Episode 85: Pursuing Purpose - A Modern Day Job Story with Deborah LeBlanc

🎶 Podcast Intro: Welcome to the pursuing uncomfortable podcast, where we give you the encouragement you need to lean into the uncomfortable stuff life puts in front of you, so you can love your life. If you are ready to overcome all the yuck that keeps you up at night, you're in the right place. I am your host, Melissa Ebken let's get going. 🎶

🎶 Episode Intro:  Debra Leblanc is a lot of things: a hypnotherapist, an NLP practitioner, a therapeutic imagery master, and a certified MER practitioner.  I don't know what a lot of those things are, but we're about to find out. She's also an international transformational speaker, the author of 16 novels, and a paranormal investigator. Let's welcome Deborah to the podcast.  🎶

Episode: 
Deborah LeBlanc  0:08  
Deborah, welcome to the Pursuing Uncomfortable Podcast. How are you today?

I'm doing fine. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on your program. What a unique title. It makes me uncomfortable just hearing the title of it. It's like, Oh my God. What is it going to cover today? 

Melissa Ebken  0:30  
Right. I think it's compelling. That's why I fell in love with it so much. That and, you know, 25 years of seeing the difference it makes for people, when they lean into the uncomfortable stuff in life and resolve it, come to terms what they've heal from it, overcome it. When we can do those things and grow, then, you know, life just becomes so much more. There's so much more available to us when we're willing to do that.

Deborah LeBlanc  1:00  
You're so right. You're so right.

