https://www.linkedin.com/in/dimitriacook/[00:00:00] Kevin Stafford: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Conversations with Coaches podcast. I’m your host, Kevin, and I just had the pleasure of chatting for a few minutes, reacquainting myself with Demetria Cook. We’ve got the spirit of 2024 in us right now. When you’re listening to this probably be a little bit later in the month, maybe a little bit in February, but we’re early I say early January.
We’re creeping up carefully to mid January already, but we’ve got the energy, we’ve got the spirit of the new year, so I’m really excited to talk about everything Demetria is getting up to and is about to get up to. Let me reintroduce you Demetria is noteworthy for her work in the leadership development space as a coach and trainer of trainers, which we’ll talk about here in a moment.
And although you may know her primarily as an executive coach with Fortune 500 professionals, she has developed leaders in the non profit, education, banking, and entertainment sectors. And I’m sure that’s only expanding as time goes on, as the year develops. So Demetria, it is, it’s so good to have you back on.
I was like, like we were just talking before I hit record and. How much happier I already am. Just, we’ve just been chatting for a few minutes over, I have a coffee over here, but it’s just so great to see you and talk to you again. And you’re lighten up my little office here. So just thanks for sharing some time with me today.
This is great.
[00:01:09] Dimitria Cook: It’s very awesome. I love talking with you and just chatting and it’s just friends catching up. There’s a connection that we have there and I always enjoy speaking with you and learning more about you and what’s going on and I’m excited about 2024 because there’s so much that’s happening already and we’re already what two, two and a half weeks into 2024.
So I’m excited. This is a great year. We’re going to make lots of things happen. And again, thank you for having me on your show on your podcast. This is
[00:01:44] Kevin Stafford: wonderful. I just like sharing light and amplifying voices. It’s just that’s like that’s the quote unquote fancy way of saying I just like to get together and have a good conversation and a lot of people hear it.
So I personally I’m just I’m really excited because I’ve used these kinds of this kind of tool before and I’m really excited to hear about your I believe you’re calling it the building beyond belief card deck. You mentioned that when you were, we were like booking this call, and I would love to start out by talking about that because I love using these sort of external physical prompts to help, help me maybe get out of a rut or help me look at something from a different angle, maybe get out of my own way a little bit.
So talk a little bit about that and we’ll roll naturally into everything else you’re up to so far this year.
[00:02:24] Dimitria Cook: Awesome, thank you. I really appreciate that. Yeah. Later in the last quarter of the year, I, I was well, obviously I was working on this prior to that, but I put out my building beyond belief, self alignment card deck and with this card deck, there are 21 different cards that you can choose from, on a daily basis to actually there’s 22 and you can.
Make a decision on how you’re going to leave your day that from the morning on. And so you can pull a card in the morning. You can put 1 in the afternoon for 1 in the evening. But what it is that you have the opportunity to really think about how you are in alignment with your soul with yourself and you get to question.
Who you are and why you’re making certain decisions that you make throughout your day and throughout, your life when you’re with your friends, with your family, the card deck is set up where you can share these, thought provoking quotes. These are my personal quotes that I have written myself and you can share them and we all have different perspectives.
So this is another way for you to really connect on a deeper level. With another individual and I can even just randomly pull a card here and just give you an example like here. I’ll just shuffle the card deck and then I’ll just pull one of the cards out. Okay. So the 1st, the card on top, it says the beauty in life is how you honorably live it.
So when you’re thinking about life, how are you showing up every single day? What, how is that in correspondence with your integrity, right? How are you making sure that you’re empathetic? How are you showing up and presenting yourself in your fullest, strongest light, right? So knowing that the beauty of life is how you honorably live it.
You’re going to affect so many different people and when you show up that way every single day and every single thing that you do, people will notice they will begin to understand they’ll begin to open up themselves. Just asking a question like this. And sharing that thought with someone else, you can have an open discussion, open dialogue as to how are you doing this on a regular basis.
[00:04:59] Kevin Stafford: I love because as soon as that word honorably immediately jumped out as soon as you read that and I was in my the first word that popped into my head when he was like, Oh, honorably, what does that mean? And the first word that came up was integrity. That was the first word that popped into my head.
And so I was like, I’ll have to make sure to mention that. And sure sure enough eight seconds later, you were like, How you live with integrity. I was like, Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And what does that mean? It’s I like that word honorably there because it really does. It prompts my brain to think of how that applies to my life.
