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In this episode of Building Texas Business, I welcomed Jen Sudduth, CEO of Sudduth Search, for an insightful discussion on her journey in the executive search industry. Jen shared her story of transitioning from Taylor Winfield to launching her boutique firm focused on transformative growth companies. I learned how Sudduth Search crafts a supportive work culture that prioritizes both productivity and well-being. Our dialogue also uncovered nuances around balancing work responsibilities with life's pleasures. As we wrapped up, Jen reflected on life lessons from mentorship to her commitment to the Special Olympics community SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Jen Sudduth shares her transition from Taylor Winfield to founding Sudduth Search, focusing on middle market private equity and emphasizing the need for leaders who can drive change. We explore the importance of having a business and marketing strategy before starting a venture, as well as considering when to hire based on company growth and values alignment. Strategies for maintaining work-life balance in recruitment are discussed, including setting boundaries and fostering a culture that supports employee well-being alongside business success. The episode delves into the comprehensive selection process for executive search, particularly for pivotal roles such as CFOs, and the role of retained search firms in this process. Jen reflects on the role of empathy in leadership and the importance of mentorship, drawing from her own experiences and her involvement with the Special Olympics. Personal joys, such as a preference for Tex-Mex cuisine and planning for sabbatical destinations like Maine and Santa Fe, are shared as part of achieving a joyful living. The conversation covers the initial opportunistic hiring during COVID and the shift towards a more strategic hiring approach to raise the team's overall expertise. Chris and Jen discuss the benefits of leaving a company the right way, honoring agreements, and how transparency can lead to unexpected opportunities. Jen advises on the importance of planning for success, not just the startup phase, by having operational projections and growth strategies in place. The episode also touches on Jen's past experience as Director of Talent at a consultancy, highlighting how internal hiring insights can improve external recruitment advice. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Sudduth search GUESTS Jen SudduthAbout Jen TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In today's episode, you will meet Jen Sudduth, co-founder and CEO of Sudduth Search, a boutique executive search firm. Jen's advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is to be intentional and purposeful in your business planning, and don't forget to plan for success. Okay, jen, first off, welcome to Building Texas Business. Thanks for being here. Jen: Thank you. Chris: So I'm excited to have this conversation with you today. I want to start by just allowing you to introduce yourself and tell us what your company, Sudduth Search, is known for. Jen: Sure. So we are a seven-person boutique executive search firm, but I think what we do is a little bit unique. We work with the middle market private equity. Probably 75% of our clients are private equity backed. The other are public, private you name it individually owned, it doesn't matter. I think the common denominator with all of them is that all of the companies are going through some sort of transformation, and most of the time that's growth. It could have been that they raised capital. That's a trigger to bring us in and go and replace some of your leadership team. Could be some of our bigger companies going through some sort of culture change. We did 10 positions for a Blackstone-backed company and basically they wanted to pull from outside of their industry and they didn't know how to do that, and so we helped them come up with a concept of how to do that completely, you know, changed their recruiting processes from how they were doing them before, and then they brought in a whole new culture and that's what they wanted. They wanted a different culture than they had before. So it's just, it doesn't matter what the trigger is, but it's usually some sort of change, transformation. You need a leader that can drive that change right. You need someone that is fearless. A lot of times that can come in, and they're you. You know they can make things happen. Right and that's where we play most of the time. Chris: Well, what I find interesting about that is how laser focused it is what inspired you to kind of start a search firm that was so focused on that kind of niche industry. Jen: So I've actually done it for over 20 years and the firm I was with before was called Taylor Winfield. I only bring that up because a lot of people know Taylor Winfield. I started with Taylor Winfield and kind of worked my way up and that's what they focused on. They were more. You know that was 2000, so there was a lot of venture money out there, there was Silicon Valley and they worked a lot in California we did. I was just a lowly junior recruiter back then and that's where I learned the business and that's where I kind of learned that world. And it's not for everyone, both as a candidate and as a recruiter, because sometimes candidates will go well, what are they going to sell? Am I going to still have a job? I'm like, well, you're really not, you're not right for this, because that's not the mentality that we look for in a candidate. But so that's how I got my start and that's how I learned it. And then when I started this up my practice five years