The time to write this post couldn’t be more perfect. I love how much the universe is guiding me at the moment and how beautifully everything is falling into place.
As you know, I’ve been sharing stories about the huge changes I’ve made this past year or so. I’ve gone from feeling completely stuck without any idea of who I am or what I want to do ‘when I grow up’ to feeling completely guided and connected to my higher self, trusting in the divine timing of my life. I honestly feel like a different person in many, many ways.
Everything I’ve written about so far has been important to me, but as I cross the halfway point of my top ten changes, I am much more emotionally involved in them.
I’ve so far written about water (“How to Change Your Life), personal care (“Be a sexy, smelly animal”), fasting (“Fasting: Punishment or Reward”), sleep (“Giving myself a fighting chance”), and movement (“Oops, I accidentally didn’t exercise for ten years). Together, they tell a big story.
Today, I want to add to that story by sharing my experiences in the personal development industry.
I’ve done a fair bit of personal development over the past 6 years, which I define as any event or program I’ve undertaken to learn about myself and grow.
For many people who haven’t done much personal development, you might think about Tony Robbins, the biggest motivational speaker in the world. He sells personal development.
Professional development is somewhat different as it is less emotional and more tailored towards upskilling in your business or career.
There’s often personal stuff involved, but there are also heaps of very structured teachings about specific topics. People on this email list who went through my old programs and events might have learned how to pitch to tourism boards, create an org chart, or conduct a strategic planning session for their business.
Aww. Look at young Lauren teaching The Travel Bootcamp in Melbourne in 2018.
Today, I want to talk about pure personal development and how it’s changed my life, especially over the last two years when I have been floundering.
I both love and hate personal development. I love it because of what I learn about myself and my nature. I hate it because the learning is not enough. Sometimes, if it’s not delivered when I’m ready, it almost keeps me from self-discovery.
Personal development can easily slip into knowledge acquisition and have me avoiding the work of truly going inward to learn about myself.
This was never truer to me than in January this year when I had just completed The Spiral for the second time and felt like the purest, cleanest, most aligned version of myself.
I remember walking to the beach one morning and realising that there was nothing that anybody could teach me that I couldn’t figure out for myself. I knew in my body that I already had all the answers.
It was profound. There was so much certainty in that moment – that no expert could give me what I couldn’t give myself. But if that was the case, why hadn’t I created the life I craved for myself?
I am the expert of me, but I don’t always have all the answers. January 2024.
I sat on that. Then, very quickly, I jumped into more personal development, committing to a three-day mastermind with Dr Espen on the Gold Coast in February.
The decision to do that event and follow it up with his Accelerator program for four months and another three-day event just recently was a funny one. I knew I didn’t need it, but my intuition told me to do it. And I had significant breakthroughs with every offering.
Because the truth is, you don’t know what you don’t know.
Being ‘in the room’ at personal development events introduces you to the topics, familiarises you with the language, and creates awareness that there is something else for you—something bigger than you could have ever imagined.
Attending Espen, February 2024.
However, personal development without integration and embodiment very quickly becomes spiritual bypassing – knowing the ‘work’ in theory but never sinking into FEELING the work and making changes in your body, subconscious, and belief system.
I’ve been there. In fact, I think a lot of people who consume personal development spend time in that strange in-between land. They know, in theory, about the ego, triggers, and our capacity for change, but they never quite manage that change.
Committing to another event and another, buying the next thing and the next, and continuing to acquire knowledge. Knowledge is a wonderful thing, but knowledge alone does not create deep change.
Deep change is created by slowing down, sitting with the knowledge, and taking action to become the changed person—the person you want to be. I’ll go deeper into this topic as these emails continue—this has been a huge lesson for me this year.
My journey with personal development started in 2018 quite by accident. I was invited to be a guest on the podcast of a successful Australian entrepreneur and motivational speaker. The topic was Instagram, and I delivered my lines with ease, talking about authenticity, content creation, and community.
Almost as an offhand remark towards the end, this person invited me to attend his $5,000 three-day flagship event later that year, and that event quite literally marked a turning point in my life.
Because you see, what we hadn’t spoken about in the podcast was the crippling loneliness I felt, the depths of my anxiety, and the overwhelm that felt so intense that I sometimes wondered if I was going to have a heart attack in my 30s.
I was successful beyond my wildest dreams, but I was creating that success from a place of lack – I wasn’t enough without it and IT would never be enough to fill that void.
I was probably on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown when I walked into that event. But as this man started to speak, he showed me another way.
He was fast. He blazed with authority and confidence. He was a man in the prime of his life doing what he was put on this earth to do. Every single person in that room gradually became filled with HOPE that they could create a different reality for themselves.
That packed room was high on life by the end of three days. I walked away with pages and pages of notes and a strong intention to do life differently. That intention became the cornerstone of who I later became, and my decisions after those three days set me up to BE a very different person.
I have continued to grow and become that person more and more every day since then.
The man who sparked that change in me is Kerwin Rae. He died last week at age 49.
Kerwin’s podcast day, May 2019.
