Unlock the transformational power of authentic community on Elements of Community! Antoniette Roze shares how the communities we participate in and create can either imprison us in isolation or restore wholeness and balance. After experiencing alternative therapies that cured her terminal cancer as a child, she now empowers others through community. 

Antoniette discusses how focusing on one's vision, polarizing through purpose, and living "in and contributing to" community unleashes its ability to reflect our humanity back to us. 

Tune in now to uncover how community can truly heal!

I love what you're doing and I love why you're doing it. Why don't you tell the audience a little about yourself and a little about why I love it.

Great. Thank you Lucas and thank you so much for having me on your show. It's an important and fun show that I enjoy following. I am Antoniette Roze, as Lucas said, and for years I was a producer of natural wellness events. One of the biggest was the Texas Natural Wellness Expo, so if you're in that space, you've probably heard of that. I was a founder and producer of that.

And that stems from a very early, very early experience with terminal cancer, the late stage kind that there was no hope for. And then kind of brought in some integrative therapies into that process. And not only am I alive, but I'm walking, I was told I wouldn't be walking. I had a child was told I wouldn't be able to carry a child.

So I believe that there, our bodies are very powerful and we don't realize the power of our own bodies. So that's my passion behind what I do.

I love that. Wow, I haven't heard that part of the story. Thank you for sharing.

You bet.

The big C sucks.

And so I don't take it lightly. It damages and destroys very a lot of people's lives, right? We're all touched by somebody that we love and care about who has battled something labeled. You know, the C word. But I also believe that if, when we take a whole body approach and we correct imbalances that there's a lot of power in that.

And every day you turn on a television, you do, you talk to your doctor, you know, whatever it is that you do, you get all of the information on different medications and different, very invasive and oftentimes. Heavily damaging approaches to not only that, but diabetes, Crohn's disease, anything, right?

Actually if you're up for it, I'd like to take a little detour.

Sure, you bet. Let's do it.

I have a theory about cancer.

Okay.

And I haven't shared this with anyone before, but your experience and the way that you're talking about it sort of brings it up and makes it relevant right here in this moment, and it is relevant to this show. So there are some things that we know about humanity. If you take people and you isolate them, they slowly over time become insane. I mean, truly insane. They lose their sanity. You actually have heard me talk about this from a different perspective.

Which is almost by definition what insanity would be at the cellular level. So all of a sudden we have a cell that we're studying in a Petri dish all by itself, just so that we can learn from it. And what we learn is that when it's sitting there in a Petri dish, it's doing things that don't make sense inside the context of the collective body. So when we put those things together. A human isolated from their community becomes insane. A cell isolated from the body becomes insane even if it survives. And this is true for the human. This is also true for the cell, even if it survives for a while.

It survives as something that's entirely different. It's not the human separated from the collective isn't really human anymore. They've become insane. There's something different, there's something new. And ironically, you could study them deeply at a hormonal level and they don't look like other humans inside a community. The same is true at the cell.

Wow.

People decided to change their mindset. They decided to enter into happiness all the time with gratitude journals and comedy movies, and culling their friendships so that they only have people that are lifting them up and all of a sudden the cancer went away. Could it be that mindset shift was reflected in the body the same way inside the body that you would see inside a community?

Okay. I think what you're describing is a whole body approach, right? It's not a localized, pinpointed thing. And I think western medicine, especially, they don't take the whole body approach, whether it is to the C word or to even emotional. Struggles, whatever it might be in life. And even we can go as far as saying how we live our lives can, if we don't take that whole body approach, that it's not, I don't have a business life, I don't have a personal life.

It's not segmented. It's all one. And if one's off kilter, the whole thing is off kilter. Right? And you can't isolate one and just excel in business and think that your family and your other parts of your lives are gonna thrive. So, I guess it really goes back to that.

There's such a bigger picture than trying to laser 0.1 little, like if my elbow hurts, it might be an issue in my right toe, right? Because something down there is off, so it's throwing something else off. Entirely different. If we just keep trying to fix my elbow and not look at the whole body as one unit, then it's just gonna wind up getting more surgeries, more medications, whatever, and it's never really gonna help.

Right? And we see that over and over. We're trying to fix one localized problem, creates another problem, and then it just becomes. You know where you're saying your goodbyes. I think that's really true for every single part of your life. Like take a step back and look how everything relates to the other.

Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. The power of community, right? The power of the community inside the body, and the power of the community that you are creating to amplify voices.