ago, I kind of I don't do a whole lot of venture. I have a few here and there. Usually they're a little bit more mature as a company. I think. As I've aged I'm not as patient with the venture. I think they've got a great thing going. But it's just a different world and I think sometimes those, the people that are willing to go and do something really earlier stage, are not the same people that I'm looking for the middle market series, b series, c type folks. So so that's how I had got into. It was really that's kind of what I've done my whole career. Chris: Gotcha. Well, I know that you started this company Suddeth Search around five years ago. Jen: Exactly. Chris: So you had to make some decision to leave and just start fresh on your own. Let's talk about that a little bit. What drove that decision? Jen: So the company that I worked for was actually owned by and I don't usually say this, so you're getting new information here by my stepmother, connie Adair, and I bring that up because she's fully retired now. She's been retired for about two years. But she brought me into the business, not as a multi-generational business. I had to earn my keep, earn my way Right, just like everyone else. She was very big on treating me like everyone else. Chris: The benefit for you that she did that. Jen: Absolutely and I learned from the best. She was really known as one of the best in the industry so I kind of got to see that world and that process. But she sold to private equity and it was a private equity roll up. Like some of them, it didn't go really well. The integration piece was a little rough. Chris: Not unique in that regard, right and I got no benefit from it. Jen: To be quite honest. I stuck around to try to support her and she did well. And then she got another bite of the apple and I tried for two years. I wasn't a big company person and I realized if I can make this kind of money for someone else, I should be doing it for myself. And so I kind of did it because I could, and she fully supported me. She knew that retirement was on the horizon and so when I told her she said you know, I think you should go for it. So that's what I did. Chris: That's great. Well, I mean good to have that encouragement for someone that you were close with but considered to be a trusted mentor Absolutely. So got to be a little bit trepidatious to just start out on your own, even though you know what you're doing and you, I think you can't do that unless you have confidence that it's going to work and confidence that it will work isn't a guarantee that it will Absolutely. But you know what were some of the things you did to kind of set yourself up in those early days of starting your own company, to try to pave the path towards success. Jen: So I will start with the fact that I had a very strict non-compete. I did not get any clients from the company or from her, and I am a devout follower of non-competes. Chris: Well, it's funny, you say that you bring that, yeah, you know, now we devise people, I mean literally every day, on both sides of those, and right because because they exist and obviously you know there's a lot of buzz recently because the ftc came out with the rule to ban them, uh, which is, you know, probably not going to take effect because lawsuits have already been filed to challenge it. Jen: But it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out yeah in the next, over the next few years, I think yeah, and not to say I don't think some non-competes go overboard. I have heard some ludicrous non-competes as I'm interviewing, so sure, I do think a lot of them go overboard. I think the fdc is in the is moving in the right direction with some of them, because I think they're a little too restrictive. Chris: But that's not your question yeah, and even as the rule's written, it doesn't apply to executives, so it wouldn't change your world. Jen: It wouldn't, and I'd been there a long time. Everything I got was under their umbrella. So what I did do was I planned for a long time. I've owned businesses before and so I had a business plan, I had a marketing plan, I had a strategy. The other advantage I had was that I had been I've been asked to be on the board of ACG and so that was a. I knew that was going to be great PR. It's gonna be great relationships there. That's how I met Steve Kasten here at the Boyer Miller and a few others, and so I knew that was coming. But it was pretty far out. You know my tenure had just started. Didn't know I was gonna be president, but I knew that was gonna be on the. I'd have a lot of visibility. So that helped quite a bit. I think that was one factor. Fun story unrelated to your question the day before I quit, the day before my last day, I gave like four months notice and they knew I was leaving. I was unwinding. I had some really big searches, so I was unwinding those and finishing those up for clients, kind of on the bench, but just doing that. So the day of the last day of employment I get a call from that client that I just mentioned wanted to change their culture Blackstone Back Company. He said I got 10 searches for you, jim. I said, well, I can't do them, I'm leaving, today is my last day. And he's well, I'm not doing it without you. And so I called the company and I said here's what's happening. Would you, would we, can we do a fee split? Didn't know that was coming, but that was really great cash flow. And they said yes, and so we worked out a fee split. I continued I worked with that client and then they brought in their team, but it was great cash flow right out of the gates. And and then they brought in their team, but it was great cash flow right out of the gates. And then I developed brand new clients