we want loss we wanted to work with and we walked through it and once I saw how it helped me because I didn't even do my sister, because I grieved her well. You know there's sometimes you can grieve well and so I grieved her well. But my grief over my father was different, because my father was absent from my life and came back into my life just a couple of years before he passed, and so I did the program with him and just seeing how it helped me complete my feelings in that area about him was why I said more people need to do this, more people need to know about this, and I have. This is what I've always wanted to do is make people feel better.

Speaker 1: 9:40

So darling. You've talked about when in previous conversations that you want to share the realization that sometimes you don't find the purpose until later in your life. So can you tell us a little bit about that and the painful situations you mentioned that? How does that play a role in your business?

Speaker 2: 10:02

Well, like I said, I went into the military. I went into the military straight out of high school because I was running from home. It was I just wanted to get away from that toxic environment. And once I got into the military and I had that structure and then I retired. I was still pretty young when I retired because I went in straight from high school, so I was about 34 when I retired and then I started working again. Then I met my God sister and we started living together.

Speaker 2: 10:31

But I was doing things that she was having me do to. You know, become a business owner, become independent, get out of the box, those types of things. But they weren't working. As long as she was telling me how to do them, I wasn't buying into it. But once she died it was like and, like I said, I was like what is my purpose in life now? When she died, it was the same year that I turned 65. And that's supposed to be one of your celebratory years, that's a milestone year, and I was sitting there like I don't want to sit and just wait to die. Now I want to stand on the promise that my ladder will be greater than my former. That God will you know, extend my years and those things, and I said, oh God, what am I supposed to do?

Speaker 2: 11:17

And so it was the pain of knowing that my grief for her could have been much, much worse if I wasn't prepared for it or if I hadn't looked up the grief recovery Institute and become a specialist and learn the tools so that even later I did. I did have a couple of breakdowns later where I was really just missing her and just going through. You know, about all the things that weren't going to happen between us, the dreams that we had talked about, the things we were going to do, all those hopes and dreams that weren't going to happen. But because I had the training, I could allow myself to feel those things but then bring myself back out of it and say you know what?

Speaker 2: 11:57

Okay, I miss her and it's painful to miss her, but grief is natural and it's normal. It's a natural, normal emotional reaction to a loss. And because it's an emotional reaction, it's an emotion and all we have to do is know what can I do to keep that emotion from overwhelming me. Just like people take anger management classes and all those different types of things. If we had classes to teach us how to manage grief, I think we would be a lot better off in this world, and so that's how I got there.

Speaker 1: 12:32

Wow, that's. That's beautiful, Darlene, and you also mentioned that grief is the greatest expression of love that anybody can give to someone. You also talked on your website about grieving your mother and your pet. So how, all of those components, how can those be summarized in you now, as a coach for grieving?

Speaker 2: 13:05

Because grief is individual to everybody. It's as unique to everybody as their fingerprints. There may be a loss in my life that I grieve heavily, that if the same thing happened to you you'd be like, oh, that's too bad and move on. And so in my case, when I was talking about my mother, my mother and I were not close, and when I got away from home we weren't. We never got any closer, you know, and so I didn't have a real connection to her, and so I did grieve the loss of my mother, but I didn't grieve the connection because the connection was not there. So it was an easier grief to process.

Speaker 2: 13:45

But my sister and I had a Pomeranian that was 15 years old when she died and so she had been with us for 15 years. She had been with us through two of my sister's three cancer battles. You know she was a member of the family and when she died I cried like many people would have cried for a parent dying. I mean, it was just this crushing feeling of pain and grief that I had never felt before and most people will say, well, she was only a dog. But grief is based on the connection and the way you grief and how deeply you grieve is based on how much you loved that person or that thing, whatever you lost, and that's why I say grief is the greatest expression of love. You can never show anyone and you'll never know how much I love you until you die, because that's when you're real, real understanding of what you've lost and what you're going to miss comes out.

Speaker 1: 14:44

So, darlene, I have a question. Come back on that. What if we're, like, super intentional about expressing our love in life as a result of having lost someone that we deeply love? What is your reaction to that?