Right? Yep. That's exactly it. And if you even look back in history at not only human communities, but even animal communities, right. Or medicine itself, right? Western. It's really, Western communities and western medicine are kind of isolated minded, right? What doesn't serve me, I'm gonna cut off.

But all of that to say that isolated approach to anything is going to create more problems. When you look at the whole. And I know holistic is thrown around, but at its core, the word holistic is not even, it doesn't even mean alternative. It means a bigger look at the bigger picture. And then you approach it from the bigger picture down instead of from the micro issue up. Right? Does that make sense?

Yeah. Cool. Thank you. Tell me about your community.

So I serve, I'm a bespoke speaker agency, and so actually in.

I do like bespoke.

So we serve under 20 speakers at this point and my team is at about that. Number two, cause we serve at a very high level. And so what's really neat about the dynamics of watching my community as it grows is the cream of what everybody is. May not even be on their resume. Right? They may not even verbally say it, but it just rises.

Mm-hmm.

What I'm realizing is most of the time I have that and even better within my own community, and I didn't know that going in. So I think for me, giving people the space to shine in the way that they shine, right? Leaving, having a framework, but leaving it loose enough where people have the room to really surprise you.

Yeah, I love that. That's the best version of community right there. Like, have people love what they do and then give them for the freedom for that love to turn into excellence.

Yep.

Good for you. Now I want to take that and shout it from the mountains so that everybody hears it.

We'll do it together. We'll shout from the mountains together.

It was organic, it just kind of happened. So you know, I'm like a lot of business owners. I take all the classes, hire all the mentors and all of the things. And what I was seeing a pattern in is the mentors that where I really grew the most and feel like I made real traction in my own direction, were the ones who didn't tell me what to do, but drew it out of me.

So somebody with maybe a quirk that I would feel like, oh, I don't know how that's gonna translate, just let them go with it. And of course I'm guiding, but you give people enough framework to feel safe. And then surround them with support. Right? But then you just let them be them. And I do, I feel like I circled the mountain, circled the mountain for seven years trying to dance to other people's dances.

This is the way it enriches, right? So I dance to their dance. I'm like, I don't really like this music, but I'll just do it anyway. Right? And then you dance to somebody else's dance. And when it was Lucas, honestly, when it was, when I just turned it all off.

Hmm.

It's believing that it's already there and stepping into it. And so no seeing that. And then my career went whoosh right after seven years of circling the mountain. And so that was all the education I needed with regard to community, and that's how I run mine. Now I just, I give framework, give a lot of support, but I also show you how to be you out loud and on purpose cause that's what at the end of the day, people crave connection, whether it's business. Business relationship, it's still a relationship. If it's a personal relationship, it's still a relationship.

Yeah, I love that out loud and on purpose.

Yep.

That sounds almost like a tagline. Tell me more about that out loud and on purpose.

So you know who you are as Lucas, right? And sometimes you'll subdue it. You'll kind of.

Yes, I do.

We're all evolving beings, which is also another beautiful thing. But we know at the core, you know, what our values are, what things excite us, what doesn't excite us, you know, our ways that we like to communicate and connect with people.

But so often we'll just kind of temper that in, whatever. Temper or kind of even maybe alter that in whatever settings that we're in. So my philosophy is figure out who you are. Like one of the first things that I do with any new client is we don't figure out who your avatar is until we figure out who you are.

Extraordinary.

Extraordinary, right? They're really gonna help you reach that next level so that you can help your people, right? Reach the next level.

And where that comes from is, I can't be you. You can have a system that works for you, but if you're the type of mentor that helps me figure out me, right? And what's gonna work for me and the vision of how I see myself serving my community. As you draw that out of me, then I become me.

I mean, I get it.

Okay, great.

So the combination of a really deeply fulfilling relationship that you have with your coach and the way that relationship opens you up to having a better relationship with yourself. Now you've taken that.

Ding, ding, ding, ding. I mean, that was, I don't wanna glance over that one. That was huge. Lucas. Yes, your relationship and your enrollment into yourself is first and foremost, and there are not many programs out there that put you before the avatar. Right. And it has to come first.

Absolutely. Can I give one quick example?

Please do.

So one speaker that I've had the amazing privilege to speak into, right? To help further her career is Chinese. And she spent the early years of her life in China and she said she's an amazing nutritionist. She's incredible. Nutritionist America needs more of her, right? But she was always very, very self-conscious of her accent. It was very thick accent.

And she was always trying to hide it, always trying to Americanize in the way that she dressed and the way that she communicated. And once she realized that she was actually doing herself and her business a disservice by doing that and embraced her accent and embraced her culture, even in the way that she dressed.

