Sometimes success can blind you to the cracks forming beneath your feet. For three decades, Dominique Levesque lived as a nomad before most people knew what digital nomadism was, building and selling businesses across continents, following impulses that always seemed to work out. She had finally found what looked like the perfect situation in Central America: a thriving business venture, a supportive community that felt like family, and the promise of financial security for her children. Three weeks before a major business sale that would have set her family up for life, the government seized everything. She was expatriated from the country with nothing. No home. No business. No money. Just two kids and the crushing realization that she had missed every warning sign along the way.
The story isn’t really about business failure or government corruption, though both played their parts. It’s about something more universal and more insidious: how the invisible forces that shape our decisions can lead us to build entire lives on foundations we never chose for ourselves. Levesque calls this conditioning, and her experience offers a roadmap for anyone trying to rebuild after loss, whether that loss is financial, relational, or the more subtle dissolution of a life that looked successful from the outside but felt hollow within.
“I was living a lot of things that to others looked like it was beautiful and wonderful,” Levesque said. “But if I would have known I was living from conditioning, I did a lot of mistakes that if I would have understood the conditioning before, I wouldn’t have made.”
The Hidden Architecture of Your Decisions
Most people think they’re making autonomous choices. We believe we pursue certain careers, relationships, or lifestyles because we genuinely want them. But conditioning operates like background code, running our decisions without our awareness. Levesque explains it as the accumulated weight of everything we absorb from church, school, parents, friends, and increasingly, the internet. We arrive in the world whole, she argues, but get shaped like Play-Doh by every authority figure, peer group, and cultural message we encounter.
The danger isn’t that conditioning exists. It’s that we can build entire lives following conditioned patterns while believing we’re following our authentic desires. Levesque spent decades seeking belonging in communities and business ventures, driven by a childhood message to “be cute and shut up.” She was chasing acceptance rather than creating genuine alignment with her own values. The pattern worked, in a sense. She was successful by conventional measures. But success built on conditioning remains unstable because it’s not rooted in who you actually are.
“When you’re living from your conditioning, you’re always losing because you’re not aligned,” Levesque said. “There are a lot of choices to make in that not alignment, and those choices are hard because you have to look at yourself and you have to understand, see the red flags and have people that care enough to really tell you what is going on.”
The red flags were there. They’re always there. But when you’re living from conditioning rather than authenticity, you see the warnings and dismiss them because acknowledging them would mean dismantling the carefully constructed life you’ve built.
When the Bottom Falls Out
When Levesque lost everything, her first response was survival mode. She describes it in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: when trauma hits, everything collapses back to basics. Food. Shelter. Safety. The business plans and future dreams become irrelevant when you’re figuring out where your children will sleep tonight.
Her background as a nomad became an unexpected advantage. For 30 years, she had practiced living without traditional anchors. No house. No car. Minimal possessions. That lifestyle had taught her to be resourceful, to move quickly, to rebuild from scratch. Many people who lose everything lack that muscle memory. They’ve spent their entire adult lives in one location, one career, one social circle. When that structure collapses, they don’t know how to operate without it.
Levesque relocated to Panama and started taking inventory. Not of what she’d lost, which was everything, but of what remained. She had skills in creating workshops and planning projects. She had experience helping people develop actionable plans from vision boards. She had knowledge about intuitive decision-making that she’d accumulated over three decades of following impulses across continents.
Within three months, she had launched workshops on intuitive planning. The income wasn’t what she’d had before, but it was enough to move forward. The real work, though, wasn’t financial. It was internal.
Rebuilding from the Inside Out
Amy Stone asked what lesson Levesque took from being forced out of her community, expecting perhaps an answer about being more cautious or building better business protections. Instead, Levesque said something simpler and more profound: “I think I finally understood when they say it all starts from within. I finally understood that.”
The traditional advice after loss focuses on external reconstruction. Update your resume. Network. Create a business plan. These practical steps matter, but Levesque’s experience suggests they’re not enough if you haven’t addressed the conditioning that led to the loss in the first place. Otherwise, you just rebuild the same unstable structure with a fresh coat of paint.
She had to learn the difference between conditioned intuition and authentic intuition. For years, she thought she was following her gut when she made impulsive decisions to start businesses or join communities. But that impulse was itself conditioned, driven by a need for belonging and acceptance that stemmed from childhood. Real intuition, she discovered, feels different in the body. It’s calmer. More grounded. Less like a thrilling leap and more like a quiet knowing.
“Now when opportunities come to me, there’s guide rails,” Levesque said. “When this first year of building myself back up, I had put guide rails because I knew that I was making from a conditioned place and not an alignment place. So every opportunity that came my way, I would feel inside my body. I would not go intellectual, because when you go intellectual, that’s where you’re thinking and it’s much easier for the conditioning to pop in.”