Speaker 2: 15:01

If you've been, if you've done everything you could to express that love to them, and then you still have that grief. All the grief is saying is it may be that they were sick or they died unexpectedly is saying I still have a conversation I need to have. I still have things I didn't get to tell them. I still have events in my life that I wish they were going to be here for. I still have unmet needs that whenever I reached out to them they were there. And now when I reach out, I know they'll never be there again. So those are all the things that are leading to the grief, and so part of our grief recovery program is we walk you through that. We have you do exercises, we have you write letters. I remember when I was going through therapy and my mother had already passed and my therapist says, well, you should just write her a letter. You know, and I'm like, okay, I mean, I'm like, what am I going to write a letter about? Just tell her how you feel. Well, I didn't know how I felt because I hadn't grieved. You know it was like, well, she's gone, it's nothing I can do about that now, but you still need to process those things.

Speaker 2: 16:05

Even in a relationship where it wasn't a good relationship, there are still expectations and hopes. We hoped it. We had time for it to get better. We hope the old person in the relationship would come back again. You know this, whoever this person is that's hurting us, we hope that they will change. And then, when they die unexpectedly, you're not necessarily always grieving the person. You may be just grieving that your hopes and expectations didn't get met.

Speaker 2: 16:33

And so I tell people especially when I do a lot of young adults we talk about when they're writing their letters. It's like don't forget to mention that you, you're sorry that they won't be able to walk you down the aisle at your wedding and won't be able to see their grandchild, all these things because it's a conversation that you wanted to have and the conversation has to be had in order for you to get complete in your grief. Otherwise it's just, it's not complete. And that's what. That's what we take them to. We don't say you'll get over it. We say you'll get complete in it. You'll understand it.

Speaker 2: 17:06

You'll have said everything you needed to say, made every apology you needed to make, talked about all the significant moments in your life together, and then you signed the letter Goodbye. It always has to be signed with goodbye because we understand goodbye is final. We understand we're not going to see them again until we reach heaven. But here on earth I will no longer allow the pain to rule me and there will be times, unexpectedly, that I will miss you and I may cry, but I'm missing you and the emotion is not overwhelming me. And then they'll get.

Speaker 2: 17:40

You'll get to a point where you'll replace the missing them with a good memory automatically, as soon as you start missing them and think you're going to cry. I wish you were still here. I had so much fun when we used to go to those royalties together. My sister loved royalty parties and I do that now in her memory. I go to a royalty party around her birthday, you know. And so you replace the things that would make you feel the pain of the grief with good memories, so that you can talk about them and not be in pain, and that it brings you joy to talk about them, because it brings you joy to express how much you love them.

Speaker 1: 18:19

Oh, I think it sounds easier than Sounds, easier than no it's a process.

Speaker 2: 18:25

Let me tell you it's a process. It does not happen overnight, but basically it is. I have this tool now. I know that when that pain starts to hit me, I need to start thinking about what was the best thing we did together or what was the greatest thing they said to me. I asked my sister when she was in the rehab center. I said, sis, tell me what to do. What else can I do? I want you to come back home. What else can I do? And she said, sis, there's nothing else you can do. You've been the best sister ever. Wow, and I never forgot that. And every time I really start missing her or I start feeling like maybe I could have done this or I could have done that, I remember you've been the best sister ever.

Speaker 1: 19:10

That moment, wow. Well, for my personal experience and why, the introduction is I lost my mother 28 years ago and it's taken me many years to go through that healing process, and so I'm taking notes of additional tools that you're mentioning, but from my audience, I'm sure everybody in the audience has had that sense of loss and not having that loved one, whether it's any type of losses.

Speaker 1: 19:43

So you also, darling you talk about the key to recovery is action, not time. So tell us a little bit about that, because we tend to say just give it time just to heal, right. So tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker 2: 19:59

Yeah, time heals all wounds is a lie. It doesn't. It doesn't. It'll heal with time. You'll get better. You just need to keep going. You just need to be strong for everybody else, all of the things that are those things we hear, that don't help us, and so the action is the tools that we do.

Speaker 2: 20:16

We do we start with something called your loss history, where we have you start as a young child and just do a graph of all the losses you've had in your life, understanding that there are over 40 different kinds of losses. So most people connect grief with death and divorce. But foreclosure on a house is a big loss, some for some people moving, whether they're moving away to college or coming back from college, is a loss. Women that deal with infertility are grieving. So there's so many different the health of an in-law or a bad relationship with an in-law so many things. People who don't have boundaries and they put boundaries in their life and they end up ending relationships are grieving those relationships even though they know those relationships weren't good for them. So there's so many kinds of loss, and so that's why we have you graph it out so you can see.