And once I was authentically who I am and unapologetically, so right then the right people started just. Like Velcro connecting with me and her career has really taken off to a new level.

Amazing. I love that. Wow.

Yeah.

Interesting. How would you like to talk a little bit about how leadership shows up in your community? I think.

I can give more examples if you'd like.

And that sounds like a version of leadership that I'm, as you know, I'm a big proponent of, I call it fluid leadership. You wanna, you wanna dive into that a little more?

Sure. So we've all stepped into rooms, whether they're virtual rooms or real rooms, where we can feel right away that we sit and listen or we interact. Right? We either sit and listen and absorb what the master head, the master talking head is giving, or we go and give, right? We give and receive. We give and receive.

And I personally, and it doesn't matter what the environment is, I don't care if it's church, if it's a conference, the speakers who succeed the most are the ones who have that collaborative experience, right?

And you decided that we're expanding and contracting in that we're allowing the organic. The conversation to organically create itself. And in my sessions, we call them SOS sessions. Our speaker, they're called our speaker open sessions. We have them once a week. I always have an idea of what I'd like to bring to the table, and a lot of times something much bigger rises to the top.

What's going well? And what could be going better, right? What can you celebrate and what can we talk about that we can troubleshoot together and, share insights and ideas together. And in that, I get blown away from my own people, right? I think I know them intimately, like more than they know themselves.

Oftentimes I write their bios, I build out their messaging, you know, all the things. And, there's one lady in particular, if I can give this example. So I didn't, I don't generally Google my speakers before I bring them in and very picky about who cause who you bring in your space. Like you said, it's not isolated, it can permeates through the rest, right?

So my executive assistant Googled her and we're like, we have Marilyn Monroe. Like, what? So it was pretty incredible. She was one of the main stars of Carmen for a lot of years if you're into theater and plays and just, she has these black and whites of just this gorgeous woman right from the 60's, 70's, and all the things.

And she never communicated those things with me. But I was just saying that there was so many layers of depth of value in her. Even just when she would talk on the surface that the resume that she gave me, right? Wasn't, didn't even touch the surface of who she is and what she has to offer.

She's an author of like seven books. Like she's got so many, so much behind her that she didn't really realize it until she was in a space that embraced, that took value in what it is that she has to offer. And had I not given her that space, she might not still know that about herself, the depth of value that she brings and how she just shines, just given that little bit of room in a supportive atmosphere.

So I hope that really kind of paints a picture when you set the stage, can I use that pun? I'll tell you when you set the stage by allowing the framework. And then, you know, giving some props and tools some resources, microphone, whatever it might be. And then just letting them step into that spotlight and be who they are.

That's when you can enroll in other people. And I think too often we put the cart before the horse, we're enrolling in other people. We forget enroll in ourselves. And I think that's probably one of the biggest beauties of my community is that we make sure that everyone owns who they are and we give them a valuable place at the round table. Right?

Amazing. For those of you who didn't really hear it, let's replay that message. It's important not to enroll in other people until you've enrolled in yourself. Yeah.

And then those who might not be perfect, but they're still pretty darn good, they're also gonna be in your community. And then those who don't fit, meaning they wouldn't be a great part of the collective. For whatever reason, their values or mindset, whatever it might be, would create maybe friction or tension or stumbling blocks for other people within that community.

They're just not gonna be attracted to you when you're out loud. So I'll give you another really, really quick example. So there was the clubhouse days for anybody who jumped onto that wagon during that time. I was really big in those days and I still enjoy Clubhouse for some things, but it's toned way down.

I didn't love it. I didn't even love the community. I loved her. And I definitely there was a lot of great value that came out of that. But really, once the buzz of a clubhouse died down. I wasn't sticky to her cause I didn't necessarily resonate with her approach. But I'll tell you what, she has an incredible business with people who are sticky to her.

But yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't my place and that was good. Like, it was good to know that for her and for me, if she would've toned it down because she didn't wanna offend anybody, she would've lost her real right people. Right? Don't tone yourself down, dial yourself up, and then you get the real right people.

Yeah. That's awesome. Thank you. We've sort of danced around the word purpose a couple of times. I'd like to invite you to talk about purpose a little bit.

All right? So business is hard. Life is hard, right?

Oh, yeah.

In the good times. All the more sweet, right? All the more tasteful and vibrant because it's connected to a purpose. I don't wanna payday, I want a purpose driven payday. I wanna payday that backs my personal life mission and my personal life mission is that every single person is empowered with the out of the box solutions, like everything's on the table. They know what resources and solutions are out there for them, for what they need to correct in their own lives. Right?