If there's anyone who knows about overcoming difficult things, I think it might be you, Deborah. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Well, I'll kind of give you a quick run of how it's how my life started, because it never stopped until recent. Well, no, not even recently, okay. Because I have my own challenges still today. I had I have this corner like mook friend of mine. And he who tells me every time we talk Deb, we choose the life we have here on this earth. You choose the children you're going to have you choose parents you're going to have. And I said yeah, but what about the parents choosing the kids? I mean, that's a nice go both ways. And he goes, it works itself out. I said, Well, let me tell you something Buba, if you see me standing in line for another one like this, just hit me upside the head and say your'e in the wrong line again, okay? You're the wrong line again. I was um, my parents divorced, when well they never divorced they separated when I was eight years old. My mother was an undiagnosed manic depressive. And of course, when my father left, she took her anger out on me, I was oldest of three children. And I took care of my brother and sister. You know, I cooked, washed clothes, had my first job at 14 in a donut shop from 11 at night till 7 in the morning, and had to give my mother what I made, which was pennies then, but still to pay the electric bill. And when she'd get into a rage, I would hide my siblings. So if she had to beat on anyone, I was it. I wore long sleeve shirts and pants throughout my middle school and high school years. Because I always had bruises everywhere and I didn't want people to see them. After my parents split up, we moved into the projects. And so I was known as a PK kid, not a preacher's kid, but a project kid. And that was worse than a preacher's kid. At least a preacher's kid got some respect. Not a PK, not in my PK and I got married. I wound up I wound up getting married at 16. Not because I had to. I had my first child at 18. But everyone when you spend eight years raising siblings and taking care of a household you feel like you're 30 When you're 16. Right? Well, you may feel that way. But I had zero relationship experience. So I of course I married the male version of my mother and being my culture, from my culture, and my religious upbringing, you stuck with it. And I did for 35 years. And through that time, I had to get past, well I actually did get past that. That's a whole other story. When my while I was still living with my mother, I had to get over the fact that my mother was a sick woman. I couldn't mourn the fact that I didn't have Beaver Cleaver's mother, you know, I was I just saw myself as someone being here on this planet to take care of these two children who are now stuck with this woman, and I had to take care of her, kinda be her buffer. So that's how I saw it. No big deal. It after I got married, I of course I continued school, went on to college. Going to college was a big deal because my ex did not, he began to see a shift happening. He was not a person that was very innovative, out there. He wouldn't put himself out there. If somebody criticized him at work, he'd quit. He'd quit his job. He must have quit five jobs in five years. And I knew that if I didn't do something, my children were gonna wind up on welfare. That's how I grew up when they had the old song food stamps, you know, these paper things you can bring to the grocery store. And I didn't want that to happen. So, though my dream was always to be a psychiatrist, actually was to be the Superman, a nun or a psychiatrist. Okay, Superman didn't work. I tried that I tried flying off the roof of a shed. And yeah, that didn't work out too well. Nun, well forget about that. And the psychiatrist, I figured it's going to take me too long to start earning money to take care of these kids. So I went into marketing. And that's what I got my degree in, went to work actually started as a receptionist, because that was the only job available. The oil field life crashed at that time. And we weren't I mean, it that's it. That's all I could get. Well, within five years, I was the marketing, National Marketing Manager for that company. And then, six years later, I was the first female executive vice president of a transportation company in the US. That's when that's when things kind of got kind of rough, with my ex, because now I was making more money than he could make in three lifetimes at his pace. And so that didn't go over really well. But after 35 years, I left. I left the company that I was working for, I left a six figure company, six figure, a year salary company, to start my own with $0. I didn't go to the bank for a loan. What I did was, I created a consulting company that dealt with transportation. And by chance, I met a man on a plane that was the National Safety Director for funeral service. And she said, and so we were talking about what we did for a living. And he said, you know, funeral service needs, needs a business a consultant, because it's usually handled from handed from father to son, and on and on, and they don't really get a grasp on business and how to make a profit. I said, I'll tell you, I'll tell you what, my radar went up. I said, I will if you teach me funeral service, I will be that for you. I will be that your go to person. So I spent two years in learning how to embalm, working in a morgue, doing removals, the whole schlepping flowers to the grave site, everything that needed to be done. This way I could sit in front of a funeral director and he knew I had paid my dues. So that the money I collected from that I put into this company I was trying to start. It was a company that did not exist in the in the world. It was a fuel logistics company. I've created, I didn't create software. I put software people from different angles of the industry together and I said this is what I've wanted to do. And it's called Focus, Fuel Watering and Carrier Utilization System. And it took off at the same time Hypermart started, you know, there is a divine light that shines from somewhere. Just at that exact time Hypermart started which they knew a lot about groceries and didn't know squat about gas and fuel right. So you here I am, I'm their Savior. I'm here to save the day. The company grew into a multi million dollar multinational company. So I've had that, you know, it was like everything I touched, just works. And it was very grateful for it. And then, you know, life was clipping along, I got a divorce. Because it was just getting too bad. My my children were older and they were out of the house. And I had my youngest daughter, wound up pregnant to a she wasn't married, and the father wasn't worse than my ex. I'm gonna put it that way. And that beautiful baby girl was the light of my life. Her name was Amelia. And there was just something about her. She spent the first year living with me because my daughter was going through this whole, the father's rejecting, his child is rejecting me, you know, I kept the baby and I would rock her at night, and give her her bottle. And I would just weep. I would cry. There was something so deep in my heart that was connected to the child, but I couldn't get where that sorrow was coming from. Unfortunately, I have found out when she was a month after her third birthday, my daughter called. She was I couldn't even understand her over the phone. And I heard Melee, that's what we call the Amelia, Melee. And she's, I knew that something was wrong. I took off in my car. Got over there in like two minutes. And I saw the baby laying on a comforter on the living on the living room rug. And she was move whe wasn't moving. And I'm I'm yelling orders at my daughter did you call 911? Yes, how long ago 40 minutes ago. Haha, what? Call 911 Call it again. And I went to the baby and started doing CPR. I'm holding this precious angel in my arms, breathing in our mouth, doing compressions with my fingers. And if you want to know a nightmare, it's blowing in that baby's mouth and watching her little chest rise. And you've ever a little thing of flutter of hope. And then it just stops when you stop. The the ambulance finally showed up. And of course, they confirmed at the hospital she was dead. She died of it wasn't SIDS, it has another acronym. It's for children between three and five. They just simply pass away. And four months later, I lost her mother in a fiery car crash. A year after losing her. She was my youngest daughter, I lost my middle daughter to alcoholism. She had been doing really great. And her sponsor committed suicide. And when that happened, she just went downhill and we couldn't stop her. My oldest daughter and I would kind of take watch, you know, because she was closet drinking. And we couldn't stop her. And she just went into a coma and never came out. I heard them call call code blue for the first time other than television I heard them call Code Blue. And I knew was her because they named the room number she was in. Doctors went running in. And I could hear the monitor. I could hear the heartbeat. And I just kind of took a breath. And then it stopped. And I could hear them yelling in the room again. And then they must have paddled her once more, same thing. I could hear one or two beeps, and then it would stop. And one of the doctors came out and told me, he said we tried twice. We can't bring her back. And I just looked at this man and I said please, one more time. Just one more time. And he did and now, not even one beat. She was gone. So we buried her. And a year after that. My dad passed away who was my best friend. He passed away at 95. He was, you know, everything just shuts down at that age. It's just over. And four months after him, my youngest brother passed away. My baby brother. So when all that death just hit me one right after the other, I really took a look at what is life about why am I here? Okay, I'm making great money. But I think I've said this, I said this to you at some time earlier. I have never seen a U haul behind a herser. What am I going to do with the stuff? It's stuff. It's stuff. I would give every single thing I own to have five more minutes with Amelia. Five more minutes with my daughters, you know. It's just stuff. So I assessed my life and said, Why am I here? What. There's got to be a bigger purpose. There has to be. And I, I saw myself as a kid. And what I wanted to be, and I gosh, if I would've gone back to school to be a psychiatrist, I'd have been 105 by the time by the time my, you know, my doctorate. So I started doing a lot of research and found a great hypnotherapy school. Did get my bachelor's in mind body psychology, went two years to HMI to get my clinical hypnotherapy certification. And that has been my focus is in helping people overcome. And I get, oddly enough, I get a lot of some that come to me with issues that my daughter's had, have my mother had. That are carrying grief, and don't know how to hold it. So it has been cathartic to me. You know, it feels like, at my age, it took this long for me to finally figure out. This is this is what it's all about. It's about reaching out and touching somebody else's hand. And just, if I can make their world better by this much, I've given that person more than anybody else around them, because they've come to me hopeless. So that that is my that's kind of my purpose is giving hope, to the hopeless.

