Why Shadow Work Is So Important for Digital Nomads
So, you want to become a digital nomad. You dream of freedom, travel, and running your own remote business from anywhere in the world. But there’s a side of this lifestyle no one talks about - the inner work.
Because no matter how many flights you take or palm trees you post, you can’t outrun yourself.
Here’s the truth: if you want lasting freedom - the kind that feels good in your body, not just on Instagram - you have to face your shadows.
Shadow work is the secret ingredient to becoming not just a successful digital nomad, but a deeply fulfilled one.
Hi, I’m Christa, founder of the Digital Nomad Life Academy (DNLA) and a career coach specialized in helping people create passion-led, location-independent remote businesses. I’ve spent the last decade travelling to 60 countries while building a multi-six-figure online business, and I’ve coached hundreds of people to do the same.
And you know what separates the ones who truly thrive from the ones who burn out or give up? It’s not a strategy. It’s not marketing. It’s shadow work.
If you want the full roadmap, you can watch my free 90-minute masterclass on how to get started as a digital nomad at www.digitalnomadlifeacademy.com/masterclass.
I am excited to teach you what works!
Let’s dive into what shadow work is, why it matters, and how to actually do it.
What Shadow Work Really Is (and Why It Matters for Digital Nomads) 🙏
Let’s start here. Shadow work is the practice of bringing your unconscious patterns, fears, and limiting beliefs into the light.
It’s looking at the parts of yourself that you’ve rejected, denied, or buried deep down because they felt too painful to deal with. The moments of shame, rejection, or fear that shaped you - often before you were even seven years old.
And here’s the thing…
Those moments don’t just disappear.
They shape your beliefs about who you are, what you deserve, and what’s possible for you.
If you’ve ever said things like:
“I don’t know enough to start my own business.”
“I could never charge that much.”
“What if people judge me for showing up online?”
Then congratulations, you’ve met your shadow.
Shadow work is the process of feeling those fears, tracing them back to their source, and rewriting the meaning you gave them.
Because, as adults, we finally have the power to reparent those younger versions of ourselves.
Why Shadow Work Is Essential for Entrepreneurs 👑
Here’s something most business coaches won’t tell you: entrepreneurship is a mirror.
Every insecurity, every unhealed wound, every fear of rejection will rise to the surface the moment you start putting yourself out there.
You want to start a remote business? Amazing. But you’ll have to price your services. You’ll have to sell yourself. You’ll have to show up online. And every one of those actions will trigger whatever unhealed stuff is living in your subconscious.
For example, let’s say you’re terrified to post on social media because you have a fear of being seen. That’s not a marketing problem - it’s a shadow problem.
Maybe, when you were younger, you were laughed at for expressing yourself. Or you felt unseen in your family. That memory got stored in your body, and now every time you go to share your voice, that same fear rises.
This is why so many entrepreneurs feel like they’re “stuck” even when they know what to do.
It’s not the strategy that’s missing. It’s the emotional safety that allows it to be executed.
And shadow work gives you that safety.
When you start healing the fears beneath the surface, your business stops being an emotional battlefield. It becomes a playground for possibilities.
How Your Shadows Keep You Stuck (Even If You’re Smart and Ambitious) 🙈
Let’s get real. Most people don’t fail because they’re lazy. They fail because they’re scared of how they’ll feel if they fail.
The fear of disappointing your parents.
The fear of looking stupid.
The fear of trying something new and falling flat on your face.
So you stay in a job you hate, because at least it’s familiar.
You scroll and dream, but don’t take action, because “it’s not the right time.”
But what if I told you that the emotions you’re avoiding: fear, shame, embarrassment - are actually the gateway to your freedom?
That’s what shadow work teaches you.
When you let yourself feel those emotions fully (instead of stuffing them down), they move through you. They lose their power. You realise they’re just energy passing through your body.
The emotion of fear? It lasts about 90 seconds if you actually sit with it.
The problem is that most people never do. They distract themselves instead. They scroll, eat, clean, work; anything to avoid feeling uncomfortable.
But your emotions are meant to move. That’s literally what e-motion means: energy in motion.
And the moment you learn to sit with your shadows, to breathe through them, to feel them without judgment, you become unstoppable.
The Real Reason Most People Don’t Leave the 9–5 🚶♀️➡️
Let’s call it like it is.
Most people who dream of becoming digital nomads never actually do. And it’s not because they don’t have the skills. It’s because they’re scared of how it will feel to go against the grain.
They’re scared to disappoint their family.
Scared to fail publicly.
Scared to feel lost or uncertain.
So they stay in a job that drains them because it’s “safe.”
But safety is an illusion when it costs you your joy.
Doing shadow work helps you build emotional resilience. It trains your nervous system to feel the fear of the unknown and move forward anyway.