And I was the unlucky one. They were basically experimenting on me with alternative and integrative therapies that had not been done on a human before, only in lab rats, lab animals. And so I was the unfortunate, unlucky one. Whereas the lucky children whose cancers were caught in time, they were the lucky ones receiving the quote unquote right treatments, right?

I was still recognizable. The kids would come in recognizable, and very soon you couldn't even recognize them. And so very, very early on I remember asking myself why weren't their parents told? Maybe there was something else they could have tried first like me, right before they went through this.

And of course in my young mind back then, I didn't realize there's no way they would experiment on children who, you know, who were, their cancers were caught in time for maybe the mainstream therapies to work. I didn't know that in my young mind, but I remember thinking, this is wrong. Why weren't their parents told they had other options? Right?

So my purpose every morning I wake up is for their voices that didn't get to get heard for their faces, that didn't get to mature and grow and have their own children. And that's the purpose behind my work. So when things get hard, it's not as hard as what they went through, and it's not as hard as so many others are going through right now.

So, I don't have time to focus on myself or have a pity party, right? What I gotta do is figure out a way to around it, over it, under it, through it, whatever. Just figure it out and keep going for the sake of my purpose. Okay?

That's a powerful story. Thank you for sharing.

Yeah. What a statement. Figure out what's truly important to you, then you can't be stopped.

Right? One of the illustrations I use with my speakers, so often they'll build this illustrious career, right? And they build this thing and they get there and you build it. Basically, you're building a mansion, whether you're pro-athlete, an actress and politician executive level leader or a speaker, even a well-known speaker.

You build this elaborate mansion and you spend a good amount of your life at the peril of many relationships or, you know denying your self-care, whatever it might be to get there. And then you get there and you're like, oh, wait a minute. I was really banking on a mountain view.

Let's decide what we want. What's that mansion I wanna live in forevermore. I may wanna add a wing, redecorate, you know, once I'm there. But it needs to be the place that you, you actually do wanna be and figure that out first. Then everything else is just reverse engineering and creating, and then you work from the ground up, you reverse engineer the big chunks, right?

And then from the ground up, milestone mile markers, milestones, mile markers, milestones. But then even then, you're micro calibrating at each new milestone because if you don't, you could veer off just a little and all of a sudden you've got, you know, you're in whole different nation than you wanted to really land in, right?

What are your non-negotiables, right? What do you want in the end? And then you get those chunks going down and then you journey it going up and micro calibrate all the way up. Check back into the foundations to the basics. Like, don't ever say I've got this. I already know the thing. No, you don't cause you're an evolving human being.

You're audience is an evolving audience or our society. Has an evolving mood, right? Things can happen in our world that affect everything. We all know that now. There's not one person that doesn't know that on this planet by now. So I guess the.

I hope.

Main message is don't be too rigid, but also be smart enough to architect, right? Know what you're building before you start building it.

Okay, great.

When you're building who you want to be tomorrow. You are building. Whether you know it or not, you are building a vision. So in the words of the Antoniette Roze, if you're building a vision anyway, it might as well be yours.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Excellent synopsis..

Know what you want your vision to be. You're building a vision anyway. It might as well be yours.

Mm-hmm.

Don't build somebody else's vision. Build your vision.

Right? And in that there are people praying for you. They're praying they're at awake at night praying for the solutions and the support that you alone bring. If you're hiding out, then shame on you. There are people needing they need you. They don't need you to be perfect. They don't need you to get it all together first, right?

It's cause they build the perfect course, right? And they build the perfect website and they build the perfect everything. But they don't know, first of all, they don't know themselves and they don't really know their audience yet. It's all about collecting data, right? We think we know, but we really don't know.

Even when you get married, like you know enough where you know you wanna commit to this person in this journey, but it's, you can be married for 50 years and you won't know the fullness of each other yet cause it, we're evolving beings, we're living beings. And the same with your career and your community.

Cause once that data, the data's gonna come whether you like it or not. Right? And so you're already into this rigid system that we've spent a lot of time, money, and life. You know, life energy on and you realize, oh, I really thought they were gonna need more help here.

But they got that. They really need more help over here. We're getting a storm. It got really dark in here. Are we good? Should I turn a light on? Okay.

No, we're good.

So I guess I'm losing my voice. You go ahead.

So that you know what pieces of what you can bring to them are the things that they really need. You can bring all of this, but they really only need this part.

Yeah. Almost spot on first and for foremost touching with yourself. Right? I thought I wanted this thing, but now, you know, I think I really, don't love one-to-one consulting. I thought I would, you know, I think I really don't. So let's see what we can do to bring in more teams, support more team to do some of that so I can do some of this other, you know, whatever it might be.