I was always going to write this piece. And I definitely would have featured Kerwin prominently because he was my ‘first’. But I probably would have spoken much more about The Spiral and the trio of fantastic events I did in 2022 with ‘Money & You’.
I certainly would have talked about the high-ticket coaches I’ve hired, gone into more depth about my work with Dr. Espen, and touched on the breakthroughs I had when I finally got to do a Tony Robbins event.
With the latest news, though, this email is going to go in a different direction.
I didn’t know Kerwin very well personally, but we were always two or three degrees of separation away. And, as funny as it sounds, I feel like we knew each other in another life or would cross paths again in this one.
He almost dated someone in my inner circle. He was close friends with one of my close friends’ brothers. A childhood friend’s wife is close to his mum. In fact, I knew about his passing a day before it hit the news.
What is an appropriate amount to grieve someone you didn’t know but came that close to knowing? I’m not sure. But after I heard about it, I spent many hours reflecting on his life, his impact, his legacy, and the sadness of it all.
Sitting on the beach feeling my feelings. Saturday, the 19th of October, 2024. The day before the world got the news.
People like Kerwin, people in the personal development space who unapologetically show up to share their message, no matter how much hate they get for it, are true leaders.
Kerwin received so much hate that I was once privy to an entire breakaway group of his ex-clients who made a sport of bagging him out and belittling his message.
Was he perfect? Fuck no. Nobody is. Especially when they scale businesses so rapidly and have unscrupulous people in leadership roles. Was he in it for the right reasons? I believe so, yes. I truly do.
Kerwin Rae had an extremely painful life. Most of it is public knowledge. Other stuff I learned about on the grapevine. But he took that pain and created something that impacted millions of lives.
He and other coaches in the personal development space can’t MAKE you change. But what they can do, what HE did, is give people so much nuance and context to ‘the work’ that it is next to impossible to go back to the person you were before you had your eyes opened.
Last week, on the day that I heard of Kerwin’s passing, which also happened to be the full moon, I finished reviewing twelve months of filling out my Awareness Journal.
This process took me weeks and involved combing through thousands of pages of practice to note down the lessons I learned, the patterns I recognised, and how far I had come in one year.
I told Dreamboat excitedly that I had discovered the secrets to human happiness. To which he replied, well – WHAT ARE THEY?
As I rattled them off, I realised that all the biggest realisations I’d had in my own practice were things I had known about for years—concepts that all coaches, Kerwin included, speak about, concepts that are featured in the most famous motivational quotes and bestselling personal development books.
And I realised – NONE OF THIS IS NEW. But people can’t take them on until they are ready to take them on. Awareness is only the first part of the equation. After that, the work really begins.
Notes from my first NISI. 2018.
I will share my realisations. Not today, but soon. And something else? I will teach them as someone who has transcended knowledge acquisition and gone through the fire to embody them.
Because the world needs to do this work more than ever, and my words might be the right words at the right time to spark the same sort of change that Kerwin sparked in me.
From sitting in the crowd, wide-eyed, as Kerwin said his famous line—”You have a voice in your head talking to you right now, and if it’s currently saying, no, I don’t, that’s the voice I’m talking about”—to now watching my ego chatter away with cool detachment, space, and choice has been the journey of a lifetime.
I look, feel and am different. This morning. 2024.
What I’m trying to say is to put yourself in rooms that will make you question yourself and your long-held patterns and beliefs.
Not every teacher or coach has been through the fire. Not every teacher or coach is in it for the right reasons. Not every teacher or coach embodies what they teach. But if they’re in the space, something will be there for you. Even if just a breadcrumb.
Just don’t fall prey to needing the next thing and the next thing and the next. If you’re pumping tens of thousands of dollars into personal development, but nothing has changed for you, stop, drop, and FEEL.
Slow down to speed up. Everything good is on the other side of feeling.
I want to end this email with a tribute to Kerwin. Kerwin, I’m so grateful that you were able to transmute your mess and pain into your message. You had so many close calls with death, and if even one of them had succeeded, then many people around the world would be poorer for having missed out on you.
I wish that you were still here. And that maybe those two degrees of separation were removed, and we had a chance to connect properly. I know I would have seen you and loved you.
You were so loved. NISI. 2018.
As I look at my little man William with great tenderness and feel my heart fill with worry at what the world will offer my sensitive little man, I remember that from great pain comes a great capacity to make a difference. And whilst I sincerely wish to spare him pain, I know that it is inevitable in a world such as ours.
From great pain comes a great capacity to make a difference. I can’t spare you pain my son, but I can teach you how to feel it and use it for good.
Kerwin, you did your best to show people another way. Your teachings have created ripples in the world that will contribute greatly to this era of change that humanity is entering.
I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. You opened my eyes. And I will open more. And they will open more. It was not for nothing. Go well, my friend.
I’ll finish by saying this. Put yourself in rooms that make you question yourself. Curiosity leads to awareness. Awareness leads to change. Change leads to self-love and self-love – it leads to love for all. Love that our world desperately needs.
I love you.
Lauren xx
**Originally published to my email database on the 24th of October, 2024**
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