That’s what courage actually is. It’s not the absence of fear. It’s the willingness to feel it and still choose freedom.
A Personal Story: Healing My Relationship With Money 💰
Let’s talk about one of my biggest shadows - money.
For years, I had a complicated relationship with money. I didn’t realise it at the time, but my money mindset was shaped by a memory from when I was five.
My parents were buying a new minivan. Every night at dinner, I’d hear them saying things like, “That’s too expensive,” “We can’t afford that,” or “Money doesn’t grow on trees.”
They weren’t being negative; they were just being parents trying to budget. But my little kid brain didn’t understand that.
At five years old, I decided that money = stress. Money = tension. Money = never enough.
And for years, that belief lived in my subconscious.
So when I started my coaching business, I kept my prices low. I’d undercharge, overdeliver, and feel guilty about making money.
Until I did the shadow work.
I revisited that memory, felt the anxiety in my body, and reprogrammed it with new meaning.
As an adult, I could see that my parents weren’t teaching me that money was bad; they were doing their best. And I get to choose a new belief now.
Money is safe.
Money is abundant.
Money supports my freedom.
Once that belief shifted, everything changed. I stopped playing small. I raised my prices. I created group programs that enabled me to serve more people and make a greater impact.
And my business exploded.
Not because I learned a new strategy. But because I healed the part of me that was scared to expand.
How to Start Doing Shadow Work (Even If You’ve Never Tried It Before) 🙃
Okay, so you’re convinced. But how do you actually do shadow work?
Here’s a simple way to start:
1. Notice when you feel triggered.
Any time you feel fear, shame, anxiety, or resistance - pause. That’s your shadow saying, “Hey, look at me.”
2. Sit with the feeling.
Find a quiet place. Close your eyes. Breathe. Ask yourself:
Where do I feel this in my body?
Is my chest tight? Is my stomach in knots?
Can I stay here for 90 seconds without judging it?
3. Send love to the part of you that feels scared.
Literally talk to yourself. “Hey, love, I see you. It’s okay that you feel this way. You’re safe now.”
4. Ask where this feeling came from.
What memory does it remind you of? When did you first feel this way? You might trace it back to childhood, a teacher’s criticism, or a parent’s disapproval.
5. Rewrite the story.
With your adult perspective, choose a new belief.
What’s true now? What’s empowering? What would the version of you who’s already thriving believe instead?
6. Anchor it in your body.
Take a deep breath, visualise the new belief, and repeat it. Over and over. You’re literally reprogramming your subconscious.
This isn’t about perfection. It’s about awareness.
Because the moment you become aware of your shadow, it stops running your life.
How Shadow Work Transforms Your Business (and Life) 💫
When you start healing your shadows, everything shifts.
You stop undercharging because you know your worth.
You stop hiding because you’re no longer scared to be seen.
You stop chasing external validation because you’ve built self-trust.
And from that place, your remote business becomes magnetic.
Clients feel your authenticity. Opportunities find you. Your creativity expands because your nervous system isn’t trapped in fear.
I’ve seen it happen with hundreds of my clients. Once they start doing the inner work, the outer results follow - fast.
That’s what I mean when I talk about quantum leaps. Healing the root issues behind your fears is the fastest way to change your reality.
The Truth: Freedom Starts on the Inside 🌸
Here’s the part most people miss about the digital nomad lifestyle.
Freedom isn’t just the ability to work from Bali or Lisbon. It’s the ability to be fully with yourself.
Because if you can’t sit with your own emotions, the beach won’t save you.
Your outer world reflects your inner world. When you heal the fears, the doubts, the “not enoughness” inside you, your external reality shifts to match that new energy.
And that is the real journey of becoming a digital nomad. It’s not just about building a business. It’s about building yourself.
Your Next Step 🧗
If this resonates - if you’re ready to not only build a remote business but to become the version of yourself who can hold it with confidence and ease - I’d love to guide you.
I created the Digital Nomad Life Academy to help people like you create passion-led, location-independent businesses and do the deep personal work that makes lasting freedom possible.
Inside the Academy, you’ll learn how to:
Discover what kind of remote business is aligned for you.
Build and market it with clarity and strategy.
Do the shadow work that helps you move through fear and self-doubt.
Connect with a community of like-minded humans doing the same.
It’s practical, it’s transformational, and it’s heart-centred.
You can learn more and start your journey by watching my free 90-min masterclass on
how to get started as a digital nomad.
Because your shadows aren’t here to stop you. They’re here to show you what’s ready to be healed - so you can finally live the life you were born to create.
It’s not just about freedom.
It’s about wholeness.
And that starts with you.