I’m just like, how am I showing honorably honor? Isn’t a daily concept. For me, maybe this is for a lot of, at least not that word, but integrity is, and empathy is. And so like making that connection to not just a feeling or sort of an internalized sort of work or conversation I’m having, but also it’s what am I, honor is like how I’m showing up, the actions I’m taking, the words I’m sharing.
I was like, and as you can see, like that prompt has already got me like spinning and thinking about how I could do that in my day and how I’ve been doing that in my days past. How I can set myself up to, to be honorable in my days to come. That’s great. I like this.
[00:06:05] Dimitria Cook: And also where your ethics, how are you showing up, ethically, on a daily basis, there’s so much.
And again, these cards are meant to really prompt you and to get you to think about who are you at your core? Who are you at your soul’s alignment? So that you can start tapping into that and really appreciating and really reconnecting with who you are from the inside, right? As we go about our day. And we just, it’s automatic.
We just do things. And then when you stop and you think about how am I presenting myself to the world? Am I living honorably? Do I have, what are my ethics? What is my integrity? If I’m doing this, does my integrity, does this hold up to my, my standards of integrity?
Yeah, it’s the cards is I, these cards really hold a place in my heart because so many people need to reconnect with who they are, because we’ve gone. off the rails. And so this is a way to bring people back and to really get people to think about who do I want to be every single day in my life.
[00:07:25] Kevin Stafford: Yeah, that’s funny. That’s funny. I was, I had the train metaphor going in my head as you were talking because it’s funny how both being off the rails and on the wrong track. Can they mean similar things, but basically it’s just a summation of your, you’re not going in the right direction. And again, it’s alignment that it keeps coming back to.
And this is, again, this is one of the things I love so much about coaching. And I so many of the core principles of why coaching is so important. Distilled down into a deck of cards, like an actual physical thing that even if you don’t pull a card, the decks on your desk and you see it.
And you’re like. It starts to prime you and prompt you to both, not either or, both consider the big picture, the big concepts that the, your character, how you’re showing up in the world. It’s a big, huge, like 30, 000 foot, like what does life look like from where I’m at all the way down to what do I do today?
What actions do I take? Today, this hour, this minute, what words do I say? What parts of myself do I share? How do I, show up in my home with honor? Maybe, you know what? Maybe I’ll go ahead and do the dishes early so that the, Maybe I’ll clean up the kitchen so that the next time we cook everything, It’s just all these little prompts where you think about, The big concept stuff that just drives your entire life’s work and not or, and what am I doing right now?
And what can I do today to exemplify that? And that’s, I love it’s both. And I, that’s one of the things I love the most about coaching.
[00:08:48] Dimitria Cook: Absolutely. And when we’re coaching, I coach the whole person, we talked about this prior, before in our conversation, but it’s so important because.
The personal affects the professional affects the personal and, how you show up and your career. It’s pretty much the same way that you’re showing up in your personal life. And so when we’re using prompts, such as my self alignment, my building beyond belief, self alignment card deck.
It just reiterates that it really hones in on that personal side of you. But it also touches in on that professional side of you. So you can see how you are showing up in those different spaces. And that’s the beauty of it is that you can use it for more than one and more than one aspect in your life.
It’s great. And I’ve gotten really good feedback about the card deck and, I’m excited about it. And, people can actually go on my website and they can, find the card deck there and read a couple of quotes or testimonials about the card deck. It’s, when I use it with my coaching practice, it is a way for me to.
Again, open up those discussions, open up that dialogue, and really help the person to tap into how they are moving and journey, going on that journey into their empowered future. Because we always want that.
[00:10:19] Kevin Stafford: Yeah, every again like you would like you were saying from the jump reconnected.
Reconnecting with yourself, and it’s like we have all these roles that we play in our lives, and sometimes those roles become a little bit more than roles, they almost become like aspects of ourselves, and again, like you’re saying if you’re not careful, if you’re not paying attention, if you’re not doing some of the work, you’ll start to drift, and you’ll have this idea of yourself as a professional, and this idea of yourself as a professional.
a parent or a partner in this idea of yourself as whatever you happen to be and you’ll have all these different identities and if you don’t do some of the work and have some help in doing that work and keeping everything integrated keeping everything connected and again that big word aligned. You start to drift, and you get, like you were saying, off the rails, and before you know it, you’re in some you’re in Topeka, Kansas, and you have no idea how you got there.
Where am I?
[00:11:08] Dimitria Cook: I don’t know
[00:11:09] Kevin Stafford: why Topeka just popped into my head, but it just popped into my head as a random city. So I want to we have relatively limited time, and I could, I love the card deck so much, I could just have you pull cards and we could talk about that all day, but you also mentioned before I hit record that you’re setting up some Kinds of like retreats, very focused retreats, like in 2024.