The guide rails included specific commitments: honesty with herself and others, authenticity in her business offerings, and a determination to build community where people could be themselves rather than performing for acceptance. These weren’t just aspirational values. They were filters for decision-making, ways to catch herself before falling back into old patterns.
Building Something Different
Seven years after losing everything, Levesque’s work looks radically different from her previous ventures. She teaches people to understand themselves through colors, sacred geometry, and human design, helping them distinguish between their conditioned responses and their authentic selves. The community she creates now prioritizes acceptance over performance. People can show up without pretending. There’s no judgment, just observation and mutual support.
The shift reflects her core insight from rebuilding: belonging doesn’t come from finding the right external community. It comes from belonging to yourself first, then finding or creating spaces where that authentic self is welcome. When you build from conditioning, you’re always trying to fit into someone else’s shape. When you build from alignment, you create space for your actual shape to exist.
This doesn’t mean Levesque has eliminated conditioning from her life. That’s impossible. The cultural messages, childhood experiences, and social pressures that shaped her still exist. The difference is awareness. She knows when she’s operating from conditioning versus authenticity. She has tools to check herself. She has guide rails to prevent repeating past patterns.
The rebuilding process taught her something that success never could: how to tell the difference between what she genuinely wanted and what she’d been conditioned to want. That knowledge, gained through the most difficult period of her life, became the foundation for everything that followed.
The Uncomfortable Work of Starting Over
Levesque’s story doesn’t follow the typical redemption arc where loss leads directly to wisdom and better circumstances. She spent months in crisis, focused purely on survival. She had to face uncomfortable truths about why she’d made certain choices, what needs she’d been trying to fill, and how her conditioning had created blind spots that allowed others to take advantage.
“When things like that happen, you have to be honest,” Levesque said. “You cannot beat yourself up when you’re down. If you want to come back up, you have to be honest to go. OK, what was this? When you are at your place, when you feel aligned, when you’re doing good, your job is to go back to the crap and look at the truth.”
This kind of self-examination requires looking at yourself without the protective stories we all tell. It means acknowledging not just that bad things happened to you, but that your own patterns and blind spots contributed to creating the conditions for those events. That’s brutal work. It’s easier to focus purely on external factors, to cast yourself as a victim of circumstances beyond your control. And there are certainly external factors in any loss. But if you only look outward, you miss the opportunity to change the internal patterns that might recreate similar situations.
The goal isn’t self-blame. It’s self-knowledge. Understanding how conditioning shapes your decisions doesn’t mean you caused your loss or deserved it. It means you have agency to make different choices going forward. You can build guide rails. You can learn to recognize the difference between conditioned impulses and authentic knowing. You can create lives that align with who you actually are rather than who you’ve been shaped to be.
That process takes time, honesty, and often outside support. Levesque mentions the importance of having people who care enough to tell you what’s really going on, who can see your patterns when you can’t. Rebuilding isn’t a solo project, even when it requires deep internal work.
The Long Game of Authentic Living
Seven years after losing everything, Levesque describes herself as very happy in her work. Not because she’s reclaimed her previous level of financial success or built a bigger business, but because she’s aligned. She sticks to her goals. She’s honest with herself and others. She’s created space for genuine community rather than performing for belonging.
The business she built uses unconventional tools like colors and sacred geometry to help people understand themselves, to see the truths they might not have words for yet. But the underlying work is the same work she had to do: distinguishing between what’s authentically yours and what’s been conditioned into you. Teaching people to be their own intuitive coach means helping them develop the internal awareness to make aligned decisions rather than conditioned ones.
This isn’t faster or easier than simply rebuilding along familiar patterns. It requires constant attention to your internal state, willingness to question your impulses, and courage to build something that might look different from conventional success. But it’s stable in a way that conditioned success never is, because it’s rooted in actual alignment rather than the shifting ground of external validation and borrowed values.
Levesque’s experience suggests that major losses, as painful as they are, can become opportunities to examine the foundations you’ve been building on. Not everyone who loses everything will choose to do this work. Many people understandably focus purely on practical recovery, rebuilding as quickly as possible along familiar lines. But for those willing to use crisis as a catalyst for deeper change, the question isn’t just how to rebuild, but what’s worth building when you have the chance to start from scratch.The answer, for Levesque, came down to one principle: it all starts from within. Not as a cliché or aspirational slogan, but as a lived reality tested through the hardest possible circumstances. When you lose everything external, you discover what’s actually yours. And from that foundation, you can build something real.
