Vanessa Petronelli: Returning to Your Inner Voice

The lovely Vanessa Petronelli is featured in this week's episode of Find Your True North. Access the podcast through iTunes or Soundcloud.

The following is an excerpt from our interview. Read on to find out how returning to her intuition brought her to a career she loves and a life she adores.  

I didn't know what intuition was as a child, but I used to have very visceral responses and “knowings.” Looking back at the journals I kept, my intuition warned me about things that wouldn't work out. I didn't see the other side of the coin at the time; I saw it as this “thing” that brought me premonitions of bad omens. It was a very strange experience to have because I didn't feel like I could talk to anybody about it, and I didn't. Even as a child, people would open up to me about their lives, and I would have this response that would make them wonder how I knew that. I intuitively knew how to answer and support them.

But as a teenager, I basically shut it all down. Or at least tried to shut it down.

When I was a little girl, I had a very strong intuitive knowing that I was here for a very specific reason. I knew that I was here to help in some big way. It wasn't an ego thing; to be perfectly honest with you I never had any dreams or goals to be in the entertainment industry, which is the direction I went. I didn't think about being an entrepreneur and owning my own business. I saw myself as an astronaut, or an environmentalist, possibly a psychiatrist or some sort of doctor.

At around the age of 14, what came through is a message from God saying that I was to go into the direction of being in the entertainment industry. It was a very specific and clear message, and when I heard it my life took a completely different turn. There was this very strong feeling within me that I was going to get into this industry to help people on a larger scale and that I had to go to L.A. I had this vision and this really stubborn attachment to being in Los Angeles by 25, working in Hollywood films, and the whole point was to choose projects that were going to make a difference in the world.

I was just going into high school when entered into the entertainment industry, and through the most bizarre set of occurrences, I joined a pop group. I was working with one of top agents in North America, even though I never had any acting skills growing up.

So I entered this industry, and you can imagine being in that industry as a teenager, balancing school and having a social life, and at night I’m this woman on stage, going to rehearsals. I was rubbing elbows with some of the top people in Toronto at the time, which is a big “Hollywood North.” People asked me to sign autographs, and I was just 16, 17 years old.

I shut my intuition down because there was really no room for it at the time. I was so busy and so focused on these external goals that I actually had to detach from this inner experience.

But I couldn’t turn it off entirely. I was always questioning things, always wondering, “Why are things like this? Why do we work five days a week and have two days off?” For some reason, I didn’t agree with the establishments that were in place in the world and felt a very strong conviction to rebel against it.

Being in the entertainment industry was actually an entrepreneurial endeavor. I was marketing myself, I was doing all the legwork, hustling. I was a brand and basically selling myself. And I think on some level that was my big F to the world. I didn’t want to go down the path that all my peers were on, where they were going to university, getting a job, and then their life was set out for them.

I decided I would create my reality, and I would live a reality that’s going to completely turn against this whole system and paradigm that we were taught to join on its head. And in this quest for truth, for knowing myself, I went away from the intuition.

It wasn’t until my 20s that I started to get very curious about it again. It was a turning point; I wasn’t very happy and my relationship to myself started to kind of deteriorate. By the age 23, I was doing so many things in the industry, and I ended up running my own marketing company. I worked with big corporations and loved running the company; we worked with companies like Fiji water, we dealt a lot with media and the Toronto Film Festival, and it was a lot of fun.

But at some point along the way, I developed body dysmorphia. I started to see myself through a very distorted lens because the industry has a way of breaking you down and reflecting your spots that lack self-love. There's a delusional type of normality in that industry; if you look at a woman who's healthy to most of us, the modeling industry might tell her she needs to lose 15 pounds if she wants to book work. And I it wasn't directed harshly on me, but I internalized a lot of it.

And it was hard. It was really hard. There's a ton of rejection, a ton of abandonment of self.

I knew I had to transition out of it, but I had a hard time letting go of the dream. But there were other parts of the industry that bothered me. The more I really worked on myself and listened to my intuitive voice, the more the industry felt misaligned for me. In the promotions world, I would hire people to come and promote products that were not necessarily helping people, or were polluting the planet. I became kind of angry and bitter about it, and the more I connected to myself, the more I saw the smoke and mirrors. I realized this is not me, this is not what I signed up for, this is not my path.

Finally, my first life coach challenged me and told me, “You know, you’re not cut out for this, just quit.” Part of me wanted to dig in because I had spent so many years hustling, and I looked at it as another F you – I would prove that I could do it. I decided I was going to do my thing, and go to L.A. to follow up with contacts there who were interested in working with me. I booked the trip.

And you know what happened just before I was supposed to leave? I got a virus all over my face.

I knew in every fiber of my being that this was not meant for me, but I didn’t want to accept the truth.

The virus was a wake-up call; my body was putting on a full-on protest to my decision to go to L.A., and I finally listened. I went on a year of soul searching and transitioned very slowly out of everything I was doing. I went from being a principle actress and auditioning for principal roles to doing background work. I went from one job to the next; at one point I worked as a flight attendant, worked temp jobs, and tried on normal things to see where I fit into the world. For the first time in many years, I had no dreams or goals; I didn't know who I was and what Vanessa really wanted out of life.

And that's when I went into meditation and started to learn more about metaphysics, and I also started studying yoga. Those three pieces really saved me so much throughout that year because it was a tough year. It was a year of knowing who I was and releasing a big part of my identity, and a big part of my heart and soul. It felt like God had betrayed me, and I had to work through it to get to the point where I saw that I was actually being protected. My higher self and my intuition really lead me to this phase, which has brought me to where I am now.

In that year of finding myself, a lot of my gifts started to activate. My intuition started to come back strongly. I started to see, feel, and know certain things. At one point, I was living with my parents and I was unsure where money was going to come from, but on the other hand there was so much excitement. It was like an opening was occurring for me. I could wait and allow myself to be guided. And that voice came back for me and I started to ask the question “What am I really here to do?”

The answer came through as a voice saying, “Will you do what you always love doing? You’re here to help people.” And I had been collecting this strong passion and connection toward personal development, spirituality, alternative health and wellness, yoga … it was like I was being trained for a role.

Oddly enough, at 19 years old, I had a really interesting premonition come into my awareness, where I imagined that there was such thing as a role of a life coach, but it was not something that was popular in Toronto. I had never heard of it even though it was already around, but I thought it would be a really cool job to coach somebody about their life. It was a fleeting thought, though… here today, gone tomorrow, and didn't think twice about it.

So then it hit me: I was like “Oh my God, I'm going to get into coaching.”

That's where the journey started into the work that I now do. Ultimately, I want people to understand that they are powerful creators; that they can be and have anything they want. They can access the highest version of themselves and they don't need to be disempowered by somebody else telling them what to do. We've been told what to do and who to be our entire lives, from family to caregivers to teachers to the media to our governments. We get to be who we need to be.

Vanessa is the creator & leader of the Soul Aligned Success Sisterhood. An entrepreneur for two decades and eight years of high-level personal, business & spiritual mentoring, Vanessa also works privately with high-performing female entrepreneurs & entertainment industry professionals, preparing them for the world stage. Vanessa guides her clients to create greater success, impact, wealth and fulfillment— by fully aligning them with their deepest truth and most powerful gifts. To learn more about her work, visit vanessapetronelli.com.