Speaker 2: 21:09

Oh, this thing wasn't the only thing that I went through. I went through several other losses that contributed to that and we could just talk about COVID, because that's an intangible loss with COVID. The first thing with COVID is what we call an intangible loss. You couldn't put your finger on it, but you had a loss of safety. You didn't feel safe anymore. How do you get past that? And then, if you had COVID and then someone you love got sick and they died during COVID, you couldn't go see them, you couldn't have the funeral, all of those things right. And so we've been hit in society with so many things With the racism and all the things, with racism and the school shootings and different things like that that you just need to take a step back and breathe and you can't. Life has to go on. So we do the loss history graph so that you can map it out, and what I find is, as people go along, they end up adding other things. Oh, I forgot to add this and I forgot to add this.

Speaker 2: 22:08

And then the second tool we do is we do a relationship graph, because a lot of times when we're grieving somebody, we only want to think about the good things in the relationship. We make a martyr out of them. They were an angel. But when we do the relationship graph and you have to write some of the bad things that happened and some of the good things that happened and you map that all out, then you see a balanced person again and you're like OK, they weren't an angel, they had their moments, they had their times. We didn't always get along. Now I see them clearly.

Speaker 2: 22:41

And then our final thing is and this is where I was talking about completing the relationship is we write the letter and in the letter we apologize for things we may never have gotten to apologize for before. Because with the relationship graph we look at OK, was it my fault or was it their fault? Did I do something to start this? I needed to apologize for that. I need to forgive them for this, because there are things that we don't say, but we still have unforgiveness about things or they bothered us, and then significant emotional statements. So when we do the letter, all those things are included in the letter and it's just as long or as short as you need it, and then you sign a goodbye and the thing is later you'll say, oh, I should have included this in the letter.

Speaker 2: 23:26

So you're constantly processing your grief and later you say, oh, I should have included this in the letter. Then you do a PS and you write PS. I meant to tell you goodbye mom, goodbye dad, goodbye Jair that was my sister and you continue that and every time you write it's like journaling. You're clearing something out of your system. Wow, and the best thing to do. The best part is you always want to read the letter to somebody you trust. If it's somebody that had died, then you read it to somebody you trust, because saying it out loud to somebody else is what makes it real for you. It's like you're talking to that person. Some people say put a chair in front of you. An empty chair doesn't react. Or an empty chair doesn't feel like a person. But even if that isn't my sister, just somebody else hearing my feelings about her can do so much for me and for them to just hug me afterwards.

Speaker 1: 24:21

Wow, Darlene. So I have done that with my mother and actually my therapist asked me to write a letter in response. And it was just powerful. It was just powerful and I read both letters out loud and it was just an incredible experience. So for my audience, I mean, you're just getting here some powerful tools, but I love how you frame grief in that context of love and in the context of just turning pain into the memories that you shared together.

Speaker 2: 25:00

But isn't that what Jesus did. He took pain and turned it in and showed us how much he loved us through the pain that he suffered.

Speaker 1: 25:09

So you share a lot of really amazing things about your personal story, Darlene. Tell me as a business owner, what is your, why and how. That links to the moments of good, bad and ugly in the business world.

Speaker 2: 25:28

My why is to do my part in making somebody else's life easier. And I always say love well, grieve well and live well. And in this world there are so many things that we can grieve about that will cause us grief. I mean, just watch the news. But if we have the tools to deal with that, if we have the tools to say that's bad, but I'm not going to let it touch me and get into me because it's not personal to me, it's something happening outside of me. If we can look at the losses in our life and start processing them as we see them coming, you know, in those instances, then we come a long way to having some peace and everybody wants peace in their life.

Speaker 2: 26:21

And I hate the fact that nobody taught me as a child how to deal with grief. You know, if I cried about something, if my best friend moved away, just because I was a child, I wasn't supposed to have feelings. You know, I even do a course on helping children with loss where I teach parents and teachers how to talk to kids about loss. I can't talk to them directly because I don't have the relationship, but I teach the people that have the relationship how to talk a child through grief, because children process it differently. And the knee-jerk reaction is oh my dog died, well, we'll buy you another one, but that doesn't take away the grief of the one that died, the one I love for all these years.