This article was inspired by an interview with [Guest Name] and Amy Stone on The Art of Imperfect Adulting podcast. https://imperfect-adulting.captivate.fm/listen https://www.youtube.com/@imperfectadulting To hear more compelling conversations like this one and receive special offers from our guests directly to your inbox, join our email community today.
Intuition: Interview Transcript: Dominique Levesque with Amy Stone | The Art of Imperfect Adulting | November 2025
Amy Stone [00:00:06]:
Dominique Levesque. Welcome to the art of imperfect adulting. I’m so happy you’re here. Are you ready for a fun chat today?
Dominique Levesque [00:00:13]:
Oh, my God, yes. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Amy Stone [00:00:16]:
I am thrilled to do this. All right, I started with the same question with all of my wonderful guests every single time. What part of the world do you call home?
Dominique Levesque [00:00:24]:
This moment, it’s Quebec, Canada.
Amy Stone [00:00:26]:
Quebec. Fabulous. Fabulous. All right, now, next question. What is your favorite way to transition from busy being busy to downtime?
Dominique Levesque [00:00:42]:
I have two favorite ways. One way is either a coffee or a tea. Can’t get easier than that. And the second way is actually breathing.
Amy Stone [00:00:51]:
Breathing, breath, work. Those are power moves in regulation and, you know, all the things. I love that. Good tips. All right, today we’re going to talk about restarting and rebuilding. You shared with me that a few years ago you left your community that you thought was part of your successful life. So the first question that I have to begin this conversation is how long ago was it that you made this change in your life?
Dominique Levesque [00:01:24]:
So I did that twice. The last one was probably the hardest one. That one was seven years ago.
Amy Stone [00:01:31]:
All right, so seven years ago. And so before we talk about this specific change seven years ago and leaving, I think I’m going to call it a situation. I want to learn a little bit more about what it was and how you got there, if you’re willing to share. So share with you what you will, what you can, what you want to about your life before this changed seven years ago, what did it look like?
Dominique Levesque [00:01:59]:
So I’ve been a nomad for over 30 years, traveled all over the world, worked all over the world. You know, I never really fit in the societal norm. I decided I wanted to be somewhere, I would go to that place. I wanted to do this, I would go and do this. Started business this and there, everywhere, right? But with that comes a lot of fun. It also comes learning on, you know, while doing, if I can say it this way. And I was living a lot of things that to others looked like it was beautiful and wonderful. But if I would have known, I was looking living from conditioning. And so I did a lot of mistakes that if I would have understood the conditioning before, I wouldn’t have made that. Now, I know there are lessons, but when you’re living them, you know, you’re. You’re wondering, what did I do wrong? And so I traveled. I did everything I wanted. I’m very, very impulsive in everything that I’ve done. But it always worked out until I Met a family that I thought they were my family. I thought that I had found the best place, the best business, the best community, the best village, the best everything. And little did I know that I was living from the conditioning of wanting my own family, wanting to be accepted, wanting to be part of something that was way bigger than what I thought. And I ended up on the street.
Amy Stone [00:03:32]:
Okay, Now I am understanding more about what happened. So you were. So a couple things to touch base on there. If you’ve been a nomad for 30 years, you were a nomad before people were talking about it, before it was.
Dominique Levesque [00:03:48]:
Oh, my God, yes.
Amy Stone [00:03:50]:
So that’s definitely something. And so then when you’re nomadic, one of the challenges or opportunities or things that you manage is intentionally creating or finding supportive community for your life. Okay. And I have not done that through experience as a nomad. But it’s also true if we move, like, anytime you move locations, you go away to college, you change your town, you move across town, actually change your job. Those are changes in community that affect the support. Okay, so you found a family and what you thought was a community that was going to be. That was for you, that was going to support you and all of those things. And you. And then you were pushed out. This was not a choice. You were pushed out, and you had to leave that situation, and you ended up. You just on the streets, like, tell me what happened.
Dominique Levesque [00:04:48]:
Oh, yeah, I ended up leaving. I ended up having nothing. I mean, I’ve always been very successful in business. I would start businesses, you know, then sell them, then go to another place. When you’re a nomadic person, you have very different way of seeing the world. I didn’t need a house. I didn’t need a car. I didn’t have to pay electricity. You know, you kind of live most of the time in rental places where you don’t really own anything. So there is a lot of place to put money aside if you know how to use your money. So when I reached that community, I had a very, very big idea in an industry that I had never worked in. But I just thought, well, I can make a lot of money for my kids, which were also nomadic, finally they can have a place where they can call home. Even though home is really where your heart is, which mine is in the entire world, I just had this idea if I didn’t live that maybe they want that. So I wanted it for them. And at the same time, there’s people around that that helped me believe that the universe was putting everything in its place. For me to have this grand business which went extremely well, and when I was ready to sell it, the government and that particular family stepped in and made me lose everything. When I say made me. They had arranged everything. It was in Central America. A lot of money was invested. A lot of money was going to be gained from that cell. And for me, in my head, I was so happy because my kids were set and they could travel the world, you know, carefree, and just go work where they wanted and kind of have the same life that I had. But living from conditioning makes you see the red flags and not pay attention to them. And so three weeks before we were selling that business, which was extremely successful, the government just took everything away and we were expatriated from the country. Wow.