from that point on. But I knew the industry. I think the industry knew me. Chris: So even if it wasn't somebody, I'd worked before, I had a plan and I went after those people. That's a really cool story to hear and there's a lesson. There's probably many lessons, but one that just struck me right between the eyes is the lesson in leaving the right way, when you leave a company versus leaving the wrong way and you just laid out a roadmap for the listeners. If you're thinking about leaving, you left the right way, honoring your agreements, and then, with the transparency to get the slug of business for your new business, for your new company, because you went to them and said here's the deal, because you've done everything else right. It's good to hear that. I guess they could have not honored that, but they did the right thing in my mind too, yeah, by saying yeah, it'd be fair to share this and, by the way, we should. Customer comes first. That's what they want. Let's make them happy. Jen: So customer comes first. That's what they want. Let's make them happy. So, yeah, and I completely agree and I try to tell people and I know there's exceptions, I know there's bosses that are just difficult and if they know you're even looking there, you're gone. I know that happens, but I think majority of the time people are reasonable and if you come to them and sometimes I'll have friends come to me and say I'm thinking about making a change- Grass is greener Right and I'm like I know they're in a great situation. I'm like have you had a really difficult conversation with your boss before you leave, before you start thinking about? Have you told them that you're unhappy You've been there? Chris: 14 years or you've been there seven years. Jen: Have you talked about it? And usually the answer is no, and so I try to encourage them to say go talk to them first and then if it's still you know, in a month you still feel like it's just not fulfilling then talk about leaving. Yeah, but you need to give them a chance. Chris: It's great advice. People unfortunately right. It's kind of human nature to avoid the difficult, uncomfortable conversation, or at least I'll say this, the ones we perceive have it that they're going to be difficult or uncomfortable. And to your point, I think, a lot of times if you actually have the courage to go have it, they usually aren't as difficult or uncomfortable as you work them up in your mind to be. Jen: Absolutely. Chris: And you know I can speak. You know as well as you can. If you give your employer, where you've been otherwise happy for a while, the chance to have that conversation most people if there's a tweak or two that would keep you there, it's probably going to save the company a ton of money. To consider that. Jen: And it might benefit the company. Talk to them about. You know I'd really like to do more sales. You know I'd really like to take on bigger projects. You know what We've been looking for someone that wants to take on bigger projects. You just never know what the company needs. Chris: So we can go back. You mentioned, and just for the listeners ACG Association of Corporate Growth. Jen: Yes. Chris: Indice Group industry in the kind of M&A, a lot of private equity. So sounds like part of that marketing plan was to plug yourself in to the right kind of networking system where you would meet people and build relationships. Jen: That's correct. Yeah, yeah, and I eventually was asked to be president I don't know if you know that and so it was a lot of it was a lot of visibility as well. That's half the battle. Chris: Yes. Jen: Because there's a lot of top of mind search firms out there. Yeah, getting top of mind and helping them see that. I understand private equity, I understand what their challenges are. I understand what they're trying to achieve. I understand how capital's raised. You know I've got the knowledge base to be able to convey that to candidates and to help find the right one that's going to fit that. So I think that helped a lot and it's it was educational for me. You know, going to conferences, hearing panels speak. I know a lot about a lot or a little about a lot. Chris: Let me rephrase that I shouldn't admit that, but it's true, but it does. Jen: It's real educational to hear those conversations and to hear what's happening in the market. You know from your peers that are in the organization. Chris: A couple other takeaways from what you said. That I hope people listening caught is that you had a plan before you did this right, absolutely. You sat down and put it to paper a business plan, a marketing plan, a strategy. Look, I think those are so important and can be overlooked. When people say, look, I'm just going to go chase this dream, that's great because you need the inspiration, but you also need some substance behind it, because if you eventually do go to and most will go to a bank or an investor or something, they're going to be asking about that. So you better be prepared. Jen: Absolutely. Chris: So one of the things and you and I were talking about this, I guess before we got the recording going, and that is you know about this, I guess before we got the recording going, and that is you know, you now have seven employees. Let's talk a little bit about you know. I think there's a few conversations. One is what was it that triggered you each time to make the decision Now it's time to take on an employee or another employee, because those are big investments and then how did you go about making sure they were the right fit? Jen: Yeah. So it was growth that predicated the need. That was the part I didn't plan was when am I going to hire what? You know what? At what point do we need