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(6) Why Shadow Work is So Important for Digital Nomads
[Christa] (0:00 - 43:22): Hey there, and welcome to the Digital Nomad Life podcast. I'm your host Christa, aka Christabellatravels on social media. And not going to lie, I'm a little bit nervous to film this episode because I know it's going to get pretty vulnerable. Fun fact, I do all my podcasts just completely off the cuff. And today I decided that the thing that I want to talk about is shadow work, which by nature is pretty much literally the most vulnerable thing that you can do. So yeah, I'll do a little intro about myself and an intro about what is shadow work. And then we can actually get into the good stuff. So yeah, a little bit about me. And actually this will be the perfect intro as to what is shadow work. So I'm a coach. I help people who have quote unquote, no idea where to start become digital nomads. And the process that I take them through is I take them through a self-discovery exercise where they learn a lot about what they like, what they're good at, what they're not good at, etc.
Their personality, their skillset, their interests. And then we take a holistic view of all of that stuff to determine a remote career path that feels really accessible to them. It feels possible to them, exciting to them, etc. When I say I work with people who have no idea where to start, like for me, you don't need to have any kind of remote experience. You can be a bartender, you can be a nurse, you can be a high school student. It really doesn't matter. The process works for anyone. And so I take people through that process. And then once we decide what it is that they want to do to work online, like what is going to be their remote skill that they use to create a remote career, then I walk them through the process of creating a business around that skill. And this is where the shadow work comes in. Because here's an example. I could sit here all day and tell you, okay, the next step is to show up on social media.
But if you have a deep fear of being seen, it's going to be extremely hard for you to show up on social media and therefore it's going to be harder for you to have success as a remote business owner because social media is a critical aspect of marketing online, if you ask me. So this deep fear of being seen is an example of a shadow. And side note, everybody has their shadows. Our shadows are just the parts for ourselves that we've rejected. And I challenge you to show me a person that has zero insecurities. I challenge you to find me a person that has never ever felt embarrassed, someone who's never felt not enough, someone who's never ever felt unlovability or someone who's never felt shame, someone who's never ever experienced lack of self-acceptance, someone who's never had a negative memory, someone who's never had any kind of childhood trauma.
And when I say trauma, I think this also is important for me to clarify. Trauma doesn't have to be this big thing like you were in a physical bad experience or sexual trauma or abuse. That is not trauma. Trauma can literally be that one time that your dad forgot to pick you up from class after school when you were seven and then you had to wait for a few hours and all the teachers were looking at you like they really wanted to go home. So not only did you feel ashamed that you were causing them to stay later, but also you felt super unlovable and forgettable because how could that have happened? So you internalize that stuff and then it ends up affecting your life in the future. So that's a real example from my life from when I was seven, had to do some shadow work to basically remember that memory. First of all, a lot of us don't remember those memories or at least when they happened, they were so painful that we stuffed them down into our subconscious and just left them there. Basically left them there to rot. So the art of shadow work is the act of surfacing those negative memories, which no one said shadow work is fun. Shadow work can be incredibly painful, but yeah, to surface that stuff. And now as an adult, I assume you're an adult listening to this.
Now as an adult, you can look at that negative, traumatic, shadowy experience from your past and look at it from a distance, look at it with a bit more objectivity, look at it with an adult perspective and say, okay, is this really as bad as I thought it was originally? And do I choose to allow this to continue to shape my perception of my own reality? The whole reason why we do shadow work is because we want to empower ourselves to choose to shape our reality into something that is abundant, into something that brings us all the good things that we want in life, such as becoming a digital nomad. So now several minutes into this episode, we finally come full circle. This is what shadow work is and why it's so important in the entrepreneurial journey because entrepreneurship is a mirror. It is a mirror, just like they say a relationship is a mirror. Entrepreneurship, every single time you have to do something new in order to create your business and put yourself out there as a business owner, you will be confronted. You will be confronted with new scary things that you have to do. And things are scary.
When I say scary things, I mean, what's another example? Coming up with a pricing strategy or actually telling someone about your prices can be incredibly scary and scary in quotes. Why is that scary? Why is it scary to tell someone that we have an offer that's $3,000? It's not because we feel that we're going to be in physical danger. That's not why it's scary. It's scary because it's challenging a belief system that we might have about ourselves and our worthiness. It might be scary because when we say, oh, my coaching service is $3,000 for a two-month package, then we are confronted with this idea of what if the other person that I'm telling this to doesn't think that I'm worthy of this, and then they're going to tell me no, and they're going to reject me, and I just cannot handle another rejection. That's why entrepreneurship is scary.