You surprise yourself cause new level, new person. New level, new ecosystem. As you evolve and your business evolves and your community evolves and your message evolves. You discover things that you cannot know, what you don't know until you're there. So,

So many brilliant, amazing people who are needed out there are in that holding pattern.

Waiting for everything to align and be perfect. And they're not only doing themselves a disservice cause time is precious and fleeting, but they're doing all the people that are lying awake at night, praying for them a huge disservice.

I feel that, yeah. Thank you.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Thank you for the space.

You have your vision you're focused on building your vision and on checking in with the people in your community to make those micro course corrections in the shared experience between yourself and your community. Your community being the people that you're serving and the people you're going to serve.

Okay. Yeah. Really, really great. So when you start with purpose, right? You, that gives you the sticktoitiveness, the drive during the hard times to not quit, right? Then the tenacity. So that part, but it also with purpose comes a lot of clarity, a tremendous amount of clarity.

And when you care about the difference you're gonna make. There's a lot of great things any one of us can do, but it really takes away what doesn't belong, so we can water ourselves down really quickly. I mean, you are a multi-talented man. You can be doing any number of amazing things in this world, right?

If I'm gonna take that on, it's gonna be run by a different team. Can I afford the team because my energy needs to be here. Right? And so it makes very, very clear who you are, what you offer, and the difference that you're gonna make in not only your own clients, but the world at large. And so I guess it gives you the power to say no without apologies.

Mm-hmm. Which is okay. I don't need everyone to need my core thing. It would be weird if I did.

Not only is it okay, it's necessary for you to be effective, truly effective in a sustainable long-term way, it's necessary. So I guess it's really important for us to know it's okay to not please everyone. You know, it's okay to not be liked, like good. That means if there's sections of people not liking you, right, or then you're on the right track.

First of all, I'm out front obviously, so I'm having some effectiveness if I'm getting their attention and the ones who care about what I care about and they're resonating with me and I'm making a difference with, they're going nowhere. They're stuck like glue, right? They're stuck like Velcro as to stick with the same analogy.

I think that if, for those who are follower of Seth Godin or the Purple Cow, you know that whole concept, it's once you can understand that fitting in is ineffective. You don't wanna be like shocking for the sake of being shocking. You just, you figure out who you are and you live that large and loud without apologies. And those who are,

On purpose.

Yeah. Thank you. I like to wrap up my interviews with three questions. The first question is for all of the people that have been as deeply inspired by you as I have over the last month, and particularly in the last 51 minutes what's the one best way that they can reach you?

Do you just click on that contact form and you can reach me and it does come directly to my executive assistant who we're very close every single day. So I will get your message through my website.

WellnessProductionsCo.com. Awesome, reach out if you want to be on her speaker directory. You will have to apply. Reach out if you are trying to change the world, especially in wellness.

Mm-hmm.

Awesome. Thank you, Antoniette. All right. My second question. This is my curve ball, my doozy.

Oh.

I love it. It actually was asked of me just yesterday and I was like, oh, there it is.

Am I happy?

Yeah. Ooh. Oh yeah. That's the one. In fact, honestly, that's a question we should be asking everyone in our lives that are at least a modicum of important to us. Antoniette, are you happy?

I am ecstatically happy, deeply, deeply happy cause I know that. The work that I do, what I wake up for every morning is work I really love and care about and also affords me the time to be with my over a dozen grandchildren when I wanna be with my grandchildren and travel and do all the other things that I wanna do.

Yes, I can't, even on the hard days at the core, I'm happy. Yes.

Mm. Yeah, partly because you're out loud and on purpose.

Mm-hmm.

Thank you for this space, Lucas. This has just been so comfortable and you've really drawn, drawn things out of me that, you know, a typical show hasn't. So you've had a real ability to do that. So thank you for that and continue doing your work and showing people the power and the importance of community.

Cause I definitely echo that. That's really where it begins. And not just joining a community for the sake of being belonging, but knowing yourself enough to know where, what you know, what spaces can you not only contribute to, but receive from. Right? Because without the giving and the receiving, then really you just have a thing that's not organic, not living, not breathing.

It means a lot. And I hope that your listeners really understand that it's not a word, it's actually an entity in a way, like a thing that lives and breathes and grows and evolves. Yeah. And so I think that's all, that's it from me.

Those are lovely words. I really appreciate you.

Yeah. Well, thank you for having me and ask me back anytime. I would be honored.