Xavier Dagba: There is a lot of lingo in that, so it is worth breaking down. The shadow is the part of us that we usually keep in the dark, the collection of the aspects of ourselves that we disown. It holds the feelings we don't want to feel, the pain we don't want to meet, the traits we don't want to embrace, and sometimes the gifts we don't want to fully live and share with the world because we're scared. Integration is about reclaiming our wholeness. I like to invite people to think of themselves as an ecosystem instead of a singular identity. You have so many distinct aspects within you, and sometimes we stay stuck because our journey requires that we reconcile with an aspect of ourselves that we don't want to reconcile with yet. Take someone invited to become a coach who doesn't like the idea of leadership. Life is going to say, okay, you're going to need to lead, and that means going into the shadow to bring forth the part of them that learned somewhere in childhood that leading was dangerous. So integration is reclaiming more of who we are so that we can live free. That's really the intention of my work.

Xavier Dagba: I get so much pushback when I describe it that way. When I first went into the universe of shadow work, there was so much fear in the writing, and so much of it read as occult, and I thought, this is not compelling. I had a mentor, Robert Masters, who unfortunately passed away this year. He wrote thirteen books, many around shadow work, and he always told me he was never able to make shadow work popular because people are afraid of it. And I kept thinking, this has been the single most liberating thing I've ever had to do. So I started looking for ways to demonstrate the benevolence of the shadow. If everything we navigate originates from one source, then seeing the shadow only as dangerous means I'm not seeing it fully. Every time you say I am ready to grow, I am ready to expand, you create a double activation. You're invited to rise and to descend all at once. The rise is embodying more of what makes you radiant. The descent is deepening your roots, going into your own soil to find the nutrients your elevation needs. Even in our years of repression and pain, I see the shadow as benevolent, because it holds what you don't yet know how to hold consciously so that you can function in a world that doesn't yet know how to receive your fullness. It says, give it to me, I'll hold it for you. And it's willing to be seen as the bad guy your whole life. That's how I arrived at the conclusion that the shadow must be the dark face of your higher self.

Xavier Dagba: This is my interpretation of what the collective shadow would say: I need all of you, at the individual level, to reclaim your own capacity for evil. That's a big ask. Reclaim your capacity for darkness. See the wrongdoings people are doing and do not put yourself on a pedestal above them. Our knee-jerk reaction, especially for people who want to do good in the world, is to decide that a person doing something unconceivable is less than human, because then we don't belong with them. The shadow is saying, this is what you are capable of when you disown love, so own it. That capacity is alive and well within you. I don't believe every German during Nazi Germany was just evil scum of the earth. I believe we can live in an ecosystem that brings forth traits and beliefs that are profoundly damaging. So the shadow is saying, open your eyes, don't put yourself on a pedestal, because some of the most heinous crimes have been committed by people who believed they were doing the right thing. I believe some of that is happening right now.

Xavier Dagba: I built my approach by seeing what works and adding what I believed would close the gaps. My first training was transformational coaching, and my first program was a purpose accelerator, to support people in doing the work they came here to do. Then I realised, in my own story, that the biggest shifts came from my ability to address the repressed pain I hadn't dealt with. So there had to be an aspect of working with our trauma. Working with people with complex PTSD showed me how much complexity lives in there, how one fracture invites someone to reconcile with many fractured aspects of themselves.

That almost forced me into the language of Jung, the recognition that an entire ecosystem of parts lives inside us. That's the introduction to parts work and IFS. And the more you dig, the more you find that Jung had already created the body of work others built their modalities on top of. The somatic component is there because the body has to be the container of integration. A big part of the work is, can I stay in my body when a trigger flares up, when an emotion I was conditioned to repress comes up? If I say no, I can't be with this, I dissociate or repress. And especially with men, I found that when you build a bridge to the body and they feel how an emotion moves through them, even without full language for it, it leads them to transformation. So it was trial and error, and liberating myself from the shoulds of my initial training. The goal is transformation, not staying true to a method for its own sake. I like to see myself as a bit of a mad scientist, creating the recipe that works for the person in front of me.

Xavier Dagba: In the late 2000s I was looking for myself. I had my first degree, in mathematics, in 2010, training to be a math teacher, and I thought, I don't think this is it for me. Around then the movie The Secret came out, and teachers like Esther Hicks, and it spoke to something I'd already felt but couldn't put my finger on. I was born Catholic and still have an affinity for much of that, but I started exploring, finding Wayne Dyer, Louise Hay, Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God. I loved that rabbit hole and I kept diving. But that was my side thing, in the closet. Even when I started meditating, I knew these things could feel freaky to my family, so I didn't talk about it. I kept chasing a feeling of meaning, thinking maybe I just need another pursuit. I got into a master's in economics and statistics, and then a scholarship to Montreal for a PhD, which I accepted. And through that whole stretch, up to 2013 when I started the program, there was a nagging voice saying, deep down you know this is not it.