to bring on another person? At what point do we need to bring on a junior person, et cetera, et cetera. I didn't plan that piece of it and I probably should have, but it was really just my bandwidth and being able to do what I needed to do. You know, we were super busy during COVID, which sounds really strange, but I had some. I had that one big client that was still going. I had just so, if you think about I had been in business for about a year and so that year I had been really busy doing marketing and business development and getting out there and making relationships, and so it just it paid off and I think a lot of those people one of my biggest clients I don't know if you know Dave Marchese, he'd be a good guest. Let's do it. He called me out of the blue in the middle of COVID and we had met like five years prior, but he had seen my posts and my marketing and my emails and so he said I can't go out. I'm not going to go out and interview five interview candidates, but we're in the or excuse me search firms because we're in the middle of COVID. So what you got Jen, and so I took it on, and we've probably done 15 different positions over three or four years. Wow, so he's one of our biggest clients. So there that, I think the prior relationships definitely helped us make it. You asked about employees, though. Chris: Yes, well, before we go there. Yeah, one of the things you so interesting. You said I didn't plan for growth. Yeah, probably should have. Jen: Yeah. Chris: So, looking back, what do you think you could have done in that regard that you might offer as advice to someone that you know is maybe about to do something similar that you did five years ago? You know, what have you learned? Looking back, to say I would have, if I was going to do it again, I would plan for growth in this way. Jen: Plan for success. I think I was so focused on how am I going to get there that I didn't say if, when I get there, if when I get there, how am I going to get to the next level? I never did that. I never said, okay, I can handle 12 searches, or whatever it is, at different in different phases. So if I get 14, what do I do? At what point do I, you know? Do I need to start hiring when I get to 9 searches, whatever it? So maybe it was a revenue. I think I should have projected and said, because I've been in the business a while, I know how many searches I can do by myself or with a team, and so I think that would have been very helpful to do kind of like an FB&A analysis, but on the operational side. Chris: Right, Very helpful, that's very helpful. Okay, so now let's go back to kind of set a search. You starting to decide I've hit the point, I can't do this all, I've got to bring someone on. Yeah, you know how did you go about sourcing. I know obviously you've probably had a lot of contacts, but you know just the whole process of how you interviewed to make sure they were going to be a good fit for your company. Jen: So my first hire, I got really lucky because she was a neighbor, a friend who got laid off during COVID and so we brought her on just to do some of this data pushing type stuff. She made phone calls, cold calls, she's fearless, and then she grew into being a really good recruiter. After that first hire it was, oh my God, I can't handle this. I just need a body that can help do, a professional person that can do all this. After that hire I was much more purposeful. After that it was we want experience. We want, you know, degree Now she was degreed. But we want degreed individuals that understand the business world, that understand you know degree Now she was degreed. But we want degreed individuals that understand the business world, that understand, you know. I think every time I made another hire I kind of elevated my expectations. Chris: Right. Jen: And not to say the first hire was. She was a phenomenal employee, but I think every time after that I was much more purposeful about how I, who I wanted to hire and what my expectations of them were. Chris: Yeah, that makes sense to me and you're right, it's not a condemnation of the earlier hires. It's if you're doing things right, I believe you're always learning and your processes can always get better, and it doesn't mean you didn't make bad hires before, but you can get more intentionality around the decisions you're making and I think that's part of growth and when you're a one person show or two because my husband did join me about six months in it's harder to attract talent you know, Now we're about to make an offer to a pretty senior person and we had a really good slate of people that were interested, that were like, yeah, I want to join a boutique firm, I want to do what you're doing. Jen: So it changes too. Advert: Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom. And thanks for listening to the show. Well, that's validating. So you've gone through this process of sourcing people for your company, right, and what have you? What has that process and the learning? Jen: through that done to help you better advise your clients or vet candidates for them. What else about that I'm actually gonna go back to. So I took about five years. I left the executive search world and went to a consultancy and they I was director of talent. We tripled in size in about five years time and then they sold to Accenture about two years after I left. When I left, I think oil and gas was zero. The barrel, the barrel. Chris: I remember that yeah. Jen: So they made a strong comeback and then eventually sold. But being on the inside like that was the best education I could get, because it was. This is what happens when you make a really bad hire. This is what happens to the entire company when