Amy Stone [00:06:51]:
Okay. So would you say that the theme in this conversation is more about relationships and community or about business and finance?
Dominique Levesque [00:07:03]:
I think it’s a lot about conditioning because you can have the business, the finance, the emotional intelligence, the everything. If you’re living from a conditioning place, you’re living from your not aligned self. You’re still going to make all the mistakes that we that are. Like when you’re looking at them like, oh, that was a rookie mistake. There are lessons, but when you don’t know that they come from the conditioning, for some reason, we don’t look at them for what they are. You know, like when you have a business, you’re either making money or you’re losing money, but there’s no like in between. You know, you can be neutral, but you’re making or you’re losing and it’s easy. I’m making. Well, I’m. What am I going to do with this? Am I going to reinvest? Am I going to, you know, like, just put it aside. There’s decisions to make when you’re losing. What am I going to do with this? Is it time to close, realign, reassess. But when you’re living from your conditioning, you’re always losing because you’re not aligned. And there are a lot of choices to make in that not alignment. And those choices are hard because you have to look at yourself and you have to understand, see the red flags and have people that care enough to really tell you what is going on.
Amy Stone [00:08:19]:
Yeah. So let’s talk more about what conditioning is and about seeing red flags and then we’ll talk about what happened because now I understand more about what, what was going on. We’ll talk about some of the things, the cultural things, because you South America and living as an Expat or an international citizen probably has some special things about it that people may or may not know. So when we talk about conditioning, share with me. I have a concept of what I think conditioning means. But what do you mean when you say that?
Dominique Levesque [00:08:54]:
So when you live from the conditioning. So we are all whole. Everybody is born in this planet on this timeline, as a whole human being that is perfect in itself. We all have our own soul, our own ways of thinking, our own. Like everything is there. But as we grow, we get shaped. Let’s, you know, we’re like play. D’oh. So if you go to church, you hear whatever the church has to say. You go to school, you hear what the school has to say, what your parents have to say, then you start hanging out with some people, what they have to say, and they come with their own have to say. And then you listen. Right now, this generations, they have a lot of the Internet, so they’re listening to what people that they don’t even know have to say. And all of that conditions your thoughts, conditions your way of thinking, your way of being, your way of acting. And so you can be aligned, be the whole of who you are. And you also have that conditioning. And when you know the difference, you’re able. So for me right now, if I would not go into a discussion about something I don’t like, I would know that I’m in my conditioning of wanting to be accepted. Because when I grew up, I was told be cute and shut up.
Amy Stone [00:10:11]:
So yeah, that’s so the. The role of conditioning. One of the things that makes conditioning, societal conditioning, community conditioning, tough leads us to talk about why the red flags are so hard to see, which you mentioned, the phrase I use all the time that I didn’t invent, I got it from somebody else, is it’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle. And because you’re not aware of the impact of conditioning, usually until something changes and then all of a sudden it shows up. So for example, let’s use something that’s like totally not controversial. If you grow up in a tropical location and you every day life has been warm and humid, and you travel to a northern location like Canada in the winter, you will be confronted with something that’s completely different than anything you’ve ever been experienced. And there’s really no way to prepare for it, Right? There’s no way to prepare for it. And it will be shocking. And you will only discover that you are not prepared for it. When you walk out of the airport door and you’re like, oh, wow, that. This is what people mean when they say it’s cold outside. Because you’ve like, never actually experienced it. You have no context. Does that. Is that my metaphor and my description?
Dominique Levesque [00:11:29]:
A lot of your metaphor is incredible. I love it.
Amy Stone [00:11:32]:
Okay, so there you go. So, all right, very good. So this was not a choice to leave. You were in South America or Central America, and you were there as a nomad. You were doing business in that country. And when you closed the business or you engaged in the transaction, it didn’t. The. It did not work. And the country said, no thank you, and you have to leave straight away.
Dominique Levesque [00:11:56]:
Oh, no, it did work. That’s the problem. It was working very, very well. And the government saw that and the family that had planned this whole scheme, they decided that I no longer existed in this country. And so we, we got taken out of the country so that they can take the business. Now life is funny, right? Because that business, they weren’t able to manage it because I never taught them that. And so the business no longer exists. They never made the sell. But, you know, life works in its own ways.