It's not actually because it's a dangerous situation. It's scary because we have shadows. We all have negative memories. We all have things about ourselves that we don't love. We all have past experiences that were really hard for us to get through. We've all had previous experiences of shame. Personally, I am extremely, extremely passionate about sharing shadow work with my coaching clients because I've seen how doing the shadow work has completely changed my life, my entire life. Not just has it allowed me to have a lot of abundance in my business in a very short amount of time. Essentially, I believe that doing the shadow work has allowed me to quantum leap. Yeah. But it also has been so effective in improving my relationships, my relationship with my friends, even more importantly with my family, and for me, most significantly, in my romantic relationships. Again, just as a romantic relationship is a mirror, the entrepreneurial journey is a mirror too.
An example of a romantic relationship shadow might be that you have a fear of people coming too close. Why do you have a fear of people coming too close? Maybe because back in the day when you were a little kid, your parent was inconsistent with the way that they gave you love. You ultimately became an avoidant person in relationships. Then when someone you're dating comes too close, your nervous system overreacts, and then you go into fight or flight mode, and then you bail. That also can show up in your business. Maybe if you have a relationship with a client who gets too close or your client is really, really happy with your work, you might end up self-sabotaging and maybe you end up quote, unquote, accidentally ghosting one of your clients. Like I said, this podcast is going to get pretty vulnerable. I'm only coming up with these examples because these are real examples for me from the very beginning of my coaching journey.
There was a client at the beginning that I felt like we were getting deeper, and then that scared me. I ended up not being super responsive to that client. Now looking back, I think I have some shadow work to do around that, accepting the fact that I did that, and in the same breath, accepting myself. There's always more acceptance that we can do. Just for anybody listening, if you are interested working with me, that's something that I've done work around. Now, not only am I so comfortable going so, so, so deep with my clients, and I do. I do go really deep with my clients. It's such a beautiful, oh, it's so beautiful. I love the work that I do. I'm also able to go deeper in my romantic relationships without fear. That really has been such a huge, powerful change in my life. I really only learned about what shadow work was two years ago. When I say that my life has completely changed, I mean it. My business has completely changed, and so have all, all, all of my relationships. Even though shadow work is totally not fun, it sucks to sit in this idea that, oh, like in that example that I just gave, like I did that.
Damn, I kind of suck. It sucks to sit in that feeling of I suckness. But the thing is, when we can hold on to an emotion, I think it's 90 seconds, it literally dissipates. It just stops. We just stop feeling so bad about it, and then we're able to move on. Emotion is energy in motion, and our emotions are always moving. Our emotions are nothing to be afraid of, but I think that a lot of people are afraid of their emotions, and that's why people are stuck. People are stuck in their 9 to 5s. The people that come to work with me, they're stuck in their 9 to 5s because they're scared of the way that they're going to feel if they take a daring leap, if they upset their parents by quitting their job, if they leave their career after a few years because they're scared that they're going to fail. People stay stuck because they're scared of emotion, and this is why shadow work is so important. Because with shadow work, the whole thing is that you're surfacing your feelings, that you're feeling your feelings. I saw a great video on TikTok recently, so I can't take credit for what I'm about to say, but it was this person talking about, what does it mean to feel our feelings?
And I wanted to share that with you because I think that is not always super clear. Maybe you've heard, you need to feel your feelings before, but what does that actually mean? Feeling your feelings is a somatic exercise. Somatic means in the body. Anything with somatic, it's all about your physical body sensations, which usually our bodily sensations are subconscious. They are below the surface. We're not thinking about breathing. We're not thinking about our heart rate. We're not thinking about our gut, feeling like it's all squished up inside and twisted and turned. We're just not thinking about that stuff. It's not in our consciousness. It's in our sub-consciousness. And so are our emotions often, unless the emotion is really big and it makes us pay attention to our emotions, such as a panic attack is like your subconscious emotions are like, hey, freaking listen to me. I'm anxious because you've been ignoring it. You've been ignoring your anxiety before that.
So you have a panic attack because your emotions finally are so big that it has to break through to your conscious mind. But for the most part, when people are not having panic attacks, they might still be feeling anxiety and therefore it's in their subconscious and it's still in their body. When we have anxiety, we feel an elevated heart rate. We might have more shallow breaths. Our temperature might rise. So anxiety, you can tune in to your feelings of anxiety somatically in your body. And like I said before, you only need to feel an emotion for 90 seconds in order for it to start dissipating if you seriously tune into it. So and that's the scary part, right? Like anxiety, it doesn't feel good. We don't want to. It's a shadow. It's a shadow to tune into our anxiety. So if you have anxiety, what you can do for your shadow work is literally to feel that anxiety if you notice that you might be anxious. And it takes practice as well, by the way, to really to tune into that anxiety, to notice that you're having it because our conscious mind is so clever. Our conscious mind and our ego just wants us to feel safe.