Speaker 2: 26:59

Or oh, grandma died, Well, you know what happened. And they start asking questions, and because you're grieving, you have no answers for them, you can't deal with it, and so that process needs to be done. But just imagine if we can take people and start teaching them at a young age, and even in our, in our old, mid and older ages, the tools to how to process it, just like we teach people anger management, how to manage their anger, how to manage their grief. Because people have decided, or society has fooled us into thinking that grief is a condition we have, and it's not. It's only an emotion. And so I hear people say I'm going to be grieving for the rest of my life. Well, that's because you choose to, because it's an emotion.

Speaker 1: 27:48

You've been in the coaching arena for over two years, and you mentioned before that that you started as a contractor when you started taking care of your sister. So so what has been this journey of, of entrepreneurship for you, darling? Tell us the good, the bad and the ugly of it, I think the good is I know it's what I'm supposed to be doing.

Speaker 2: 28:14

The bad is I still have to convince myself that I can do this, that I can accomplish the things, because I've had clients that have gone like halfway through and not finished and, as I said, I'm very empathetic with people and so it hurts me to know that they quit in the middle, that if they had just gone through the whole thing there could have been some help there for them. And then you know the usual big business things. People ask you your fees and why has it cost so much, and you know different things like that. But I understand every. Everybody is not my audience and everybody is not my perfect client, and so I'm gonna. I've learned to stop limiting myself. You know I had to get rid of a lot of limiting beliefs just to start the business and so most of those are gone. But I'm not going to limit myself.

Speaker 2: 29:15

I think one of the best things is now I'm working to get the program in the school system to teach the teachers and the parents in the local school system about how to help their children, especially with all the school shootings and things we've had.

Speaker 2: 29:31

They don't have enough counselors and if teachers can help with that, that's great, and then just my bag. As Dr Dany's will say, my big, audacious goal is to help 10,000 people, and so the other part of the coin of being the entrepreneur is to help 10,000 people. I'm going to need some help. So there are a lot of grief recovery specialists out here that may not be doing a big business that I can hire as contractors to help me when I get into the school system and start doing more things different places, so it's not just for me. I always look at how can I not just support somebody with the grief recovery program, but how can I take it wide and really help other people so they can start with me? And in the classes, as a lot of people learn about how to help their children, they realize I need help too, and so, as they're training under me, whoever comes out of that class needing help will be one of their clients. So I'm helping build more businesses and I'm helping expand the reach of grief recovery.

Speaker 1: 30:33

So yeah, that is so exciting. Okay, so I'm going to go back to two things that you mentioned. The first one is you said I had to go over a lot of limiting beliefs to just get the business started. Tell us about that. Where were you? What was in your?

Speaker 2: 30:50

way. I think I was in my way. More than anything, the biggest thing was okay, I'm starting a business at 65 years old almost 66, right, this is where most people are getting ready to retire. They're getting social security there, they're moving into their condo, they're condo for life one level and I'm starting a business.

Speaker 2: 31:12

First of all, I have never wanted to be a business owner. I've never wanted to do a business, I've never wanted to talk to anybody about anything, and it was just like you know what. You can either sit here and die or you can make an impact. You can leave a mark. You can leave a mark and I think one of the things I know most of your viewers are probably young people coming up that are just trying to get into the entrepreneur thing and things like that. But I would speak to the seniors out there and say you're not done yet. If there's a dream or a vision, go after it. Be around young people that are doing it, find programs to support you, learn everything you can and then step with what you learned, step with what you know, and then the next step will show up.

Speaker 1: 32:03

I love that Never too late, because even I mean, regardless of the age. Right, that's a limiting belief and it's like it's too late, but in reality it's our time. If we have it right in front of us, it's our time.

Speaker 2: 32:16

That's it, and it doesn't matter. God doesn't look at age, he looks at the potential he gave you 65 years ago that you haven't used yet. He's like it's still there. It's still there. So now is the time to do it. And the pain jumpstarted me. You know, the pain of the loss jumpstarted me. The pain of being stuck in the house during COVID, loss of safety, loss of trust in the government, all of those things that go through your mind. They jumpstarted me Because it's like if I'm feeling all of this, somebody else is feeling this and they can't talk to anybody about it. So why don't I give them an avenue where they can talk about it and get better?

Speaker 1: 32:53

Awesome, awesome, never too late. I love that, and the second part of it is the. You said I'm going to go into the school systems and I'm going to serve 10,000 people, and so tell us about your dreams for the future. For A to be coaching.