Amy Stone [00:12:29]:
So you were asked or told very suddenly then with. To an urgent set of change of circumstances. All right, so what you said is that you were broke with two kids and no backup plan. That’s what you told me. And when I hear that, that sell sounds like a very stressful set of circumstances to me. So if I ask you to think back to that time and put yourself in that moment, what was going on in your mind, state of mind as a parent, as a woman, as an adult, and your emotional state at that.
Dominique Levesque [00:13:07]:
Time, I learned very, very fast what somatics are. I had a lot of vocabulary and a lot of knowledge already in self awareness and, you know, self work and energy and stuff like that, which I believe is one of the reasons why I am still sane and thriving today. But when all of that happened, I went into shock. Like a literal shock. I don’t think that for at least three months my brain actually functioned. It was just fine. Safety find trying to not be on that, like, survival mode, but at the same thing, survive, same time surviving because you have kids and it’s not their fault, you know, And I had done everything for them, for them to thrive, be after, you know, all of that in my head. But it’s. It’s not the way it is really when you analyze it right. But in my head I was, I. It was. Don’t beat yourself up because it’s gonna. It’s gonna make no difference. Just get them to a place that is safe and rebuild. This is like, this is my survival. Remember, I’ve been a nomad for so long. So for me, getting out of a place and getting into another one, even another country, is easy. Most people would have probably reacted a very different way, but for me, it was get them to a safe place, regroup, and rebuild. That was my safety. But my brain was completely off. Like, I could get food, get shelter, and that was it. Probably a little bit more than three months, My nervous system completely shut down.
Amy Stone [00:14:56]:
I don’t think it’s hard to imagine that in that situation to have a sudden severe disruption in the security, your life. So, I mean, it’s super old, right? But there’s Maslow, who was. I mean, it’s a long time ago. This is like. And everybody’s heard of him in, like, their basic psychology courses, but he created that hierarchy of needs, which really is that when you don’t have the basics, which in a modern sense includes a place to be safe, a structure to be safe, and food and wifi, in a very modern sense, that those things take full priority. You cannot think about anything else at the time. And I don’t know whether or not that’s been changed. I’m not an expert on it, but it still rings true. It passes the common sense test to me, like, when those things are there, that you get very much tunnel vision in your life. And it’s only once you address those things that you can begin to rebuild an intentional life. I think. I think that’s my rebuilding. It sounds funny to say rebuilding an intentional life or building an intentional life, because I think that a lot of times we have. When we’re young, we have this assumption that if we follow the instructions, the unwritten instructions, that those things, the intentional good life just shows up. Yeah. So, all right, so three months of survival. And you said something very interesting, which I think is really easy. You describe it as easy to do this repositioning with your kids in tow. If I ask you, is it easy, or is this something that you had a good skill set and knew how to do?
Dominique Levesque [00:16:37]:
Well, that’s what I mean, because I’ve been doing it for so long, but usually I do it with having a thriving business on the side. Right. So this time it was like, well, I’m actually forced to do this. I’m in places that I have no idea. I mean, I’m lucky. I speak Spanish perfectly. I just picked the first country that I knew that it was Easy to get in and was safe and we went to Panama. But for a lot of people, I stop. And I think for a lot of people, what this could have looked like, you know, And I feel very privileged to have been a nomad my entire life, because even though it was a real crisis, it didn’t feel that much, you know, like I wasn’t being stretched so much into the moving. It was more the rebuilding without beating myself up. And now understanding how the conditioning came in place so that I don’t redo that again and again and again.
Amy Stone [00:17:40]:
All right, so very good. So what, what were some of the beliefs that came up that you were questioning at the time as you were going through this adjustment before you began to rebuild?
Dominique Levesque [00:17:53]:
So I went through a lot. I. I tried to evade the truth. This is really. I think we do that, you know, and that when we get out of the survival, I thought, well, maybe I have many beliefs.
Amy Stone [00:18:05]:
Okay.
Dominique Levesque [00:18:05]:
So I went in my back and I’m like, yeah, okay. It’s not money. You know, I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to talk about that relationship, me growing up without a strong family structure, wanting to give that to my kids at whatever cost. And that came the cost, you know. But I went through everything before that. Like, I. I did again, like I said, I’ve already had studied a lot of coaching programs and self awareness and this and that, you know, sign I had the basic. So understanding that the knowledge is nothing if you don’t embody it and bring it into wisdom. And then I was like, okay, stop lying to yourself because it’s just going to rehappen again, you know, and then I had an opportunity to invest in something else that I knew I was going to make money. And I stopped myself before and I said, why are you doing this now? I was asking the right questions, so now we’re good. But I did, I did have to ask the right question and face the truth that I knew that I didn’t want to, that it was hard, it hurt. And without beating myself up, because everything is okay. Okay, that’s. That’s a really important point. We can go through highs and lows, but if, when we’re in the lows, we beat ourselves up because we’re in the lower, I don’t think we get back up. We just stay there and we make ourselves believe we’re going back up.