That's actually what they say is the number one job of the subconscious mind is to keep us safe. So yeah, so our conscious mind or ego is like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. We're going to do literally anything we can to avoid this feeling of anxiety. Let's just clean our room or let's go. Let's just eat a cookie or whatever. Our conscious mind literally just wants to take that feeling of anxiety and stuff it so far down into our subconscious. So you need to start practicing tuning into those subtle emotions so that they don't turn into panic attacks. Right. But also so that you can tune into them so that you can start to feel them when they happen and allow that feeling to dissipate. And when you allow that feeling to dissipate, then you can be empowered to move forward in your business building activities or going more intimate in your relationships, et cetera. So all of that is background to say that when you start to feel that inkling of anxiety, what you need to do is sit with it and feel it. And when I say sit with it and feel it, I literally mean go sit down, turn off all distractions, close your eyes and breathe.
Focus on your breath. Feel what's happening in your body. Ask yourself, how fast is my heartbeat? What does my stomach feel like? How heavy is my breathing? How shallow is my breathing? And really just tune inward and make note, register what is going on in this beautiful machine that you're living in this, this body, this temple of yours. So tune into those feelings and just feel them. I know it sucks. That's why it's shadow work. I know it sucks. I know it feels bad, but I promise you the more that you can sit with those feelings. And then when you sit with those feelings, what I want you to do is with your conscious mind, send a signal to those feelings and say, I accept you. I accept you. And I love you. And whatever you feel that's welcome here self, if you feel anxious, that's totally okay. You've been through some hard times and it's okay. If you feel anxious, Hey heartbeat, I know you're going a little bit fast right now. And that's, that's okay. You have every right to feel scared because you've been through some tough times and you're probably being reminded of those tough times. And now here's how we go deeper with the shadow work.
When you go through this exercise and you are feeling those feelings and you're, you're noticing what's happening in your body and you're sending it love. Now, I want you to ask yourself, where is this really coming from? What are the memories that are being activated right now? And chances are you can trace back the memories from when you were a little kid. Yeah. Okay. We, we have recent trauma as adults and as teenagers for sure. Something that you need to know about shadow work is that before the age of seven, our brains are literally operating in a different wavelength as we operate when we're adults. So when we're kids, we're operating in a theta wave, which is the same brainwave that we are in when we are imagining things.
When we are dreaming, it's not the slowest of the brainwaves, which I think is when we are actually in like a deep, deep sleep. And it's not the fastest other brainwaves, which is what we are in when we are in a deep state of focus. But yeah, theta, it's, it's a brainwave that we have when we are, yeah, when, when we're dreaming. And it's also a brainwave that we have when we first wake up. It's kind of like this brainwave that's at the cusp of our subconscious, right? When we're, when we're dreaming, dreaming where we are operating in our subconscious, when we're awake, we're maybe in an alpha wave, delta wave, et cetera, going about our lives. That's as adults, but as kids, you're kind of always in this dreamlike state. And therefore you are extremely impressionable. Not only are we impressionable, but biologically kids are wired to make everything that happens to them about them. Like it's not possible for kids to have this circumspect vision of humanity and other people. Kids don't really have empathy. Kids, it's, they're very self-centered. Everything's all about them. And it's not because they're self-centered people. It's just, that's how humans are.
So kids are making everything about them and they're operating in a highly impressionable dreamlike state. So that means that when you're a little kid and also like you don't have a lot of perspective as a little kid too, up until you're seven, you literally only have seven years of life experience to work with here. So before you're seven, when something bad happens to you, that shit gets programmed deep into your subconscious and it stays with you for life. Well, it stays with you for life until you listen to Christabellatravels podcast and start doing the shadow work that's ultimately going to free you from all of your limiting beliefs and negative behaviors. So let's think of an example or I want to, I'm going to think of an example that I will share with you. Oh, I know. Let's do one about money. This one's big. Okay. Because money is really big with entrepreneurship. Something that I've seen, and I kind of gave this example earlier about like pricing yourself, but let's go deeper into this example, this exercise. And I'll share with you a shadow work exercise that I did to help me with my relationship to money.
We have a relationship to money. Money is this abstract thing. It's a concept and we relate to in different ways. Some people have a poor relationship to money. And when I say poor relationship to money, what I mean is they think that there's never enough money. They think that money is hard to come by. They think that you have to work really, really hard to make money. A lot of people have that kind of negative or even toxic relationship to money. Some people think that money is, you know, that it doesn't matter and that they don't need a lot of it, they only need a little bit or that they are comfortable going deeply into debt and then they feel suffocated by money. So yeah, some people have that kind of negative toxic relationship to money. Are you one of them? Or some people have really positive, beautiful, nurturing relationships with money.