Speaker 2: 33:12

I plan on reaching 10,000 people with grief recovery and the easiest way that I think I wanna reach people. But I also wanna reach back and get the younger people and get them started now learning how to process grief, because I really feel like a lot of these young kids we see out here doing these crazy, dangerous things is because they're angry and they're hurt. And a lot of people, when they can't express their grief or they don't know what it is, it becomes anger. That's how it comes out. That's how they cope with it. And so, if I can reach back and get into the elementary schools, the middle schools, the high schools and say, okay, what you're feeling is grief because you lost your brother, you lost your mother, you lost your father, let's process that and start there. And yes, some people still need to go on for therapy and other things. I tell people I'm not a therapist, I'm a coach.

Speaker 1: 34:14

Darlene, what has been your biggest fear as a business owner?

Speaker 2: 34:20

I think my biggest fear is that I won't reach my goal. I think my biggest fear is that I will say it, but I won't move in that direction. It's like, oh, it's a good idea and I feel it, but or I will start reaching it, and then I go oh, my God, now what do I do?

Speaker 1: 34:47

So what are you gonna do about that?

Speaker 2: 34:49

I'm hoping, because I'm already talking to people. I'm hoping that when I do reach it, I'm believing that when I do reach it, god will have the people ready for me to come in and help me, because I do understand that no business can survive with just one person. I can't be everything to everybody, and so I'm already talking to other people that have had the training.

Speaker 1: 35:11

Darlene, you know it's so amazing because in your description of what's next and your description of your why, it's a really interesting combination of your why, but with the business strategy, Like, you wanna reach 10,000 people because of your purpose, but that means that you're gonna have to bring people on board and you're already connecting your future staff to get you to where you need to be. So that's a really powerful and clear path you have, Darlene.

Speaker 2: 35:46

And then the thing with that Griselda is talking to those people now holds me accountable. Yes, and now it is public now.

Speaker 2: 35:56

Right and they're looking, they're like, okay, I need more money. So when are we gonna start doing this? You know so that I needed to put things, because I know me, I'll get out there and I'll get real pumped up and then I'll, you know, because life, but doing that holds me accountable, because now every time they see me, they talk about it. So what are you doing now? Is it anything I can't help you with? You know, and I needed that accountability and that's where I think a lot of entrepreneurs don't have somebody holding them accountable.

Speaker 2: 36:25

I just started a podcast and I did, I think, episode in February and then I might have done one in July. But when I first started it, I said I was gonna do a session every week. And my son just happened to listen to it the other day and he said, mom, I really like the first two episodes of the podcast, but you know it's been quite a while. We're gonna do another one and I was like you know, so you have to have people holding you accountable. What we do is we plan it and we work the business, but we don't tell anybody about our goals in the business. But if you tell people, you know working on this business, and by this date I wanna have such and such done. So remind me of that. You know, then, that holds you accountable and it makes you say, yeah, I gotta do this.

Speaker 1: 37:10

Darlene, when is your next podcast Really sync?

Speaker 2: 37:17

Next week, next week. Thank you, I told him that, I told my daughter that, and now I'm telling you, and your audience next week will be number three. And then after that, every week after that. Yes, we're talking about grief. We're talking about grief on Heal, baby Heal on Spotify. We're talking about grief and then I'm gonna get my cue Griselda and start YouTube and actually be on video.

Speaker 1: 37:40

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, I look forward to being a subscriber in your YouTube channel. And a guest and a guest and a guest? Yes, totally, and I'm gonna cry in that episode for sure, darlene, and when are you gonna submit your proposal to the school system?

Speaker 2: 37:58

The proposal for the school system is going to probably be in January, only because I just started. My daughter does government contracts. She has a hiring agency and so she contracts with the government to help them hire people. And she says, mom, you know you could probably work in their mental health support system with your grief recovery, like with veterans and stuff. So she's really working with me to push that, which is another avenue that I had not thought about. So we're trying to see where that's gonna go first.

Speaker 1: 38:35

So that's another potential opportunity for reaching those 10,000 people.

Speaker 2: 38:41

God is opening the doors. If you make it big and you put it out there, he's gonna open the doors. He's gonna open the doors once you know. I never thought about doing anything with the government until she talked to me about it.

Speaker 1: 38:55

Wow, and actually you know, school systems are also part of government, right, just a different type of governance. But that's really exciting because now you would be influencing those who influence the rest of the people, right? In either one of those cases with the veterans and with the school system.

Speaker 2: 39:16

We're excited to see what's going on, I know, I know your next big contract.

Speaker 1: 39:23

Darling, what are you most thankful for as a business owner?