you make a really good hire. And we weren't huge I think we ended up being about a hundred but but it was really helpful to me to see. I also learned you know really short tenures on people's resume. There's a reason you know, I know there's reasons that people have to leave jobs absolutely there's good reasons, but when it's over and over and over, and then you hire that person because you're desperate for a data manager or whatever it is. You're desperate for that skill. You're going to find out why they can't stay in a job longer. I learned a lot being on the inside, you know, and I think that job is really what taught me kind of the hard knocks of making a mishire. Chris: Right. Well, I think you're to your point, right, it's if you look there are red flags, pay attention to them, and I know from our we're not perfect either in this business that I have, and you know sometimes you can convince yourself to overlook a red flag here or there, and more times than not you shouldn't. Right, there's exceptions to every rule, but we don't want to run a business based on exceptions necessarily You've got to be purposeful about those hires is really what it taught me. Jen: You know very purposeful. Chris: So just to kind of come back to Sutter's search a little bit so you have seven, about to have eight, and you talked about doing a search for a client where it was a culture change. Let's talk about culture at Sutter Search. What are you, as the kind of co-founder and CEO, doing to try to cultivate a culture? How would you describe it? And what are you doing to kind of, you know, foster it and breathe life into it? Jen: Yeah, it's hard with seven people, eight people, you know, to kind of create that, because you're like oh, we're just eight people, but they need it. Employees need training, they need to be developed, they need to evolve, they need to expand and grow, and so we actually started EOS at the beginning of this year. Are you familiar with entrepreneurial operating system? Chris: Yes. Jen: I think I don't know if Allie was the one that told me about it, but you know I've heard a lot of business owners that have done it, and so we actually started it and I think it's been evolutionary and I'm not selling it, I don't sell anything they do but it has really helped us be very purposeful about what we're doing for our employees, and so my one of our other managing directors is. She's in charge of kind of the HR and training, and so we have a weekly training every single week and it's sometimes it's heavier than others, but we have a weekly training every week and one of the employees actually gives it, so they have to go out and learn themselves and then they come and teach the rest of us. I try to. I'm a big advocate in the old school headhunting world is just dog eat, dog work, and so when I started my firm I was like I don't want to be that way. We're not working 12-hour days, we're not working both coasts, we're going to have a great and I hate to use the words work-life balance because I know it's overused. Chris: That's right. Jen: But we are, we're going to edit that part out. I'm kidding it is overused, but I think in some aspects it's important because you're a better employee if you take your vacation, if you didn't have to work until 9 pm the night before, if your managing director isn't calling you at 6 in the morning because she happens to be on the East Coast that is not the culture that we have. I'm always telling them you're going on vacation. Who's taking your emails? You're going on vacation. Who's taking your emails? You're going on vacation. Who's taking your calls? Did you put your out of? We require out of office messages to be turned on and I'm just, I'm always preaching that. I really think it's important to separate yourself and give your brain a break, because what we do is very, it's very repetitive, it's very. You know you may, if you have ten searches, that you have four candidates at least on what we usually have a hundred, but you have four finalists going through to offer yeah you think about the ups and downs every single day. Chris: It's a lot well, I mean, to your point, what you're doing, I mean, has to be stressful because you're affecting people's lives. Absolutely right, you got four candidates and or maybe see this as a great opportunity and are very hopeful, and you got a, a client, that needs to fill a hole and every day they don't have that whole field, they're losing money. So I can get that yeah to your point, the work-life balance and we could do a whole podcast on that. But I think what my experience has shown, or at least what I feel like I've learned through that, is our work-life balance is different at different times of our career. So it's hard to institutionalize that when everyone's at different stages. We try to use the term more like professional development. Developing our people to be great professionals means you tend to your business, but you tend to you have a life as well and you got to figure out how to manage both in a healthy way, knowing that the way it works for me now is totally different than it was 15 years ago right and that's okay because everything changes and we have new employees here that are going through totally different life stuff than I go through now. but how do we help give them the tools, the training to manage that and still be successful both in the office and in their personal life? Jen: Yeah, and we do we have different? Everybody kind of has a different work methodology. I shouldn't say hours, it's more like hours, you know a 20-something. They like to kind of work late in the day and have their workouts in the morning or whatever. Like everybody's