Date with Cents

What My Business Hero Did Differently to Find Love Fast After Divorce

TorahCents Episode 133

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I attended a business conference this weekend where one of my long-time business heroes was speaking—someone whose career I've admired for years.

While everyone else focused on her business strategies, I was captivated by her personal transformation. After her divorce, she took an approach to dating that completely contradicted what most women do. In this episode, I'll share the surprising conversation we had about how she intentionally created space for new love while still building her empire.

I'll reveal her practical, actionable strategy that flies in the face of conventional "take time to heal" advice most divorced women hear.

If you're ready to learn what devotion to your love life really looks like and start attracting quality men now, book a sales call HERE to speak with me about 1:1 coaching.

Book a sales call to learn more about private 1:1 coaching with me.  Book a sales call HERE to speak with me. 



OTHER POPULAR RESOURCES:

Read my online essay on why the way we date is broken- Modern Dating is Hard 


Follow me on Instagram for more dating gems at: 

@torahcents 

@curved2cuffed 

Speaker 1:

What's up, lover girl? Welcome back to the Date With Sense podcast. I am so happy to be back. I'm back home.

Speaker 1:

Last time I had a podcast, I was on my way to prepare for emancipation, which is a business conference with my coach DL my business coach coach DL and it was so amazing and so this podcast is going to going to touch into one of the amazing pieces of it. So we were in DC having an amazing time. I met me a new biz buddy, um shout out to her Hi Jasmine. At the conference. Um, that was amazing. I was able to get I feel like my coach always says, like you get 12 months of transformation in two days. I really felt like I received that when it comes to my business, as well as connections and friendships, because I linked up with so many amazing, brilliant, six figure, seven figure women in the room that I'm like, oh, we're friends now. So that was really nice. And then also, I met two delicious men while I was out there and I had two dates planned and only went out on one of them and I kind of posted, I alluded to it in my stories by sharing some screenshots of text and like people were in my DMs asking. They were like that's not Latin poppy, that's not big body bitch. You wasn't going out with them Like no, and it's so funny because people ask questions around that Like I'm, I guess, exclusive to big body bands, exclusive to Latin poppy, like I'm not dating anyone else and like I'm open to dating other people. And some people were like oh, since you got somebody, you added somebody to the rotation, or what are we calling this person? What nickname are we going to give them? We're not going to give them anything because I wasn't planning to see their ass after that.

Speaker 1:

Anyway, like I was just going on, I just wanted to meet new men, I just wanted to go on enjoyable dates. The plan was not to continue to date them after I left them, like maybe if they did what Big Body Benz did, because I wasn't, I wasn't, he was long distance when I met him and I didn't plan on continuing to date him, but he was coming to see me like every two weeks, like if they did something like that. But I just want to reiterate that just because I go on a date with a man doesn't mean he's in my rotation. Just because I go on a date with a man doesn't mean I'm planning to see him again. Just because I go on a date with a man doesn't mean I'm planning to see him again. Just because I'm on a date with a man doesn't mean he's significant enough Like it's a significant enough connection for me to tell y'all who they are, what they're about. I literally just wanted to go on dates and it was just an amazing experience connecting with these delicious men. And now I'm back home and I probably won't be talking to them again, and I'm okay with that. And now I'm back home and I probably won't be talking to them again, and I'm okay with that. Right, I'm super okay, unless one of them surprises me. But any who?

Speaker 1:

I had to come on here today and share this story because it ties perfectly into what we talked about last week um, about devotion, about desire, about willing to move with your ache instead of running from it. The 10 K dating coach controversy. And before I get into this episode, I really want to shout out Dougie Fresh. She says Tora does not miss. She wrote a review on the podcast. She says I don't know how you figured it out, but every single episode drops gems and speaks directly to me.

Speaker 1:

This episode about the 10K coach and the ache and devotion. You're really tapped in and you do an amazing job of gently calling us out on our true desires and calling us into something more honest, real and embodied. The client episodes never miss either. So much juiciness, learning from other women, what's possible through committing to yourself and the process. I literally be thanking God for you. This is such deeply spiritual work. Thank you, dougie Fresh, thank you guys for always leaving a review on the podcast and if you'd also like to leave a review to tell me how you're enjoying the episode, I would love it, absolutely love it.