Speaker 2: 39:28

I'm thankful for the opportunity to do something that I can leave a mark. I never thought I'd be that person that people would say oh she helped me with the grief of my mother or the grief of my father, or she helped me come to grips with losing my leg in Afghanistan. You know just different things that help people just not get over it but just work through it and move on with their life and realize they had life left. And I'm thankful that I didn't just sit down and decide to just exist.

Speaker 1: 40:11

That's so beautiful. That is so beautiful and a very important question here, darlene were you expected to be successful as a businesswoman?

Speaker 2: 40:22

Everyone told me I should have been doing this a long time ago. Oh, that's amazing. Everybody was like Mom, you've been doing this all your life, Miss Darlene. You've always done this. This is so awesome. And I look at all of them like you're seeing something I never saw. And they tell me all the time this is so you, this is so you, and so that's another point. People see more in you than you see, so trust what they tell you.

Speaker 1: 40:53

So in this case, you are the only one who wasn't expecting to be successful as a businesswoman.

Speaker 2: 41:01

Yes, I was not. I was like, I think in the beginning I was just kind of going through the motions so I could say I was doing it because I knew God had called me to do it. But then when it started clicking, I was like maybe I could really do this. And when I when I and I didn't even tell people that I was building a business, probably for the whole first year, that I was doing it, oh I would. I would talk to different friends that didn't know each other and I would say, hey, and I knew they had gone through grief or something.

Speaker 2: 41:32

Or I'd say, let me, you know, let me be a user, as a guinea pig, let me take you through the program, you know, tell me what you think. And they would finish and they would be like, why haven't you been doing this before? Why did you wait till now? And so, because I was not someone who dreamed. I was always in the box trying to control the chaos, and so to even dream that I could be doing a business and that I could be reaching veterans and reaching school teachers and parents and reaching just grieving people in general, that would have been crazy to me three, five, five years ago.

Speaker 1: 42:13

Wow, wow, darlene, what would be a call to action for the women out there hesitant to start their own business? What would be a call to action for them from you, take?

Speaker 2: 42:26

the first step. Take the first step. Find somebody who's doing it and talk to them. Read books, don't buy just the first program you see. Investigate, ask other people. Get some knowledge under your belt. You know, the better you are, the more confident you are. Trust your judgment and trust the people around you that say you can do this. And if you don't have people around you that say you can do this, find some. Get away from the ones that say you can't.

Speaker 1: 42:57

That's beautiful. That's beautiful. And what if they don't have somebody and they need to find people who believe in them? What would you recommend them?

Speaker 2: 43:06

Hit me up on my website. Hit me up and I will encourage you. That is what I have done all my life. I am a natural encourager. Call me, hit me up on my website, email me and we will start talking, because everybody needs somebody. Because once you start, and you start getting into those circles of people that are learning and growing, you're going to have your tribe.

Speaker 1: 43:31

I love it Okay, give us your website then.

Speaker 2: 43:34

My website is HBHrecoveryorg I guess it's the wwwHBHrecoveryorg and I talk about, as Griselda said, I have my story, a little bit of my story on there and my podcast where I talk about my story and then I just talk about different things, about grief and recovering and the different steps that we go through in the grieving process. That's Heal Baby Heal on Spotify. I don't know if it's on Apple, but I know it's on Spotify.

Speaker 1: 44:04

Darlene, how would you summarize your journey as a business owner in one word?

Speaker 2: 44:12

Unexpected.

Speaker 1: 44:13

Unexpected.

Speaker 2: 44:14

Everything that has happened in this journey has been unexpected and it hasn't been easy, but I've made it through and I'm excited for the future. So, yeah, I didn't think I would ever get here, and I've only been here three years. Let's talk again in seven, when I've done it for 10 years and see what's down, right, I know I totally look forward to that day.

Speaker 2: 44:43

Yeah, but yeah, unexpected, and it's just prayer and God and people to encourage me, whether they were in my case. I was lucky. I had family and friends that encouraged me, but I also had people in the tribes and the mentoring groups that I'm in and different things like that. Just listening to their stories and listening to their drive and their push and every time I hear them win, I say, oh, I need to go out there and win.

Speaker 1: 45:08

That's awesome, darlene. It is being a pleasure and an honor having this conversation with you. I appreciate you sharing your story from the most genuine place and thank you for the work you do to help us all grieve those losses that we've all had. For my audience, thank you for joining us. One more episode and until next time more to come.