Tribal Truth is a conversation.
It’s a platform for our voices.
It’s a community.
It is many things to different people and so what I’d like to share with you here is the story of how we came to be and the essence of who we are. Then you can determine from there what Tribal Truth is to you.
When I moved back to San Diego from New York where I lived for 5 years, I hit the reset button. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next with my life. What I did know was I needed community. I wanted to be around like-minded women. In January 2009, I put on my first event in San Diego and named it Women 4 Wellness. Women loved it and were amazed that I was able to pull together 30 women into a room, most of whom I didn’t know. I immediately made new friends and found a sweet spot for myself: organizing community gatherings.
Every month, I brought in a new speaker about holistic health. By the time August rolled around, I felt a disconnect with what I was doing. Something was missing. I wanted a business partner and I wanted to shift the focus away from wellness.
A couple months later, a friend introduced me to Novalena Betancourt, who wrote a book called The Total Female Package. We decided to collaborate and rebrand Women 4 Wellness to a women’s empowerment community.
In January 2010, we launched with over 65 women packed into a downtown loft. You know something is right when things fall into place easily and quickly. Tribal Truth was the place to be.
A few months later, one of our members came to me with the idea of having weekly circles. I wanted to incorporate a 90 day plan to have the circles be laser focused on an intention and women support one another’s dreams. Tribal Truth took a quantum leap in June when we launched the first Sistership Circle.
We were onto something. The results were profound for the women in the circles. At the same time, we did not know how to handle the competitive nature of women, and so while deep friendships were formed and businesses blossomed, many upsets ruined relationships as well. We still had a lot to learn about circle facilitation and holding space.
In February 2011, we launched Los Angeles with about 12 of the top experts in the industry and over 100 women in attendance at a gorgeous home owned by a famous man in Hollywood. We were known for having events at unique venues like the Harley Davidson store, Rancho Santa Fe mansions, art galleries and chic downtown lofts.
At the same time, Novalena and I decided to dissolve our partnership agreement. We had different visions of where we wanted to go with our lives and as Novalena always put it, “You are Tribal Truth.” I stepped into the CEO role and Novalena moved on to work with another global company.
I took the model from the LA launch and duplicated it to launch tribes in New York City and San Francisco during the next few months. This time, I had a learning curve around leadership training. How do I teach someone to do what I do so well? I learned through many mistakes.
What I got was this: to have someone be accountable as the tribe leader, they’ve got to have a strong “why” for themselves, see the training opportunity as a privilege and live their life in alignment with the core values of our company.
As I felt a spiritual shift within myself and on the planet, Tribal Truth again evolved.
Something was missing. I was bored with the networking event model that we kept getting pigeon-holed into. I didn’t want speakers coming in doing their signature talks. I wanted depth. I wanted vulnerability. I wanted fulfillment on a soul level, not just a masculine focus on making money and promoting one another’s businesses.
When I returned from India in February 2012, we launched Las Vegas and London. We began to peel back the layers and look deeper at what it looked like to be a real community, where women had each other’s backs no matter what and were willing to look deep within themselves for personal responsibility and truth telling.
We questioned whether we were walking the walk. Collaboration. Leadership. What did these words really mean? How could we embody these concepts and not just talk about them but live and breathe them.
It was in May 2012 when I saw how much I was still running Tribal Truth on my own as a solopreneur and lone ranger. I was a control freak who wasn’t empowering anyone on my team to truly shine in their brilliance. I saw where I was the bottleneck in preventing Tribal Truth from expanding without busting its seams and falling apart.
I had to surrender.
I had to fully let go of controlling how it looked. I had to stop doing so much and start trusting others. I had to start believing in myself first on a whole new level and start telling the truth about how inauthentic I was.
I had so much inner conflict and turmoil. I was an emotional mess. I felt like everything was being stripped away from me — my boyfriend dumped me and kicked me out of our apartment, I totalled my car, dropped my phone in the river, lost friends and realized I had a debt.
This was the turning point.
They say that the universe first taps you on the shoulder when it’s time to change something. If you don’t listen, you get pushed. If you still ignore it, you get knocked out by a brick. If you still don’t see the message, you get a terminal illness like cancer or something where you are brought to the brink of death.
I believe this. I believe that the universe threw me out on my ass and I was forced to change something. I was forced to start living my purpose work: truth telling and real collaboration.
I experienced real freedom. I experienced real love. I experienced real power.
I experienced the truth of who I am.
Tribal Truth is a safe space for women to have this shift that I experienced. To self-realize. To take full personal responsibility for your life. To have a loving and compassionate respect for yourself and others. To reflect on your deepest desires and look at how you can be fulfilled.
Tribal Truth is a sacred space for true collaboration and co-creation. We are not alone. We are not separate. We are all connected and once we discover this, we can start to vulnerably share the truth. Through authentic truth telling, we can build trust first within ourselves and then with the people in our community.
Tribal Truth is a lesson. We are each leaders in our own lives. We are each learning how to lead from our hearts and not just from our brains. We are learning to connect instead of run away, go through the eye of the needle to get the exact lesson we need to take the next step forward on our journey.
Tribal Truth is an embodied experience. It is a place where you show up fully in the present moment and receive whatever comes up with open arms. That may mean someone pisses you off or upsets you. In that moment you have a choice to love or to react in fear.
Tribal Truth is a conversation for healing.
We carry so many wounds that extend back generations. It is time to let it go and move forward together as one united community.
Tribal Truth is a platform for our voices. To speak up after being shut down. To declare our truth that inspires others to do the same. To listen with openness. To allow one another to shine in brilliance. To claim our own brilliance when for so long we have dimmed our light.
Tribal Truth is a real community. We work out our difference. We accept each other’s weakness and compliment each other’s strengths. We let go of our expectations, judgments and prejudices. We stop trying to control, manipulate and fix one another. We celebrate the breakdowns and the breakthroughs. We embrace the darkness as much as the light. We have one another’s backs. We lift one another up. We stand for one another.
We lead by example. We call one another out with compassion. We are love. We are one. This is the future of our world. As difficult as it is to walk this path, we are committed.
We know deep in our hearts that this is the way we create peace on the planet.
If you feel the calling, join our community here.
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