Xavier Dagba: In 2014 I came to a second dark night. I couldn't drag myself to university. Maybe it was being in a different country by myself, no longer feeling the support or the societal pressure. It took me a year to convince myself to let go, and the reasons were heavy. I was being paid to study, which was a big one. And there was reputation: look at this guy, top of his class, given a golden opportunity, and he's going to blow it all. That was a shadow opening a door. In order to find your path, you have to let go of the path people think you should stay on. It was a complete identity destruction. I became the screw-up, the one people thought had been cursed, the one who didn't make sense to my family. I went from hero to zero in their eyes, and my pride was attached to it. I kept trying to positive-think my way out of it, and then came a call of shame that said, you're not going anywhere until you come and learn to love the things in yourself you've been conditioned to see as inadequate. In my family, school was salvation. The highest-paying job was salvation. I grew up in a country in crisis, watched my parents work themselves to the bone to send six kids to private school because they bet on us, and here I was being the bad example. That threw me right into the universe of the shadow. There were tiny moments of suicidal ideation, moments of seriously considering homelessness, a period of losing my student status when I couldn't afford the next visa. And I've always been driven to feel significant, to feel that my presence matters. So even that moment in the dump needed to matter. Show me how this matters became my prayer to God.

Xavier Dagba: A shadow career is a career that is very close to what your soul is asking you to do, close enough, but not quite it, the proxy that feels safest to go for. I knew I wanted to support people, but the thought of doing life coaching back then felt out of reach. I'd found people like Jim Rohn and Tony Robbins and thought, this guy gets paid to help people shift their mental states and create the lives they want, this is calling me. And then, who am I? A boy who just came from Cameroon, who three years earlier didn't even know what transformational coaching was. When you don't want to own something, your shadow has a way of making you consume your own light.

It shows you people embodying it, people you put on pedestals, and instead of emanating your light you consume it. That's the shadow saying, this is possible for you too, and I was in denial. So the closest thing I could do was health and fitness coaching. I could help people get fitter, so I did it, and I opened a gym. But my heart wasn't fully there. Sitting with clients, instead of the fitness and nutrition plans, we'd talk about how they felt, their inner states, what was happening in their lives. One client, Denise Jones, I'll never forget her, said, you are more my life coach than my fitness coach, and I am so grateful for it. When she said it, electricity ran through my body. In 2018 we closed the gym. I was this close to signing a lease for a new one, and I thought, no, I need to reinvent myself and really accept that. So the shadow careers were stepping stones. They taught me I had value to offer that I couldn't see back then, and they showed me I actually created real transformation with people. They built my confidence and my skills. Owning the gym made me lean into marketing. Network marketing made me talk about what I offer. I learned to sell a program I believed in, to design programs, running challenges like our fifteen-day Lean 15. A shadow career isn't negative. It's a stepping stone, close enough that you don't want to stay stuck there. Your life is leaving you clues.

Xavier Dagba: This isn't a personal attack, we're in this together. I believe our virtuous addictions are one of the biggest things keeping us trapped. We love being aligned, we love feeling inspired, we love feeling certain, and we're living in some of the most uncertain times ever. That requires trailblazers more than before, and I see thought leaders and light workers as the ones who need to go first into uncharted land. One of those virtuous addictions is the addiction to purity. I've started using an archetype I call the Puritan. People in this line of work love the purity in the way they approach the altar, the way they pray, the way they do the breath work. We want to be so perfect that it takes the magic out of the whole thing, when so many paradigms need to be reinvented. One of the greatest skills we can develop is the ability to shine our light imperfectly. That's where our human self and our higher self reconcile, where we break the pedestal. There's a David Goggins line, who's going to carry the boats. Your human self is going to carry the boats, and by the boats I mean the consequences that come with shining your light. When you go out and express what's meaningful to you, your human self has to feel the fear of humiliation, of alienation, of not being understood. Light workers don't like to feel that, so we tell ourselves we'll show up once we trust we're perfectly aligned, and our human self asks, who's going to give you that certainty? If I were the devil, I would take the brightest lights in the world and convince them they must shine perfectly, because that's how I'd get them not to shine at all. What we need now is the messy light worker, the person willing to blast their light out, realise they went too hard or not hard enough, and recalibrate. These are the consciousness first responders. We need them out there, not to add to the noise but to disrupt it, to be the person who says, take a deep breath, drop your phone, go hug your kids. Take care of your mental health, yes, and still, can you shine your light imperfectly in a world trying to convince you that's not the way?

Xavier Dagba: I'm a fan of the golden shadow, the light we keep in the dark. Meeting the dark shadow, the pain and fears and disliked traits, is fantastic, and no one escapes it. But I love the journey of reclaiming the light, because we're scared to fully reclaim the gold in the dark. It could be your bigness that scares you, a gift you were conditioned to see as inadequate, a passion you disowned because you thought it would cost more than it gave. Embracing the golden shadow is cleansing it of the prejudice we put on it. An example. Early on I was part of a community run by a man, Kyle Cease, who'd been a successful comic and left it behind. He did an event for a few thousand people, arrived with nothing prepared, and said, we're going to let the now teach us. I came from an academic world of theses and slides, and part of me thought, this guy is talking out of his ass, and I was hooked, and angry that I was hooked, and receiving value from it.

That was envy, and envy mirrors, this is also where your light is. You have your own version of this inside you. Working with the golden shadow is looking at all the ways we project our light externally so we can reclaim it. We're masters at projecting the dark shadow, insisting the evil is out there, and we do the same with our light: this person can do it, I can't, they're so radiant, I could never. Everyone mad at billionaires is, deep down, sensing their own abundant nature externalised. At one point, working through money, I decided to bring every billionaire into my heart, even the ones I believed were the most evil, and look at their capacity to create abundance, just to reclaim my own version of it. It doesn't have to look like theirs, but I want to feel that essence in me. What I get most passionate about is helping someone see where they're projecting their light, and then hearing the shadow say, well, go build your version of it.