kind of different. And then Hazel and I are about the same age and we like to not be disturbed until 8.30 or something. You know, like we like to go do our thing in the morning and work out and whatever. Read the paper and everybody's a little different, but we are very understanding of each other's different lifestyles. Right To your point. Chris: The key there comes to communication right. Yeah absolutely Absolutely, and so do you have. What is it that you're using as such to make sure those conversations are happening? Yeah, so that people understand how each other works differently, but together you can work for success. Jen: Yeah, we talk about it when they're hired. I say I'm not going to track your hours unless your productivity is not working Right, and then we're going to talk about it. Do you have too of a workload? Or, let's be honest, are you not working enough? You know, because last week you didn't have very many searches. This week you've got a lot. So if I need you to work till six, you gotta admit that last week you didn't have to. And they're very honest with me. A lot of times they'll say, hey, not going to be online until 10 or so, but I'm going to be working late or whatever. Or I stayed up for four hours last night sourcing. So you know I'll be available on phone but I'm not online. Perfectly okay, and we're very flexible that way. It's a little hard sometimes. You know, I'm always like are you working? I'm on the back of my brain and then I have to call myself and go. Of course they are, it's not producing. Chris: So that comes down to two fundamentals no matter what industry, communication, yeah, and what you're willing to do is have what some people might feel like is the harder conversation or uncomfortable conversation, but you approach it with kind of support and transparency. Jen: Yeah. Chris: The other thing. It comes down to productivity. Jen: Yeah, right. Chris: Absolutely. If we're running a business, we're running a for-profit business. We have to be productive to make the business go. So you can't lose sight of that. Some people, I fear at times the extracurriculars overweigh what we do to make our money and what is our. You go into the. This is what fuels our economic engine. We can't lose sight of that. It won't matter how many out-of policies or things we do, we won't have a business to support it. Jen: So it's finding a balance there, right? Yeah, I'd say the common denominator with all my employees is they thrive on success. They thrive on accomplishing things. They're not going to just shut things off if they're not done and they haven't accomplished what they set out to accomplish. They're very driven that way. That's a common denominator. Chris: Very good. So a little bit about your business. So you were saying you know, middle market focused, we're kind of approaching mid-year 2024, which is like just blows my mind that we're, you know, that far into the year already. But you know there are businesses out there that either use services like yourself or maybe contemplating that, and I know, at least in your world there's at least two different ways to go about it Retain, searches or kind of the contingency model. Can you just share maybe a little bit about what each is, the differences, pros and cons, and maybe flow into what a company should consider going one versus the other? Jen: Yeah. So I want to make it clear that I am not pro or con. Either way, I think there's a contingency, there's absolutely a place for it. I have several friends that are in the contingency recruiting world and they say I will never be in the retained world. So there is a place for it and I think if you have a large number of hires, you have a position or a company that is attractive to candidates and you want to get all the resumes you can get and then choose because they want to come to you, that's great. You can use contingency. What we do is a consultancy. So if you're a middle market working with a middle market firm right now, it's a downhole tool. Cfo position this position is critical that they get it right because they have big plans. I'm not going to tell you what those big plans are. They're private equity backed and they have big plans and it's going to happen, but if they don't have a financial expert that can devote time and devote, then it's not going to happen. And so it's critical, and in that situation you absolutely need to find the best person that you can find, and you need to interview a lot of people to make sure that you are choosing the right person, and so that's what we're doing. That's where we come in, and it doesn't have to be a CFO role. We can do. We do VPs and we do directors sure directors but we're going to look at 150 people that we know could do this job, and then we're going to reach out to every one of them and then we're going to interview 20 or 30. I'm going to interview half of those and then I'm going to present and rank the top. So it's not like we're going out and finding five people that are qualified and handing them to you. We're going out and finding 10 times that many maybe not 10 times, but a lot more than that and then finding you the best and ranking those for you to interview. So if it's a critical hire for your company to succeed, I would absolutely recommend retained, because they should be a retained firm, should be a consultancy, they should help you find that person. Chris: So that's really helpful, and hearing you describe it makes the difference very clear for me. I hope for the listeners and what I hear is you're doing a lot more upfront work on the retained side and I guess, as a consumer of these services, you should expect that your retained firm will