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How I Lead My Clients Through a Major Transformation

by D'Arcy Benincosa

What if understanding the pattern isn’t the same thing as changing it?

There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from being deeply self-aware and still watching yourself repeat the same thing.

You know why you overwork.You know why you disappear when it’s time to be visible.You know why you keep choosing the same kind of relationship.You know why you procrastinate on the thing you say you desperately want.You may even know exactly where it came from.

And then Tuesday comes around.

And you do it again.

I have become fascinated by the distance between those two things:

Knowing why you have a pattern.  And no longer having the pattern.

They are not necessarily the same skill.

And over the last several months, I have fallen completely in love with working inside that space.

So for the first time on Play It Brave, I want to take you behind the curtain and show you what I actually do when someone sits across from me and says:

“I know something in my life has to change.”

I don’t start with what’s wrong with you.

I start with curiosity.How do you do this problem? Because something we call “procrastination” or “fear of visibility” or “self-sabotage” can sound like a fixed characteristic:

I’m just like this.

But when we slow it down, there’s usually a sequence. Something happens. You notice something. You make meaning from it. You feel something. You respond.

And eventually you’ve done that sequence so many times that it stops feeling like something you’re doing and starts feeling like who you are.

That’s where I get interested.

Because I don’t want to spend our time convincing you to try harder at the final behavior. I want to know what’s underneath it.

Most of the patterns running our lives once made sense.

This is one of the things I wish more people understood. Something happened. You felt something. You learned something from it.

Maybe the conclusion was:

I’m not enough.

I’m too much.

I’m never chosen.

People leave.

It’s not okay to be seen.

I have to prove myself.

You didn’t necessarily sit down and consciously choose these beliefs.

You adapted.

You learned what to notice. What to expect. What got you love. What brought rejection. What belonging seemed to require. And sometimes something you learned to do eventually begins to feel like something you are.

That distinction changes everything for me. Because if something was learned, decided or organized somewhere along the way, we can become curious about whether it still belongs in the life you’re living now.

You don’t have to erase the past to stop organizing your life around it.

This is where the work has become incredibly beautiful to me. When we work with something from the past, I’m not interested in pretending it didn’t happen. I’m not interested in convincing you it wasn’t painful. And I’m certainly not interested in removing the wisdom you earned because of it.

We go looking for the learning.

Sometimes it’s:

I was a child. I wasn’t responsible for what happened.

Sometimes:

Someone leaving doesn’t mean I’m unlovable.

Other people’s anger isn’t mine to carry.

I can speak for myself now.

I don’t have to abandon myself to be loved.

I am allowed to want what I want.

You keep the wisdom.

You just don’t have to keep the old emotion in order to keep the lesson.

That distinction has changed the way I understand my own life.

There were stories I could explain beautifully for years. I understood why they affected me. I could tell you exactly where certain responses came from.

And I was still having the response.

I used to have panic attacks.

Some of the most profound work I’ve done personally involved going back to the experiences underneath those attacks—not to relive them, but to change what I was still carrying forward from them.

I haven’t had a panic attack since.

That’s my experience, not a promise about anyone else’s.

But it profoundly changed what I believe can happen when we stop working only on the behavior we can see.

And then there are the sentences.

Emotions aren’t the only things we carry forward. We carry conclusions. One woman I worked with discovered a sentence underneath years of relationship patterns:

I’m never chosen.

Through our work, she found another reference in her own story—a version of herself who knew what being chosen felt like without performing for it.

She said:

“She didn’t have to do anything. She was chosen because she was just her.”

I’ve thought about that sentence ever since. Because imagine the difference between living from:

I have to perform, prove, achieve, accommodate and become enough so that someone will finally choose me.

And: I am chosen because I am me.

This isn’t about finding a prettier affirmation.

It’s about discovering the conclusion underneath the pattern and asking:

Does this still get to be true?

What is the sentence organizing your life?

There is an idea usually attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson that we each carry a central conception of ourselves through which the facts of our lives become organized.

I can’t stop thinking about that. Because the facts don’t necessarily have to change. The childhood happened. The heartbreak happened. The business failed. The person left. You lost the money. You were rejected. But what if those facts no longer had to be filed under:

I’m not enough.

Nobody chooses me.

I always fail.

I can’t trust myself.

It’s dangerous to be seen.

What sentence have you been living from?

And what could change if you no longer had to organize your choices around it?


This is the work I’m opening now.

I’ve fallen in love with this work in a way I did not expect.

It brings together so much of what I’ve spent years studying: human behavior, story, identity, business, creativity, language, transformation—and the question I’ve been obsessed with for most of my life:

Why do we become who we become—and how much of it can we consciously change?

For the first time, I’m opening a small number of private spaces to do this work with me.

There are three ways we can work together.

The Breakthrough is for you when there is one significant area of your life you are ready to work on deeply. We work privately across several sessions, and I stay with you for 30 days afterward as you integrate what changed into your actual life.

The Cabin Breakthrough is the immersive version: two days away from your ordinary routines, devoted entirely to the work, with time for reflection, walks, meals, meditation and ritual around what you’re leaving behind and what you’re taking home.

And for a very small number of women, I’m offering six months of private work with me, including four full Breakthroughs and my strategic support as you build what comes next. If you own a business, that means you don’t have to separate the internal work from the external one. We can work on the belief and the brand. The pattern and the offer. The internal conflict and the sales decision.

These first spaces are available with special founding pricing, which will change as this body of work develops.

You don’t have to know which experience you need.

You just need to know:

There’s something I’m ready to change.

Book a 30-minute clarity call and tell me what’s happening. Tell me what keeps repeating. Tell me what you’ve already tried. Tell me the thing you understand intellectually but still haven’t been able to change.

We’ll start there.

[BOOK A FREE 30-MINUTE CLARITY CALL]


And until then, sit with this:

What did I decide?

What did I decide about love?

Money?

Success?

My body?

Being visible?

Being chosen?

What have I spent years collecting evidence for?

And what might become possible if that sentence were no longer true?

You don’t have to erase your history.

You get to keep what you’ve learned.

You just don’t have to keep living from a conclusion you made before you knew what you know now.

Click here for more ways to listen to this episode.

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A few of my favorite business tools:

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Struggle to match your digital to your film? You've met your match. Use code PLAYITBRAVE to get $50 off!

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Say au revoir to lazy galleries! Use code DARCY to get your first month free.

tonic site shop

Crappy website? Say no more. Get 20% off a template with code PLAYITBRAVE. You're welcome.

Learn my simple tweaks you can make that will have you attracting your dream clients with the portfolio you have TODAY.

free guide

Have no time to submit
to publications?

Don’t let your images gather dust on a hard drive – GET THEM SEEN (and gain street cred too).

free training

Not booking $10k+ weddings?

binge-listen

Play

It Brave

podcast

A few of my favorite business tools:

CREATIVE LAW SHOP

Contracts, Privacy Policies, and more. Use code DARCYB10 for 10% off!

goodlight presets

Struggle to match your digital to your film? You've met your match. Use code PLAYITBRAVE to get $50 off!

pic-time

Say au revoir to lazy galleries! Use code DARCY to get your first month free.

tonic site shop

Crappy website? Say no more. Get 20% off a template with code PLAYITBRAVE. You're welcome.

Have no time to submit to publications?

Don’t let your images gather dust on a hard drive – GET THEM SEEN (and gain street cred too).

free guide

Learn my simple tweaks you can make that will have you attracting your dream clients with the portfolio you have TODAY.

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