Speaker 1:

And for those of y'all who are overthinking it like, oh, it gotta sound like this, it gotta sound like that Girl, if you don't say what you need to say in ChatGPTN, let it spit out a review for you so you can copy and paste it in there. Just tell it what you want me to hear and then let it create the review for you and you just copy and paste, because I know I got some overthinkers like, oh, it has to be like this. Before I write Torah review Girl, just send the review to ChatGPT, talk to ChatGPT. But anyway, over the weekend I went to Emancipation and at Emancipation, one of my longtime business heroes. She was there to speak and it's like somebody I used to look up to. You know, when it comes to her business, she's always been a hard worker. She's always been moving and shaking out here in the business streets. She is some of your favorite mentors favorite mentor and I even used to look up to her.

Speaker 1:

I used to look her up on podcast apps just to hear her interview, just to hear her story. I remember one time I was working out in a I think it was 20, was it 2022? And I was listening to an episode she had on a podcast and it was all about how she made $1 million in profit one year and I literally just cried. First I went into a shame spiral because it was like Tora, how come you're so far away from this? A million dollars in profit, not revenue profit. I started crying. I'm shame spiraling. But then I cried because I was like, wow, this black woman who came from the rough hood was able to come out of all of this and do this for herself. I'm just so, so happy to hear this and it just brought tears to my eyes and just showed me the possibility and I've just admired the way she built her business.

Speaker 1:

I follow her on all of her platforms. I've loved the way she's taken risk over the years and I've also loved the way she seemed to create her own path, always like she is. You see, like business coaches online if you're in the coaching industry and you see them and sometimes you're like everybody's kind of cookie cutter. But she seemed to be, she seemed to always have created her own path. And so just like really seeing her in real life and having conversations with her in real life because you go to business conferences and often the host and the guest speakers they they kind of like tucked away and they don't interact with the attendees but she did every, all the whole the host, all the attendees. They interacted with us. They went to dinner with us, they went to lunch with us and, of course, it just reminded me that the women that we admire, they're not made of something different. They just keep showing up for their desires, even when it's messy, even when it's hard and even when the world tells them quote, unquote it's not the right time.

Speaker 1:

But what really struck me at this event? It wasn't even about her business success. It's what I learned about her personal life. So, years ago, when I first discovered her, she was married and it seemed like it was a happy situation. She had kind of like the it was kind of like a power couple image that a lot of women secretly hope for she being a successful business owner and him being successful in terms of his career as well. And Then, you know, she disappeared from the internet.

Speaker 1:

She disappeared from all platforms and she talked about taking a sabbatical and leaving, and so I didn't get any updates from her for a while, like about a year. No updates, no content, no, nothing. She was just gone. And then she finally came back. I saw a post in my feed. I was like, oh my God, she's back. And she was different Not different as in like her personality, so to say but she had gone through.

Speaker 1:

She shared that she had gone through a divorce and now and then, within, like I feel like it was within a year, she was engaged again. She talked about her getting a divorce and then she talked then, like within the year, she's like I'm engaged. And I'm gonna be completely honest when I heard that, like my whole spirit sat up, like I was like, oh, yes, I love it. Like I knew she was a bad-ass business woman, but I'm like no, you are bad ass, because I know from my own experiences, from my clients, experiences specifically like how easy it is to believe that, after a long relationship ends, that you're supposed to, uh, have years of being alone, or you're supposed to be healing for quite some time, or even like women having years of feeling like they missed their chance and they get back into this modern dating world and they don't know what to do with it and so they have to be single for more years, like pass what they want. But here she was, she was proof that it doesn't have to be that way, and I'll explain.

Speaker 1:

So when everyone else at the conference was asking her about her business strategies, I stood up and I asked her a question that I couldn't stop thinking about, about her personal life. I asked her okay, I said, hey, we've watched you online for years, we've watched you be married, and then, when you came back from your sabbatical, we also watched you get divorced. And then we also saw you just announce that you were engaged. And so I would like to know from you, like, did you just stumble across this man? Was this something that you just stumbled into, like you just bumped into and y'all got together, or or was there a strategy behind it? Because I know this woman is extremely strategic in everything that she's done in business and I just wanted to know if she showed up that way in her personal life, because I wanted to know, like, was it luck or was it actual intention? Was it actually a strategy? Was it devotion? And y'all. The way she lit up when I asked that question, like I could really feel it, like this wasn't an accident.

Speaker 1:

And so she began to tell me that when she was married, she realized that she actually wanted, she was a woman who wanted children. Okay, she told me during her divorce, like she had a clear mind, that she wanted the life of a mom. She always wanted to be a mom, and the man that she married, although he wasn't abusive, he wasn't somebody who was, you know, harmful, but she didn't feel safe enough to bring a child into the marriage and so because of that, she initiated her divorce and it was actually a clear decision for her. She also mentioned after the divorce she still wanted the life she had dreamed of, like a life with a husband, a life with children, a life where she felt safe to build a family. She moved like a woman who truly believed her desires were still valid.