Amy Stone [00:19:33]:
So you said a lot there, and I’m going to pull some things out. One of the things you hit on is awareness of beliefs. That you’re carrying forward from your own experience, which I think is very hard to see sometimes. You call these origin stories and in my own experience. And again, I am not the expert, but you either, like, if you have a great experience in your origin story, you might want to repeat it and do the same thing. Like traditions, like we do the same, you know, family traditions if we love them. Or you can have a totally different one where it’s like, well, that sucked. And so I never want to do that. That’s like the anti hero. Right. And so sounds like you had some of the. Okay, I do not want to repeat these things that happened to me in my own life. And you were aware of them, if I’m understanding correct, Partly because you had done a lot of sel development work and coaching programs that helped you find those tools. Okay, so you shared that this experience, this crisis forced you to rebuild from the inside out from intuition. Can you share a little bit more about what that means and what the role of intuition is in being intentional for you?
Dominique Levesque [00:20:44]:
Of course. So let’s move back. I used to use my intuition to be impulsive. I used to use my intuition to go wherever I wanted. I knew that universe had my back. So I was living from what I thought was the truth. And that served me right, you know, most of my life until that happened. And after that, my intuition was more a sense of this is exactly where I need to be. It feels peaceful. It doesn’t feel like a thrill. It feels like I can breathe into this, I can learn into this, I can feel into this. And it doesn’t have to be an over going adventure that might take me onto the cliff that I have to jump. So that’s the two different ways of looking for me at intuition. I am an impulsive person. I know that about me. But now I understand that I was mistaking my intuition with my conditioning. And now I live more for a from, I’m going to say the whole of who we are. You know, I did a lot of human design which helped me a lot as well. But I know who I am. I’ve studied who I am. And now when my intuition, it’s me trying to trick my intuition to go back into a thrill, I have the red flag and I see it because I’ve learned. I don’t know if I answered your question.
Amy Stone [00:22:12]:
I think so. I think so. So I think that because you mentioned earlier that one of the things that you were really trying to do at this time was make sure you didn’t repeat A series of mistakes. And what I think I’m hearing you saying, and correct me if I, if, if I get it wrong, is that you were really trying to be self aware and not internalize this judgment just because something had happened to you. It’s very easy when things go wrong to, especially for women to just jump to the conclusion and say, the reason this bad thing happened is because I wasn’t enough and, or I did something wrong or I’m not good enough. And so I hear people talk about that. So then this is you setting up sort of your guide rails or your filters, where you’re running your intuition sort of through this. You’re like, all right, is this, is. Does this align with where I want to go versus where I’ve been?
Dominique Levesque [00:23:08]:
Exactly.
Amy Stone [00:23:08]:
Is that right?
Dominique Levesque [00:23:09]:
And it doesn’t happen in my head anymore. It happens in my body.
Amy Stone [00:23:13]:
Okay.
Dominique Levesque [00:23:14]:
Before I was able to trick because I was like, well, yeah, the universe is putting all the sign. But now I don’t trick it because I feel it.
Amy Stone [00:23:22]:
And that’s the somatic.
Dominique Levesque [00:23:23]:
Yes, and that’s peaceful. Intuition is like, some people call it the higher self or, you know, the inner knowing. This is basically my gut saying yes.
Amy Stone [00:23:34]:
Or no as opposed to, like, to make sure that I’m understanding it. So this is like a somatic experience that you’re feeling and sensing in your body as intuition as opposed to intellectual cognition, like sitting down and making a pros and cons list.
Dominique Levesque [00:23:50]:
Exactly.
Amy Stone [00:23:50]:
Okay, all right, I think I got it. I think I got it. I think I understand what you were doing. All right, so how. Tell us a little bit more how you move forward from this spot of being broke with no backup plan and feeling untethered. So, like, I think that means a lack of community and connection. What were a few of the things that you did that helped you change that sensation and reality for yourself?