Those are probably the rich people. Those are people who feel like there's always enough money. They feel abundant with money. They feel like money actually, they know how to make money work for them. They probably are really into investing. They've probably got their hands in a lot of different projects that allow them to make a lot of money. So yeah, those people have a great relationship with money. If they viewed money as a person, they would probably be just showering their money with gifts. They would be, you know, making sure that their money was well dressed, like it was in the best credit card and it was in the prettiest wallet and it was really, just really, really respected. Whereas the people that have a toxic, negative relationship with money, they might just avoid looking at their bank account altogether. They might just be like, oh my God, I don't want to, I don't even want to look at you. Or what else might they do? They might just, you know, have a shitty wallet. Oh my gosh, I'm just thinking my dog chewed up my wallet the other day and it's like so bad that I haven't gotten a new one because I'm like, no, this is reinforcing my negative beliefs about money, which I'm still working on it.
Although I have done a lot of work around it. Now let me share with you a story of some work that I did, some shadow work that I did around my relationship with money that stemmed back to when I was a kid. Okay. So when I was a little girl, I was one of three girls, right? My family had three girls and then we were going to have a baby boy or my mom was going to have a baby boy. So that meant that our family needed a new, bigger car because we weren't all going to fit in the sedan that we had. We needed a minivan. So I was five when this was going down. So yeah, for months we would all be sitting at the dinner table, the five of us, my parents, and then the three girls. My parents would be talking about this new big purchase that they were going to make. Mind you, my dad is really frugal and he does a lot of research when he purchases something. And also I think my mom was really feeling like, you know, maternally wanting to get the right car for her babies and also thinking long-term, like this is what we're going to be driving for a while. So it was a really big discussion that my parents were going to buy a new car.
And this is what I was hearing every night at dinner. First of all, I was hearing, that's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. That's expensive, expensive, expensive. That's too much. We don't need that feature. We can do without it. Let's choose something else. And just a lot of like these conversations about what we can afford and what was too much, too expensive. Money doesn't grow on trees. I was hearing these phrases a lot. And also I was watching my parents' faces looking like they were not happy, looking like they were stressed or had anxiety. So in my little beta brainwave brain, my little childlike brain that's operating in a state of imagination and also was in the process of being programmed and doesn't have any context to life at all other than my few years on earth experience, I decided that what was happening here was teaching me a lesson, which is that money causes stress. Money causes anxiety.
Obviously, as an adult, I can look back to that experience and be like, no, that's not true. But as a little kid, you have to understand, I'm operating in a theta brainwave and I have no context to anything. And I have no empathy. So I also am just seeing money equals stress, money equals anxiety, money equals there's never enough, money equals that's too expensive. So I grew up feeling those things. By the way, this literally this whole experience, like the last part of that memory is that when we finally got the minivan, we had cleared out the whole garage. It was like such a big deal that we got the minivan that that whole night I couldn't sleep. I kept sneaking downstairs to open up the door to the garage and look at the car to check on it to make sure it was okay because I knew that this car was expensive and I knew that my parents didn't have a lot of money. So therefore, if something bad happened to this expensive thing, I knew that everything bad was going to happen.
So how do you think that affected me growing up and my relationship with money? Well, first of all, I think that I learned that material things are more stress than they're worth. Why would I put all this money into a material thing that could just get damaged? That sounds stressful to me and I reject that. I don't want to feel stressed. I don't want to feel anxiety. And I'm not going to pay attention to my stress and anxiety. I'm just going to carry on with my life and tell everybody that I don't care about material things. Or maybe as I get older, I'm going to say, well, yeah, I could get a job where I'm making a lot of money or I could choose a life path. Maybe I could choose in college to study, I don't know, to study math or something rather than journalism. Because if I study math, I could become, say, like an accountant or whatever. And that's a job that makes a lot of money. But I'm going to study journalism because one, I like it better. But two, like I don't need a job where I make a lot of money. Actually, I kind of believe that making a lot of money equals stress.
And why would I want to be in that situation? I don't want to be like that. I learned when I was really young that money equals stress. And therefore, I will choose different activities in my life to avoid that feeling of stress and anxiety. And I also will subconsciously keep myself playing small with my potential income. I will probably not naturally gravitate towards things that could make me a lot of money. I feel more comfortable. I feel more safe and secure in this zone where I'm only making a specific amount of money, not more than what my parents made. That's actually something that I think most people have is they see their parents making a certain amount of money and subconsciously, that's what they feel comfortable with.
That's what they know. And what we know, what's familiar to us is comfortable and safe. Therefore, people usually end up earning about the same amount of money as their parents.