Speaker 1:

What she mentioned she was like look, when I left my marriage, I downloaded every dating app I could find. I got myself on every dating app, but she just didn't download them and sit there scrolling. She paid for every single one of those dating apps, she invested in them. She paid for the memberships. I know a lot of women are always asking Tora, do you think I should pay for an app? Do you think I should pay for this? Pay for that? She was just like I'm paying for it all, like I'm not asking, I'm not getting permission, I'm going to do it because this is what's going to serve me. She paid for all the investments, everything she could think of, and then she treated like finding her next chapter, like it was worthy of her attention chapter, like it was worthy of her attention, worthy of her energy and worthy of her resources. And as she was on those dating apps and like really putting herself out there and really figuring out what she wanted, and she was putting herself back into motion. She also started pouring life back into herself.

Speaker 1:

Okay, she didn't just hunt for a man. She pursued her own joy. One of the things that she mentioned was that she said yeah, I put my, I went out on solo dates every single week. Like I went on solo dates and I took myself out. And the thing is, when she came back from her sabbatical, I remember her going out on these solo days. I remember her posting them in her Instagram stories. I remember her posting these solo dates in her feed and she pursued her own joy. And one of the things she said is like I just filled my life with pleasure. She said I knew I wanted to be married again, but I didn't want my pleasure attached to a man. Like I really wanted to embody my own pleasure.

Speaker 1:

And so she also signed up for hobbies. She always wanted to try. She did that once a week and one of her dreams when she was younger and she said I always wanted to to have a dance recital, you know. And of course, she was poor growing up and then she also wasn't raised by her mom and um, so she kind of didn't have like the childhood that some people have and was able to do a lot of extracurricular activities, and so she did in a, she said, in order to live that dream out, I'm going to find a place where I can do an adult dance recital. So she took this sensual flow floor class and within six weeks she had her own dance recital, like her own dance performance, and it was something that the little girl in her had dreamed about.

Speaker 1:

And when I heard her say all of these things, like her investing in her pleasure and her investing in getting her pipeline of men and then also developing herself personally, mind you, those are the three pillars that are part of delicious dating that I teach in my, teach my clients and in my program pleasure, pipeline and personal development Like she was doing all of these things. So when I heard her say that, I was like, oh my gosh, snap, snap, snap, she is doing, she is. She took the ingredients and did it for herself, without even like hearing any like me talk about it, and so something clicked for me also in a deeper way, because how many of us women have buried those parts of ourselves, the pleasurable parts of ourselves? It's like when I have clients come to me and they're swiping on the dating apps and they're getting dates and they are meeting men, but it just feels so heavy, it feels so responsible and they're like, yeah, I'm doing the things to her. I'm like, where's the pleasure? Delicious dating has to have pleasure involved, and so we try to make it like I need to be responsible about this so I can get what I want, versus how does this light me up? But we buried the pleasure parts of ourselves because we were taught to be so responsible.

Speaker 1:

What about the parts that crave beauty, the parts that want life again, not just survival? Okay, how many women decide that because one chapter ended painfully, whether it was in a relationship or marriage, that they don't get to hope for another one? They stop asking, they stop moving, they stop desiring, and then they call it healing, but really that they're hiding. But that's not what this woman did. She saw her ache, she made an executive decision, left her marriage, went to go out there, put herself out there in the world, served her ache by honoring it, honoring her desire, and became devoted to it. She honored it, she fed it with pleasure, she fed it with beauty, she fed it with movement, she fed it with possibility and she trusted that if she stayed in devotion to this desire, life would rise up to meet her.

Speaker 1:

I remember her telling me when I asked the question, she was just like yeah, I wasn't, you know, trying to. I was. I just wanted to date. I really wanted to experience things. I really wanted to. I knew I wanted a husband, but I wasn't trying to rush it. I really wanted to be a mom, but I wasn't attached to the outcome. I wasn't attached. I didn't need things to happen a certain way. I just wanted to put myself out there, and a lot of us do not think that's allowed.