Dominique Levesque [00:24:13]:
So I, so we were living in Panama. I had found the safe place. I found, you know, our barrier. We were in a beautiful village. And I thought, what do I know? And what is. What are the basic things that I know that I know? Work that have always worked for me. Let me not go into only theory here. And I know how to make plans happen. And so I went into the coffee shops and I’m. And I made a project. I made a workshop on how to make plans happen through your intuition. You know, like, but the real plan is it only making a vision board. So let’s make the basic. The vision board. And how do I make my vision board become a real Thing, you know? So I started making workshops that became popular. Then people were calling me to go and give the workshops. So now I was able to feed my family again. And that’s how everything kind of evolved. Because every time I would have a new idea, I would feel the idea, not only think the idea. When I felt the idea was right, then I would put it on paper, still be smart about it, and then say, okay, does this fit with what I want? Before, if the idea was making money, I’m like, let’s go do it. But now it’s not only that, because I’m not going to go back into that conditioning, right? So now it was more, okay, I feel the idea, I write the idea, and then I put that idea against my values and my goals, my dreams. And does it fit? And if it does, then I make it happen.
Amy Stone [00:25:57]:
That is a really interesting way to describe that. I think that that sort of methodology shows up in a bunch of different places when we’re talking about transition advice. So, you know, books like, you know, what color is your parachute? The idea. Gandhi, Hendricks, idea of the zone of genius, any of those sort of things where you’re trying to intentionally make something, a change in your life happen, People will say, all right, well, look at your skills and look at what you know what to do, and look at what you’re good at. And there’s a risk there that sometimes shows up where you can. Instead of, you can pick what other people say that you’re good at and what is good for other people. So, like, you’re very good at making dinner for the family, or you’re very good at scheduling things in the office. But then what you’re saying is you might be. You might really might be. But does that line up with what you actually want to do? Like, and you don’t have to repeat it just because you’re good at it, you can run it through the filter and make it into something that’s building what you want. Is that right? Did I get that right?
Dominique Levesque [00:27:04]:
It is. I always say there’s one sentence when people come and work with me. I tell them, you can know how to do it, but it doesn’t mean you have to do it.
Amy Stone [00:27:13]:
Yeah, right. So, okay, I love that. All right, very good. So you shared that you were rebuilding your life with a commitment to truth over belonging. I think I understand more about where you’re coming here from then. I wasn’t exactly sure what you were saying when I first read it, and I felt like there was a lot more probably Hidden in that sentiment. But it sounds like this is your filter in building the life, the intentional life that you wanted to create. So share. So this is almost like it’s your North Star. So share some of the things that became, you know, your truth and your filter as you were doing this. And what is the role of belonging? Why is that kind of like the cost or the price that used to be there, there?
Dominique Levesque [00:27:58]:
So the first question, what is like, my guidelines? My guidelines is truth. So honesty with myself and with others, with myself first. If I can be honest with myself, I can be honest with others. Authenticity. So even though I’ve learned from so many teachers, if I can’t embody the knowledge, turn it into wisdom that I can use for myself, I will not use it for others. And then another thing that I’ve learned to a great cost is I went into a lot of coaching programs, a lot of therapy, a lot of things that cost a lot of money that did not give the results that they were promising. And so one of my guidelines is what I’m going to put into the world, is it achievable for a bigger amount of people? Okay, I’m not saying high ticket prices are bad at all. I love high ticket, you know, offers. I love low ticket offers. But for my community, my audience, my. The people that I like to work with that are being served from my product, can they be there without overstretching their nervous system? Because that happened to me when I went with. From going from a very good life to what most people would say is a very bad life. But it wasn’t bad, right? It was a huge learning. I overstretched. I overstretched in all the ways. And I want people to be able to be happy with what they have, which is why I work colors. I work with colors and sacred geometry and energy, because it is everywhere.
Amy Stone [00:29:46]:
All right, so very good. So. And then the next part of the thing that I wanted to touch back, so commitment to truth, talking about truth with your personal identity and your values, I think is what you’re talking about. Okay, so. And then over belonging. And so what, what is the role? So in that phrase, it sounds to me like belonging was almost the price or the.
Dominique Levesque [00:30:08]:
Well, it was definitely the price I had to pay because I grew up with the lack of a family structure. And so I looked for that my entire life.
Amy Stone [00:30:18]:
Okay.
Dominique Levesque [00:30:19]:
I looked for people that made me feel like I belonged. Instead of me making myself belong into my own body and then belonging to what would come up, I would not, not force Myself be with people that made me believe I was always very successful, very lucky. I think that I’m still am, but, like, I was successful from the age of 13. I had successful businesses. So a lot of the people that made me feel belonging is because I was also contributing to their financial. I didn’t see that because my thing was, oh, it’s fun here. I like it. The people are nice. It feels good, right?
Amy Stone [00:31:02]:
Yeah, I think so. I think so. So then the lesson that came from the experience where you were forced out is that to be careful about trusting the groups, to not assume that just because it matched and it felt good that you were truly belonging in that space and be able to generate that safety for yourself without exposing yourself to risk within a community.