do a lot more upfront work and vetting the best clients to bring to you. Jen: Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing I think that's important for my clients to know is our database is completely open. Our kimono is open. Is that a bad thing to say? Chris: No, we don't have video, so we're good. Jen: They can see everything we're doing, when we're doing, how we're doing. It's not a we'll talk to you in a month or two and we'll give you three great people. There's no magic thing that happens like that. It's a database they can go in. They can be like ooh, I know that guy and not going to work. Chris: Right, whatever reason, work right, whatever reason. So through, I guess, an online portal that you give them access to. Jen: okay and so it's a process to get to the fine. We meet once a week and I say here's why we chose, here's why we interview these people. What do you think? And a lot of times I'll say you know what? That company doesn't hire well, or they might be an acquisition on the horizon with that company. We can't talk to their people, so we have weekly conversations that get us closer and closer to the best person. And so it's a process, it's a very thorough process that gets us there. But that's 15, 30 minutes a week from our client, that's it. Chris: Okay, Well, they have to be invested, especially in these that are so critical. The positions to fill the client has to be invested. That's right and I like the somewhat. Maybe it's not. It sounds innovative to me that you are creating that opportunity for them to vet and see what's going on whenever they want. Right, but have those weekly check-ins. You know, it sounds like a kind of a white glove service, if you will. Jen: Yeah, and I think a lot of times people are scared, overtained. They're like what if it doesn't? What if you don't find someone? I'm like never happened in the history of 23 years, because we're talking to you and if we're not finding the right people, we're going to pivot, we're going to merge, we're going to figure out why is that happening. Is it the company reputation? Is it our pitch? Is it the way we're describing it? I mean, we're going after the wrong people. We will figure it out. We always fill the positions. Chris: Right Always, because you're invested in it. Right, right, it's not which. Jen: Because it's and it's not a. Here's three resumes, let me know. Chris: Right. Jen: That's not how it works. I got it. Chris: That makes sense. So a little bit, I just want to ask you're obviously, you know, leading this company. What, what would you or how would you describe your leadership style and how would you say that maybe has evolved over time based on your experience? Jen: So I would describe my leadership style as real. It's too real. I like to be pretty open with my employees and I have weekly calls with almost all of them I shouldn't say almost all of them. My fellow managing director we talk almost every day, so I don't have a weekly calls with almost all of them, I shouldn't say almost all of them. My fellow managing director we talk almost every day, so I don't have a weekly call with her. But the others, who I may not speak with, I have weekly calls. We talk about what's happening, what's going well, what is their workload like? I ask them what was the most challenging? Because we all work remote, so that's the other thing. We don't see each other every day right and I'll say what was the most challenging thing and what are you most proud of. And sometimes I had no idea. They're like oh well, I met that candidate at that event. I went to one of my. One of my employees told me that I'm like, I had no idea. Like you went to this networking event and happened to meet the right guy. So you know, just things like that. I try to have the communication very open yeah and they can tell me listen, I'm just not feeling well today or I'm mentally having some issues with home. I'm not going to tell you what it is, but I just need to sit back and I'm like, take the time, whatever you need to do. So I like to think I'm a pretty real manager. Chris: Yeah Well, it sounds like there's a lot of empathy that comes across in those calls, so they feel safe. Yeah, empathy, that comes across in those calls so they feel safe, and I think that's an important thing for a leader to be able to show empathy so that people will be more open and responsive, at whatever level your leadership is in the organization, is an important quality. It's interesting too, I think, that you asked about challenges, because I find it to be helpful to if you're kind of forced to reflect on what was really good about the last week and maybe what was a challenge, because we learn from both. Right, well, that's really good. Anything that you mentioned your stepmother earlier as a mentor, any learning from her that you kind of feel like you're implementing today and kind of carrying on some of the things you learned along the way from her Well, she is my free consultant, so you know, so I call her all the time. Jen: I'm like, okay, more free. Chris: Don't let her listen, she might start charging. Jen: She's fully retired, so she's like no problem. No, I think, being a peer to your clients and telling them no, sometimes you know she's not a yes man and I think I learned that, that you know you've got to push back. When you know, because of your 20 years experience, that something's wrong, you have to call the elephant in the room yeah and you have to say you, you may not skip this recruiting. You know, a lot of times my clients will get very excited about a candidate and they're like, well, can you just come see me tomorrow? And I'm like, no, he cannot because that's too fast