This is why shadow work is so important in entrepreneurship. Because if you have this belief that you should only be making the same amount of money as your parents, the business activities that you're going to do are going to ultimately keep you playing small. Whereas the way that I see it, every single client that I work with, they have the possibility of scaling their business and making seven figures. Anybody that I work with ultimately could become a millionaire. Because just with online businesses, literally the sky is the limit. So yeah, anybody can scale their business to a million dollars. But if they have a poor money mindset, they're just never going to do that. They're going to only choose specific business building activities that keep them there. An example of that is when I first started coaching, I was working with clients one-on-one. I was charging $2,000 per client, which is pretty low for coaching. So yeah, that was where I was. With that, I was trading my time for money directly.
So with that, there are only so many clients that one can handle as a coach in a month. If you had 10 clients in a month, and you were giving all of them a one-and-a-half-hour session, that's a lot of your time and energy. And your cup ultimately is going to end up being depleted. And therefore, you're not going to show up as a good coach. And you're maxed. You're maxed out. Okay, well, that's a 20k month. But that's still... You don't want to have 10 clients in a month as a client. That's just a lot if you're doing it that way. So when I was working on my relationship with money, and I improved it. And I went back to that experience from when I was a kid, that traumatic experience. And I'm doing air quotes. You can't see them. But yeah, that experience was traumatic for me. And it shaped my reality. Furthermore, until I actually went back, did a meditation, and really, really, really focused on remembering, and then surfaced that memory. And then now as an adult, I can say, oh, okay, I think that, you know, Mom and Dad, yeah, they were stressed out about this.
But Dad's super frugal, and I'm not like that. And I have the power to actually believe, change my mind that money is good, and that I'm capable of making more money and that money doesn't have to equal stress. I choose to find other examples in my reality that will help me believe that money actually can do a lot of good. So once I rewrote that belief system, all of a sudden, the ideas that I had for my business were unlocked. And I started to think about how can I scale my business. And that's when I started doing group coaching, where group coaching is much, much, much more scalable, I can work with many clients at the same time. And, and, you know, they still pay me like, however much money, but I get to work with many of them. And I get to help more people. And it's good. Ultimately, I group now group coaching is all I will do because it's just not worth it for me to work with a client one on one, like, for me to give one client an hour and a half of my time.
That's an hour and a half that I could be giving to five people at a time. So that client would have to pay a lot more money in order to access my time. And I just feel like I don't want to be charging anybody that much money that just feels like I'm working with a different demographic of people now. And I really love my demographic. I love working with people who have no idea where to start. I love working with people who've never done shadow work. I love working with people that, you know, they start off not really having a lot of confidence, and then ultimately guiding them through this process of deciding what it is that they actually want to do. What is it that they like? By the way, that whole process too, is ultimately an act of shadow work as well. Because when I work with my clients, first of all, I give them this big spreadsheet and I have them fill out a ton of information about what they like, what they don't like, how they feel about certain things related to work. And they surface all this stuff.
That's the first part of shadow work, right? It's surfacing, getting those pieces and bringing them up into our consciousness so that we can look at them. And then I look at those things with my clients and talk them through the process. Like when you gave math, when you rated that a nine, why did you do that? And the client might say, oh, well, I always really liked math. Actually, I kind of always wanted to be a math teacher. And then I'm like, ding, ding, ding. Like you always wanted to be a math tutor. Why haven't you been one yet? And then she might say something like, well, my parents are immigrants and they really wanted me to have a job where I could make more money. And now I get to say, okay, so I see here that the reason why you haven't been following your passion is because you've been trying to make your parents proud. Okay, now let's look at some memories of when your parents weren't proud of you and let's go back to those childhood memories and heal them. Let's look at those memories from an objective adult perspective with our new higher functioning brainwaves and just basically rewrite that memory so that now it can compound effect and you can move forward. Yeah, sure. Becoming a math tutor, if that's what you always wanted to do.
Sure, at the beginning of your experience being a math tutor, you might not be making a ton of money, just like I wasn't making a ton of money when I first started coaching, but ultimately you can create a math tutor agency and then you can make seven figures. So I hope this is all making sense. Essentially, the point of me making this episode is that when you want to become an entrepreneur, if you want to have alignment in your business and you want to do something that you love, something that you're passionate about, something that you're excited to go into it and really get creative and think and just expand your mind, you need to be doing this shadow work. You need to be doing it. If you're not doing the shadow work, you're operating strictly in your consciousness and therefore you're not going to have the access to all the beliefs that you have, which are dictating your reality.
And that my friends is shadow work for entrepreneurship. Whoa, that was a lot. So yeah, if you're, if you've listened this far, if you're still here, I want to tell you about how you and I could work together because maybe you're interested in feeling like how I could help you through this process. So I have a program called the digital nomad life Academy and this Academy, you join the Academy and initially you got all the prerequisite work, which is a mandatory and I mean mandatory reading assignment about reshaping your belief systems about money because that's, you know, business is money. Money is business. You need to improve your relationship with money. So you get your mandatory reading assignment. Every other student in the program has read it. So you can have a book club conversation about it.