Well, thank you for doing that. I can't think of a more beautiful purpose. And I think it's settle uncanny, the way our souls tend to find each other. The people that need you find you. The people who have experienced a similar losses that you have your souls find each other. And I think there's something beautiful and purposeful about that. Something a little transcendent about that as well.

I think so. I believe so. I was hoping once this journey was done, and you know, kind of everything settled, I could just say okay, this is you know, there's a saying of you're only given as much as you can handle. Well, let me tell you something. It doesn't always work that way. This beginning of this year, my husband, my my second husband, the man who's the life in my life is was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. And the chemotherapy treatments that they gave him, caused total neuropathy from shoulders down, he can't get out of bed, he can't dress himself, barely feeds himself. And they don't know if there is no cure for neuropathy. So we're trying everything under the sun in physical therapy and what not to help him. You know, he was such a vibrant, active man. And I'm just going ok, Lord when? Don't ever say enough is enough because somebody's going to show you you think so? Wait, let me show you.

Melissa Ebken  20:07  
You know, talking to you is like reading the book of Job in the Bible. And then was this and then there was this and then yes, it's just that's true. Its true. Deborah, if we can shift gears just a little bit, you do so many unique things in life. First of all, not only can you start a business and with the Midas touch more than once, but you also have so many unique skill sets. Tell us what is an NLP practitioner or a therapeutic imagery master and the certified MER practioner. What are those things?

Deborah LeBlanc  20:53  
Those are different modalities that can be used other than hypnotherapy. NLP is um is neuro linguistics. And it is, it's a form of hypnotherapy. But it's used at a much well see how can, how can I phrase it? NLP can be used like to get people out of a panic situation, or out of a phobia of phobic situation. It's used sometimes for schizophrenic clients. It's just a different modality. Same thing with imagery, therapeutic imagery, which I love because I'm I am a storyteller by art is taking a person into hypnotherapy and using imagery for their own subconscious mind to find the answer to the problem they're trying to solve. They already know it, the answer, we just have to help them get there, get to a place where they can find it.

Melissa Ebken  22:01  
I think there's so much truth in that. Generally with all people, and I don't have the people come to me that you have that come to you. But I find that people that come to me don't need to learn something from me that I know that they don't, because I honestly probably don't know, much more of anything than they do. But they just need a space a safe space to unpack all the stuff that they do know, and uncover that one truth that they need to connect with. 

Deborah LeBlanc  22:34  
That's true. That's very true. You know, we have to, and probably one of the biggest things that I find that people learn is that they have to own their own journey. You can't, you can, you can spend your lifetime blaming your mother, your father, your cousin, you know, everybody that did you wrong, and some did some horrific things. You can either spend your life or waste your life, blaming people, or take charge of your life and make something out of it. In spite of all of that.

Melissa Ebken  23:17  
You know, it's funny you say that I read a quote just this morning. That said, the person who blames others has a long journey ahead of himself. The person who blames only himself is partway there. And the person who blames no one has arrived.

Deborah LeBlanc  23:36  
Beautiful. That's right.

Melissa Ebken  23:38  
I love that. All right. So here's the question I really want to get into. You are a paranormal investigator for 30 years now. Tell us a little bit about that. What do you do? 