Speaker 1:

So many of us are sitting on the sidelines of our own lives telling ourselves that we have to wait for permission, wait until we're perfectly healed, wait until the fear is gone. Some of us are like I got to wait until I feel comfortable. Wait until somebody magically finds us. Wait until we lose the 10 pounds right. Wait until we have the business completely set up. Wait until somebody magically finds us. Wait until we lose the 10 pounds right. Wait until we have the business completely set up. Wait until we finally got the schooling out of the way. Wait for all the things.

Speaker 1:

But devotion doesn't work like that. Desire doesn't work like that. When you're devoted to your desire, you move, even while you're scared and you don't have it figured out. For example, one of the things that she said is when she downloaded all those apps and she paid for all the apps, it was still connected to the iCloud of her ex and he saw all of the charges that she was making towards the dating apps and she was so embarrassed. She was so embarrassed but that did not stop her from being on the apps. I hear a lot of people come to me and they're like oh, I just don't, I just don't want my ex seeing this. I just don't want people in my life seeing me on the apps. And this girl she look, it didn't matter, even though she was embarrassed, it didn't matter. Right, you move Even when you don't know how it was going to end. You move because your future deserves your participation. That's how you move and, once again, this doesn't have to be big and dramatic. Right, for her, it was downloading all the apps and paying for them and showing up there.

Speaker 1:

For you, it might be having a vulnerable conversation and saying yes to connection, even when it will feel easier to guard yourself. It might be dressing like the woman you know you're becoming, even when no one's watching. Yet. It might mean unfollowing people online who make you doubt that love is available to you. I had someone approach me at the Emancipation Conference today and she was telling me all the stuff that she's seeing on the internet and how it's like, discouraging, and I'm confused. I'm like why are you following these people? Why are you watching this content? Why are you watching anything that makes you doubt that love is available for you? I can't watch any piece of content that's going to make me doubt that me and who I am is not going to find love. I don't care how many statistics you throw at me Like oh, the 1% of men is being pursued by the 90% of women and how do you think you're going to get that man? I don't listen to that shit, I refuse.

Speaker 1:

It's like it could look like letting yourself want what you actually want instead of dumbing it down to seem more reasonable right. It's like making your home feel like love already lives there Candles, music, cozy spaces, instead of waiting to upgrade when someone else shows up. It might look like choosing to believe that you're lovable now, not after you lose 10 pounds, not after you heal every wound. It looks like protecting your hope like it's sacred, not letting other people's cynicism become your story. For example, I put on TikTok like I only date ambitious men. I put on TikTok recently about me and, by the way, my biz bestie is who got me back on TikTok because I did not want to be over there. But I'm going to try it out for 90 days and there's a ton of comments of men just telling me I'm going to be single forever, of I'm average looking, I won't be able to get a man, blah, blah, blah, blah. But guess what? I'm living the dating life that I desire, that I that I love, and these men are trying to tell me what's available to me when I'm already living it. Imagine living a life that people are telling you can't have. Right. Being devoted looks like staying open after a disappointing date instead of folding back into hiding. Or like what? My business hero signing up for the dance class. Oh, she also did a cooking workshop. She went through. She did a cooking workshop for herself as well, to pour pleasure back into herself.

Speaker 1:

The weekend trip, not because you're looking for men, but because you're looking for yourself. It's showing up to that event alone, not to meet the one, but to meet yourself in a bigger life. It's building a world around you that your desires can live inside of it's saying I am going to. I like, I feel this ache for love inside of me and I'm going to move with the ache, not sitting here waiting for it to go away, not distracting from it. So if you're waiting for a sign, if you're waiting for a green light, if you're waiting for um, if you're waiting for the fear to stop before you start living again, this is it. This is your sign. You don't have to disappear, you don't have to put your life on pause, you don't have to apologize for wanting more, because when you stay devoted to your life, when you move with your desire, you're not chasing love, you're not chasing a man, you're creating the life where the love can land. That is the whole reason why the ache is there in the first place. The longing, the desire, is because you don't have a place where it can land. So stay devoted, stay available, stay in motion and just watch what God will do in the mess.

Speaker 1:

So I hope this story inspired you. It definitely inspired the room when I asked the question in front of 150 people and I had so many people. I had so many sales calls booked when I was out there and it was mainly from people from Washington DC. That was wild. I don't know if it was because of them meeting me out there Maybe they have been, they were local or because people have saw me on my stories out here, dating in Washington DC and meeting in DC. So they can't say that you know it's it's difficult to get a date because I was able to do that. I don't know. But I'm looking forward to talking to you guys on the sales call and keep you in motion, girl Devoted to the desire. All right, I will talk to you next week. Bye, oh, leave a review, girl. Leave a review, all right, bye.