And then you're also going to get the prerequisite work, which is going to help you identify what it is that you can do to work online. So yeah, like I said, most clients that I work with, they have no idea. They just know that they want this lifestyle, but they don't really know how to get started with it and they don't know what they could do probably because they haven't looked at their shadows yet.
So you're going to get this mandatory prerequisite assignment. And then maybe through that assignment, you've figured out what it is that you want to do. Maybe the shadow work has been effective enough for you, or maybe you want to have a call with me where I can look at your career assessment and yet go through that process of coaching you through the decision-making process. Usually I've gotten really, really good at this by the way. Basically give me 45 minutes and we'll find your life path. Like I feel very confident that I can do that for you if you use my method, right? If you fill out the sheet the way that I've asked you to, and you're open to being vulnerable on this call and available to go deep in the conversation. If you are, yes, we can figure out something that's going to make so much sense for you. Or maybe you just want to use my time as a business strategy call. Either way, once you know where you're going, then you basically start taking your first classes in the Life Academy, which it's an 18-week, it's an 18-weeker. Every single week you have about an hour and a half long video lecture that's going to teach you different concepts about building a remote business and marketing that remote business. So it's very, very, very practical.
Honestly, if you go through this program, and even if you don't create a business, you're still going to know a semester's worth of marketing. I'm not actually even going to say more than a semester because the only information I'm teaching is very, very practical. It's not like you're going to go get a degree in marketing and half your time is spent on analyzing the supply and demand chain of whatever. I'm not having you do bullshit stuff like that. I'm teaching you how to market a business effectively. So you can get a job in marketing once you complete my program, even if you don't actually launch a business.
But I want you to launch a business and everybody in the program is someone who also wants to launch a business. The people that come into the Digital Nomad Life Academy are people who, yeah, they want to become digital nomads and they want to break free from the nine to five. They want to be self-starters, they want to work for themselves. So yeah, everybody in the program is really like-minded. They're travel lovers, they're a bit rebellious, and ultimately they're really, really interested in personal development and personal growth. Because as you just heard in this podcast, that's something I'm really passionate about and is a big part of my marketing. So anyway, yeah, so everybody in the program is like that. And there's an awesome community aspect of the program too. Basically, yeah, you join the program and not only do you watch each week of video content, learning about business and marketing, you also get a lot of shadow work exercises in the homework and you can come to the live calls, which are multiple times per week, multiple times.
So no matter where in the world you are, there should be at least one call that you can attend live. And in that live call, you will be guided through other shadow work exercises. You'll meet other digital nomads in my personal network, like other people who work online that have had great success. You're going to hear their relatable stories, you're going to be inspired as hell, and you're going to, yeah, meet other people in the program. And when I say meet other people in the program, I don't just mean you're going to get access to text them in a Facebook group. No, I hate that. I want to develop deep relationships between everybody. I want to foster that. So yeah, we have a lot of live workshops with breakout Zoom rooms, and you're going to actually have like real, legit, vulnerable conversations with other people in the program. And this is how the program is going to allow you to leave with lifelong friends, business partners, travel companions, et cetera. So yeah, in summary, the Digital Nomad Life Academy, you can join the program having literally no idea what the heck you're doing, having no experience at all, or you can be further along in the journey, or you can know what you're doing. Either way, anybody can join the Digital Nomad Life Academy.
The only mandatory things for you to join is that you're open to doing the shadow work and you want to create an online business. So join the Academy, whatever stage you're in, anytime, and get excited for this transformational journey where we're going to literally transform you from the inside out, and give you a whole lot of information about marketing so at least you can get a job in marketing when you're done. But ultimately, I hope that you become a Digital Nomad. I hope that you become a Digital Nomad who is confident AF in the services that you're offering, more confident in your relationships, and filled with more self-love than you ever imagined was possible for you. And that's what's going to happen in the Digital Nomad Life Academy. So if you're interested, if you've listened this far, I welcome you to message me on my secret Instagrams account, which is Christabellatravels coaching.
I prioritize incoming DMs on that account more than my normal account. And I only mention it at the end of a long form content like this because I just want to make sure that I'm only talking to people who are actually really serious about working with me. So yeah, so go ahead, message me there, tell me you heard this podcast, and let's talk about whether the Academy is right for you or not. If not, I'm really comfortable telling you to go in another direction. I really only want people in this program that are going to be dedicated to getting results and aren't going to come to me crying when they have to do some shadow work that they feel uncomfortable about. Okay. All right. All of that was a lot. I hope you go sit on it, meditate on it, surface some stuff start looking at it. And I can't wait to see you, hopefully, in my DMs. Let's talk. Thanks so much for listening to the Digital Nomad Life podcast. I'm Christa, signing off. And yeah, see you later.