Dominique Levesque [00:31:29]:
I think I finally understood when they say it all starts from within. Yeah, I finally understood that.
Amy Stone [00:31:36]:
What’s the funny thing about community and belonging is that sometimes is that it really. You can have the same group of people, and some people will feel very comfortable and like they belong, and other people will not. And you can be in a room full of people, you can be in a house full of people, you can live in a building full of people and still feel very much alone. It’s a. It’s a complicated concept, I think. All right, so I believe so, too. One last question before we wrap up. We talked about what life looked like before. We talked about what caused this incredible shift in your life and the need to rebuild. What is life like? This is seven years ago. Three months of real, you know, high stress, and then rebuilding. What’s life like for you and. And the kids, if they’re still kids. What’s life like for you today? What’s the difference?
Dominique Levesque [00:32:29]:
Well, today I work. I. I’m very, very happy in my work because I stick to my. I stick to my goals. Right. I have an authentic business. I. I am honest with myself and with others in this business, and I can create that community that everybody feels like they don’t have to lie about who they are. So we work with colors. We work with sacred geometry, with human design. So everybody knows the whole of who they are, and they are allowed to come in those communities and be everything and feel everything and talk everything, and there is no judgment. We’re all, you know, the observers, and we’re all here to help each other. I teach people how to use the colors to get sometimes those truths that we don’t even know what they are. You know, like the colors, they show up. The sacred geometry, it shows up the energy. It Shows up. Sometimes we don’t know how to interpret it, but everything has a science behind it. So after you look into yourself, you see that truth. And sometimes you need a little bit of outside help. So we use the colors and we use everything else to bring that truth. So that in the 3D, because this is where we live, we can use all that information and be successful, be happy, be joyful, be whatever it is that you want to be. It’s not other people to tell you what they want you to be. It’s you to tell yourself how and what you want to be.
Amy Stone [00:34:03]:
All right, very good. So I have never talked to anybody who has talked about colors and geometry in this way. I want to give you a chance to very specifically tell the listeners what it is that you do. Would you describe yourself as a coach?
Dominique Levesque [00:34:18]:
So what I call myself an intuitive coach, but I really teach people to be their own intuitive coach through the colors and the energy.
Amy Stone [00:34:26]:
All right. And very good. All right. So you have a special offer for the audience that I’ll share, which is a quiz, a free intuitive color quiz, which I’ve never heard anything like this. So this is a lot of fun. What color are you resonating with right now? And there’s a link for this free quiz in the show notes for everybody. So that’s on the audio platform, it’s on YouTube. And the easiest way for everybody to get the links is always to be a subscriber to the imperfect adulting email list. Then it just shows up in your email and you can click on it, easy peasy. All of the offers from all of the guests. So that’s what I recommend. All right, Dominique, I want to say thank you very much for sharing that with us and sharing that offer for the audience. Are you ready for the three fun questions?
Dominique Levesque [00:35:12]:
Yes.
Amy Stone [00:35:13]:
Let’s do it. On a rainy day, what is an activity that you like to do inside?
Dominique Levesque [00:35:21]:
Read.
Amy Stone [00:35:22]:
Very nice. Do you like to read real books, like hardcover books, or do you use an E reader?
Dominique Levesque [00:35:27]:
I like. No, I. I read real books.
Amy Stone [00:35:30]:
Okay. A lot of people I talk to real books. It’s very. I. I can do both, but I’m very. I don’t have a. I like the fact that the E reader lights up because I will. I can have it be the only light in my room. I don’t. That’s just me. That’s just me. I have no. I have no allegiance either way. Okay, so that. Those were follow up questions. They don’t count. We’re still on. That was question that was all question number one. Number two. What is your favorite way? I didn’t know you were nomadic before I wrote this, so this is. This is going to be great. What is your favorite way to travel? By car, plane, On a cruise ship, a train, or another way all together?
Dominique Levesque [00:36:04]:
I really like trains. I haven’t done it in a long time, but I really like trains.
Amy Stone [00:36:09]:
Very cool. Very cool. Trains can be a lot of fun. I would love to do one of the, like, really luxurious, sort of scenic, touristy trains. They’d look like. They would be a lot of fun. They look like that would be a lot of fun. So. All right, last one. Have you ever had a celebrity crush? And if so, are you brave enough to tell us who it was?
Dominique Levesque [00:36:31]:
I don’t think I have. I’ve never really watched tv. Yeah, No, I don’t think I have.
Amy Stone [00:36:36]:
Good for you. All right. Good job. All right, that’s it. Dominique Levesque, thank you for being a wonderful guest today on the show.
Dominique Levesque [00:36:45]:
Thank you so much for being here with me.