Deborah LeBlanc  23:58  
Well, I that journey started. My middle daughter actually knew a producer of MTV's Fear program. And they were in Louisiana and looking for haunted, purported haunted locations. So she said Mom, we're going to Dauphin Island to Fort Gaines, you know, to scout it out for MTV, do you want to come and hey that's an adventure. Let's go. And so I was on board with this. Well, at that time, I had a disposable camera and a compass. And I always tell people when I started out all I had was the disposable camera, compass and a set of brass balls. Then that was it. That's all alright. And we just went in. And what I began to realize is that I was I was able to pick up energies from different places that other people couldn't. We were hunting at another fort. I've been to every fort, I think on the planet. I can't remember the fort's name but there is a mass grave that's unmarked. And my, the team that I normally hunt with, now, because I'd hunt with I've hunted with teams all over the US, but they test me they do this all the time. They said um, Deb, why don't you come out here, and it was a picnic table. And it was the fort actually had a moat around it. And why don't you come and walk around this, you know, see if you pick up anything by the fence or by the driveway. And I thought that was odd, you know, I went by the fence I went by the fence or their driveway. And so these two men were talking, one of them was a team member of mine. They were talking so I'd walked up to them, and I was going to say, Okay, what's the BS here Bub? And I stepped the I was maybe 10 feet from him. And I started feeling tingling under my feet. Now, I'm not barefoot. I'm wearing boots. And I feel a tingling into my foot. And I just looked at the ground and I said, there are people buried under here. The groundskeeper's mouth dropped open. That's where the mass grave was. And he is the only one that was there that knew that. Wow. Yeah. So I go into houses and, you know, we have all now we have all the EMF readers that you see on these paranormal shows, all the gadgets that do the little stick figures that go Oh, my goodness, that's an ghost. And I think some of it is hogwash. And some of it is legit, when stuffs flying across the room, that's legit for me, that's, that's, uh, you know, that works for me. But it's, I don't know. I have I have a deep faith, I do have a deep faith. But it's needing to touch that other. I think that veil between where we move on to after we pass away is is just as thin as a, as a as gauze. That's how thin it is. And I'm so anxious to look on the other side of it and see what's there, you know?

And I've had people that come to me and say, How can I reconcile this with my faith? And, you know, there's a part of me that says, yeah, it's difficult. But there's this other part of me that says, There's something about a God and a faith and a world that's beyond what I can understand and comprehend that deepens my faith. There's more out there than what I can know what I can experience what I can explain a way that speaks of a depth that is beyond me. And that gives me hope that gives me comfort actually, that I can't just explain away everything but God is a little more profound. Eternity is a little more in depth than what I can explain. What do you do with this? What's your faith and your understanding and your and your sensitivities to these things?

It it it strengthens my faith, because I don't see God fitting into one book. You're talking about an omniscient omnipresent being that created not just one universe, there are more that we've never discovered yet. We it was like when we first learned the world with not flat. Okay, there are universes we haven't even touched yet. We've just covered this little bitty thing because we don't have the technology yet to go beyond it. God is so much bigger than that one book. And so whatever comes about where where paranormal investigations go, one I always do a prayer of protect. You never go into paranormal investigation unless you have a strong faith. You don't because you can come across some demonic entities and I have. And that's where I step out. Because that's not my I'm not a demonologist. I don't do that. I don't do any of that. I step out and call other people in who can handle that. And yeah, that's not me. And know what to do before I leave, so it didn't bring me, follow me home. But it strengthens my faith in God. You know, and, you know, I tell people, look, it didn't matter to me, if you believe in Buddha, Captain Crunch, God, and you know, it doesn't matter. Whatever you believe, I'm not ashamed to say I believe in God. And it then just opens the doorway, this just bigger than I can stretch my arms out. And when I look at a God that big, that's how much he loves me that it's so big, that we can't comprehend it. Have you ever had anybody in your life love you that big?

That's a powerful statement. That's a powerful statement. Yeah. So, Deborah, if there's someone listening to this podcast, friend, if you're listening to this podcast, and you're feeling hopeless, if you feel like the weight of the world is just crushing you right now. And you're thinking about giving up or you don't know where to find hope, or you don't know how to find purpose, or why you have so much grief, if you feel like your name, too, could be Job, and you're sitting on this big pile of ashes, and it just keeps coming and just keeps coming. There's more. More light.More life. More love. And Deborah, what would you say to that listener?

That in what whatever valley that you're in, don't be afraid to open your eyes. Sometimes we go through it like a dark room. If we close our eyes, we won't be frightened, right? We keep our our eyes closed, we get depressed, who stay in bed, cover our heads in there, done that. But if we're not afraid to open our eyes, there's, we see, we start to see purposes and reasons for things. There's always a lesson to be learned in every traumatic and dramatic thing that happens in our life. You know, it's Amelia's short, little life, or my husband, who had never had, his family was not touchy feely. He didn't. He never had children. She taught him what unconditional love meant. I mean, to come here and provide that was was that little girl provided more than she well, she probably knows now. But she did a great job. There is a reason, there's a purpose and thought we miss them here. It's us that keeps saying I wish they were here. I wish they were here. Why? Look at where we're living. Okay. We're making this day by day. You make every day as positive as you can. And you do it by reaching out to somebody else who's having an even messier day than you're having. Smile at them, say good morning, make their day better. Yours will wind up being better. And eventually, eventually, eventually, the lights will be getting brighter and brighter and brighter in your life. Until one day we're home. And there is no darkness anymore.

That's a beautiful way to end today. Thank you Deborah.

Thank you so much for having me.

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