So just talk a little bit more about that, cause I’m really curious. Cause again, bringing people together in different like sort of external environments can be really powerful for sparking that reconnection. So talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so
[00:11:38] Dimitria Cook: I’m extremely excited to be moving into hosting wellness retreats and I’m going to be hosting wellness retreats for veterans and for women.
And again, this is a way for us to come together and have that realignment, have that soul alignment. And there’s four steps to my process force. There are four principles that we have, right. And the first one is reframing. And that’s part of the mindset. Okay, and then the 2nd part is grounding and that’s when we do that breath work when we make sure that we’re centered that, our central nervous system is more calm and we’re able to connect with 1 and connect with self and connect with others.
And then the third piece is, or the third pillar, the third part of the process is the writing slash journaling aspect. So we have to be able to release those emotions that we have inside in a way to express ourselves. And so that writing piece can be for yourself, or it can be for others that you can share, as part of your legacy, but it’s very therapeutic to be able to write.
And the last pillar, the last principle. Is with the is the yoga aspect and that’s the centering aspect. And so we want to make sure that we’re centering ourselves. So we have the reframing the grounding, the journaling and the centering. So those are the 4 principles, the 4 steps to the building beyond belief up to building beyond belief.
So again, we’re working on the whole person. And within this, within the retreat, you have that opportunity to work on. All those different aspects of who you are and to bring yourself back to your soul’s alignment.
[00:13:28] Kevin Stafford: I, first of all, I really, I appreciate how, I hesitate to use the term holistic because it gets used in a lot of circumstances and a lot of people almost like tune that word out.
But how whole, W H O L E istic that approach is, because you really, you’re really not going to get anywhere if you neglect any one of those four. And one thing that I find that so often I, at least in my life, will, if not neglect, Give like shorter shrift to is the grounding where I was like, you know what I’m you know I am I had a bad I had a weird meal and I’d like I had a little indigestion last night and I slept funny It’s maybe I need to like actually acknowledge the fact that happened, you know Maybe I’m like I noticed myself like I’m breathing too shallowly today Or my breathing is quick.
I don’t necessarily know why, but that’s moving some stress up, from my chest into my shoulders, creeping into my neck and head, and it’s affecting the way that I’m interacting with people. It’s there’s all these little stuff, and that’s just the stuff that I realize. So it’s just reground, just ground.
And I love I love that term too. ’cause it’s just take off your shoes, get in contact with the earth. It’s just just remember where your two feet are planted, get your balance right. And that’s, again it’s so easy to neglect any part of that. Again, the reframing too.
It’s like sometimes you just need to get out. Of your patterns, even if your patterns are well built and well constructed and relatively healthy, maybe it’s been a while since you’ve pulled the fridge out and cleaned up behind it, I just, I did that like a month ago or so and it had been like about a year and I have cats and so I pulled the fridge out to do some, spring cleaning in the winter because I’m weird like that, but I’m just like, oh, Maybe I should have been paying more attention to this.
There’s there’s a lot of cat fur, and there’s toys back here, and there’s all sorts of stuff, and I’m like, no wonder my fridge has been making strange noises. And that’s, obviously, I slipped into an easy household metaphor, but it’s, that’s the kind of stuff that you need to do to be able to, to again reframe, and re center, and re ground yourself, and really, Check all the lights and check all the gears and make sure that things are where they should be.
And when they’re not, having people around you who are going through that same process, or, like you, very much understand how that process works, and guide me, I was going to say guide us, but guide me, because now I’m like on this retreat in my head, towards, a cleaner house. A cleaner dwelling in myself.
[00:15:43] Dimitria Cook: Yeah and it is, it’s about the patterns, the behaviors, the beliefs and that reframing, and again, the grounding and the journaling and the centering. So it is, it’s designed this well, the wellness retreats are designed again to work on the whole person and to really, like you were mentioning before, having your feet on the ground and we’re connected to earth.
We draw in that energy from the earth. Those are our roots and you can feel it. And that’s what we’re looking to do is to really have people reconnect. From the earth and fill it from the inside. And as all of that energy runs through you, you’re able to, light up and become that person.
You’re able to have those conversations and be in those discussions and to just beam and show and just be at peace and know that you are taken care of, that, you are here for your soul’s alignment and your soul’s purpose.
[00:16:44] Kevin Stafford: There’s a sort of cheeky phrase that gets tossed around here and there to, especially for people who are like very much online, it’s go outside and touch grass or it’s I need to touch grass and I was like it’s funny, but it’s also it’s such a.
