Today we’d like to introduce you to Renelle Darr.
Renelle, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
In 2008, about 12 years into my professional career, I found myself recovering from major back surgery on my couch and forced to take several weeks off work and play. I didn’t sit around on couches too often before that. I worked at a big consulting firm traveling a lot. When that wasn’t feeling right, I went to work at a nonprofit to find more purpose. I then went back to consulting when I realized that working for a nonprofit doesn’t ensure you have found purpose. All the while, I was finding new places to travel in the world, skiing, hiking and climbing as often as I could and pretty much never slowing down to “just be”.
As a young leader working on large scale organizational change and strategy projects, I had the opportunity to learn a lot about human systems. And as a young and growing leader, I was given the opportunity to engage with an executive coach just before my time on the couch. I now understand that I ended up having back surgery due to my angst and striving and see that time recovering on the couch as the best few weeks of my young adult life. One night I had a dream that it was time to leave the corporate consulting world and start my own business called InSight. It was the clearest dream I’d ever had and because of this forced time on the couch, I had begun to learn to listen more to that quiet but powerful voice inside, my intuition.
And so, on January 3, 2009, I resigned from my job to continue exploring this unknown way of living and start InSight Coaching & Consulting. I’ve spent the last 10+ years evolving myself and the business to be a true co-explorer in shifting consciousness within organizations through individual and group coaching as well as more broad organizational shift. I truly believe the time has come for the workplace to shift and it all starts with the leaders in the organization doing the deep inner work necessary for a larger collective shift.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
I smile when I think about how to answer this question as all of the challenges and struggles have been such a part of the journey that I can’t imagine a smooth road would be any fun or would have led me to where I am today. There were lots of unplanned rights and lefts, missed exits and even some potholes. One significant twist was deciding to have children while also starting a business in the middle of the biggest recession of my lifetime. It shaped how I looked at fear, how I looked at purpose, how I looked at work and how I looked at what it really means to be a woman entrepreneur (and a mom). I changed the way work worked for me before I ever thought I could advise other leaders how work might be different for them.
Growing up in the corporate world and being within that patriarchy, I had been conditioned that business was all about numbers, rational thinking, goals, projections, busyness and profit. It was that way of living, that landed me on the couch for several weeks. I wanted to also bring in the balance of who I was as a human and the feminine energies that exist in us all, but had been suppressed for so long. Sure I wanted profit, and I also wanted to use my intuition, have more space to be (remember it was that space “to be” that brought a vision to start my own business), and have deeper relationships. I had to find the courage within myself to be that change I wished to see. To not have to choose between profit or purpose, but to choose both. The inner work required to make that shift was deep and difficult. Though I knew if I didn’t first shift myself, the market wouldn’t be drawn to buy my services. The road to integrate who I was as a mom, a woman and a whole human have been quite a journey and worth every moment.
Please tell us about InSight Coaching & Consulting.
InSight knows that a purposeful culture and visionary leadership is the overlooked growth strategy. We know that adding these two elements to the overall strategy creates significant shift. Yes, it contributes to an organization’s bottom line, but more importantly, it brings humanity back to the workplace and that has ripple effects across families, cities and ultimately the world. Many people spend more than half their waking life at work, so shouldn’t work be a place of personal growth and deep relationships? InSight is known for being a co-creator with our clients. We walk the journey of shift with them.
We engage in deep work with CEO’s, leadership teams and full organizations to help evolve our consciousness and thrive in this more complex world. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in both work and the world. InSight becomes part of an organization’s ecosystem to help facilitate this profound shift. I’m most proud of my partnerships with my clients and my partnerships with other coaches and consultants. Together, we are evolving ourselves and the systems we are in.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
If I had to start over, I would have taken a look at my fear and socialized way of being earlier in life. The cool thing is I see the next generation already doing this! I don’t look back much with regrets or what I would do differently anymore. I now integrate and accept it all (that sounds easy, but it has been hard work to get to that place). There is so much freedom in accepting and embracing everything on our path – the perceived successes, the perceived failures, the fun times and the hard times.
Contact Info:
- Website: insight-cc.com
- Phone: 303-204-0726
- Email: info@insight-cc.com
- Twitter: renelle_InSight
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