Darla LeDoux was trained as a coach while she was employed as a chemical engineer, and loved everything about it. After that experience, she began studying to be a professional coach. But it wasn’t until 10 years later when she realized she needed to make a change and started her own business. 

Darla LeDoux, founder of Aligned Entrepreneurs and Creator of Retreat and Grow Rich™, is a recovering engineer turned business coach, committed to supporting women on a mission to create a simple multi-six figure business using small retreats. Darla added an additional 6-figures each year in revenue for 6 years straight in business while hosting just a few retreats each year.

Background

Darla was an engineer for about five years and then went into marketing after that. As an engineer, she did product development, doing research to determine what products her company should be offering to their clients. She loved the marketing side more so she shifted to marketing. She was trained as a coach within her company. She worked in Procter & Gamble and they sent her to a training. Her training consisted of different people at different levels of the organization. They were trained to be diversity coach and it was fourteen days divided into three different retreats. Darla felt her life started to change in those three retreats. She was very unconscious before the training. She felt like the tragedies in her life didn’t affect her, the fact that her parents divorced when she was two years old didn’t affect her. The training helped Darla know more about herself. It cracked her shell open, she got to know more about her heart and the wonders of retreat. She realized everyone needed to attend a retreat in their lives.

How did the training help you crack your heart open? 

There was this specific exercise Darla did in her training that really helped. The participants in the group took turns to stand in the center of the room, and then tell the truth and share their opinions with the group on different topics. They talked about their biases, about their opinion on men, women etc. Up until that point, Darla never shared her opinion publicly.

How did you find the courage to finally leave your job?

Darla would plan and then get scared and find a job. This happened until her stepfather died, and she got divorced the same year. Her marriage only lasted for six months. Everything she knew she felt like fell away, she didn’t know what to do. Her old ways of surviving life failed. There was something in that failure that helped Darla to go in business and be okay to fail. Most people aren’t okay to fail in business. We always want to look like we have it all together and make sure we don’t make any mistake. We can all relate to the fear of facing failure and how others would think of us if we fail.

How much planning is necessary if someone wants to lead a retreat?

It is different for everyone, she uses a tool called human design and tells her clients to use it as well. It tells a lot about how plans are and how they need to be. She also has an assessment that she does in her retreats that she will be taking online shortly. For someone people, they do not have every segment planned. Many people have plans but do not execute it. They have the order, the outcome they want for their participants but they are just panicking which is obvious. It is not easy not to panic when a group of people come to be with you and to trust that what you envision is going to work for them. It is a vulnerable act. When a group of people comes together you don’t always know how things will go. In her first retreat, Darla had 182 slides. Most people fail retreats because they have too much content to share. She advises people to cut it short and keep it to the point. She teaches six different retreats styles as well.

What advice do you give people when they are not feeling aligned in their lives?

You can always go on retreat because, in your own environment, it is hard to see and find the purpose of your life. The reason why retreats are so powerful is that when you are in different energy, you can see things clearly.

What are you up to these days?

She just released a book titled ‘Retreat and Grow Rich’. She did a mini launch of her book in May and took people through a book study. It took her a while to teach what she was doing in her business. She is an advocate for retreat and retreat leaders.

Can you suggest an action step for someone who wants to go on or lead a retreat?

If you want to lead a retreat, first read the cheat sheet from URL posted below. If you want to attend a retreat, you can email Darla through her website.

How can we connect with you?

You can find her on her website. Her website’s URL is

http://alignedentrepreneurs.com/

Find more about retreats from the following URL

http://www.retreatandgrowrich.com

You can find the cheat-sheet for leading a retreat from the following link:

https://darla.clickfunnels.com/cheat-sheet