It’s such a good prompt, at least for me, because I like, it’s, when’s the last time, and this is me asking myself, it’s like, when’s the last time I was barefoot in the grass? My bare feet touched grass, and it’s it’s, it’s winter now where I’m at, so it’s, not the best idea for me to go outside barefoot, but it’s something I don’t do nearly as often as I could, and it’s it’s these simple things like that, or the, again, it’s almost like you can have that in as one of your cards, like a little wild card, it’s touch grass.
It’s go outside. Take your socks off when it’s a proper temperature, and it’s not like a downpour or whatever, and just let your body re experience what that’s like. It’s like, when’s the last time grass touched my bare feet? And again, that’s just one prompt amongst probably thousands that would just, again, get you thinking about how you can get realigned with yourself, with your soul, with your people who are around you, who you work with, who you share your life with, and all of the above.
Obviously, I’m picking up what you’re putting down, because you got me thinking about all sorts of stuff going on in my life, and I could talk to you about this stuff for a lot longer than this, but before I let you go, and I do have to, I want you to share, where can people find out more?
Obviously, you mentioned your website already, if you have a social media, presence, a particular platform that you’re most active on, where you like to connect with people the most, obviously your website and we’ll put all this stuff in the show notes too, but just tell people where they can find out more about the card deck, maybe order it, where they can find out about the retreats, maybe schedule one, and just in general, find out more about who you are, what you do and how you’re doing it and how to be a part of it.
Absolutely.
[00:18:23] Dimitria Cook: So you can learn more about the card deck and the wellness retreats on my website, which is www. demetriacook. com. And so you can go into the contact, you can click on wellness retreat, click wellness retreats, and it’s going to show you the information about the veterans wellness retreat and then the women’s wellness retreat, right?
And we’re inclusive. So we’re, it’s all about inclusivity also. Okay. And then you can also fill out the contact form to get more information regarding the retreats. And then there’s also a place where you can click on. Self alignment card deck but building beyond belief, self aligned card deck, and that will take you to where you can actually purchase the card deck.
Okay. I am also on LinkedIn. I do a lot of connecting on LinkedIn. I’m also on Instagram. My Instagram is Demetria L. Cook. And then my public Facebook page is Demetria L. Cook also. Okay. So that’s how people can find me. They can connect with me. They can read the different postings, learn more about who I am and why I do the things that I do.
As a coach, as an entrepreneur, as a trainer of trainers, as a mentor, et cetera. So I just love, helping people guiding them and moving them into their empowered future. And 2024 is, the next. I’m moving into my next phase with the card deck and the wellness retreats, and I’m really excited about it.
And I really appreciate you so much and having me on your podcast once again.
[00:20:04] Kevin Stafford: Yeah, it’s my pleasure. Like I’m not just blowing smoke up here, but I could chat. I could talk with you about this stuff. For hours, and also I just feel like we could just go have a cup of coffee and just talk about life.
Maybe not like cleaning up behind the fridge, but, or maybe that too, I don’t know, household tips. But I am so grateful to have gotten to begin my year. I’m, I still count this as the beginning of the year, even though like you said, we’re on, we’re coming up on two weeks in and it’s going by so fast. But I’m really grateful to have gotten this shot of life energy from you, even though we only chatted for a half an hour.
It’s just so good to see you again, so good to talk to you, and Honestly, be inspired by you because what the work that you’re doing, your focus, your commitment, the specific way that you’re bringing your talents and your abilities to bear on the communities that you can best serve. It just it’s. It is inspiring.
And again, I know I’m getting mushy again, and I don’t want to, but I really do feel that way. And I also have that experience with you, even though our experience together is relatively brief. I just I’m just really glad that you’re in the world doing what you’re doing the way that you’re doing it.
And I just love the way you express yourself in the way that again. You connect and are available for connection. So I’m just basically thanking you for being you. So I’ll shut up now.
[00:21:12] Dimitria Cook: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Again, people can find me on Demetria cook. com. That’s my website. And I look forward to connecting with people there.
[00:21:22] Kevin Stafford: Absolutely and odd to the audience. Thank you for listening. You know what to do. You know the links will be in the show notes. Do yourself the tremendous favor of, at the very least, having a conversation with Demetria, but also, maybe get the card deck . Absolutely. Definitely. Get the card deck.
Definitely get the card deck. Definitely get the card deck. And thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for sharing time with us. I hope your year has gotten off to a, just an absolute fantastic start and we’ll talk to you again here on the pod very soon.