for the candidate. They need time to process. You look too eager. I had one client that said it. He said I'm not coming to the first date with a diamond ring. You cannot come to the first date with a diamond ring, you have to let the process happen. But she was always very good about not being a yes man and I've learned that works and it pays off to help your clients be successful. Chris: It's funny that works and it pays off for to help your clients be successful. It's funny that reminds me there's an analogy that applies in all kinds of situations. But it's the cake right. So, just like you were saying, don't be too fast. Yeah, you can have all the right ingredients, mix it up, put it in the oven. If you pull it out too quick, it's going to flop yeah right. So you got to let the process, trust the process, let the process play out, and that applies in so many different aspects of business yeah, and these are humans that we're dealing with. Jen: These are people and they weren't thinking about a job change most likely. Chris: So you've got to let that change management process happen in their head, you know, let them go through that as well so good point to make and we'll repeat it that for what you're doing with these targeted executive searches, most likely the right person was not looking. The ones that are looking there could be one of those red flags there, Not always right, not always, but yeah. So, jen, this has been a fun conversation. Congratulations on your success, thank you. I want to ask you just a few things to wrap up. Yep, so obviously you've been in the search world, or executive search world, for you said 20 plus years. What was your first job? Jen: I remember you asked somebody else this, so I actually worked at a daycare for intellectually disabled kids and adults. Not that fun story that you wanted to hear, but it was fun. I absolutely loved it. I worked every summer. 0:36:20 - Chris: There had to be a lot of life lessons learned in that. Jen: Very challenging. These were kids that were not accepted at other daycares, even for special needs kids. And so I made $4.25 an hour. I was just telling this story because now I'm the chairman of the board for Special Olympics. Chris: Are you really? Jen: I am, and so they asked me my why, and I was like well, I did this for about five years, six years, all through college. I did summer camps and stuff, and so that population has a very soft spot in my heart. Chris: I love how that's come full circle in your life to be able to be doing what you're doing with Special Olympics. As an aside and maybe a plug, isn't Houston hosting the Special Olympics? Jen: next year, next year, I did not tell you that you didn't, but I just know we are right at rice, and is it 2025? Yeah, so that's a big deal, so huge those. Chris: Any listeners in houston, be on the lookout to go support that, what a great cause thank you, appreciate that all right. So my favorite question tex-mex or barbecue? Jen: tex-mex. I'm not a barbecue fan. My husband loves it, but I don't. Chris: Well, you know, you had no problem answering that question. Jen: Some people struggle so I love that In Texas only probably Right. Chris: So another question I get travel ideas from. So if you could do a 30-day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do? Jen: Maine. Chris: Maine. Jen: We. If you could do a 30-day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do? Maine, maine. We went to Maine last year. Oh my God, it's beautiful. We're empty nesters and so we're doing two-week working vacations. We just got back from Santa Fe and then we're hoping the next spring we're going to do Maine. Chris: Good for you. Yeah, I like that, kenny. Jen: Bunk or somewhere around there. Chris: Okay Well, you didn't let me finish a sentence, oh sorry, no, so I know you meant it right. Some people have to think about it. Jen: Oh, I knew. Yeah. Well, we're thinking about where we want to go now, so we've got a whole list. Chris: That's a fun process to go through. Yeah, it is so well, jen. Thanks again for coming. Special Guest: Jen Sudduth.
On this episode of The DEB Show, host Debra Eckerling speaks with Jennifer Ballard, Jenny Calcoen, and M.J. Fievre about Life Implosions. Jen Ballard is founder of Joy Scoutz Gen-Xer Adventure Club; Jenny Calcoen is CEO + Founder of Inner Earthquake™, and M.J. Fievre is author of the Badass Black Girl series, among other titles. When facing change, by choice or circumstance, it's best to pause, take a breath, and embrace it. Jen, Jenny, and M.J. discuss how they got - and get - through challenging times, as well as some of their life explosions aka the good things. The trio also shared recommendations for coping with whatever life throws your way, tips for setting boundaries, goals for self care, and more. What Counts as a Life Implosion - MJ: A situation that brings you more stress than you think you can endure - Jenny: It could be minor for one person and major for another. It's something that shakes up your insides, it impacts your identity - Jen: It's about the loss of control, a major life event, uncertainty, fear How to Deal With Them - Jenny: Approach with curiosity - MJ: Figure out what you can and can't control - Jen: Look at the big picture Goals - Jenny: If you are living your life based on someone else's expectations, there's a voice inside that you need to listen to. Quiet the noise, pause, trust yourself, develop confidence - Jen: Have an adventure. Do something that's exciting that takes you outside of yourself. It helps you reset - MJ: Try journaling. Imagine your perfect life and write it down Final Thoughts - Jenny: Believe in Yourself - Jen: From Lisa Nichols: Fill your own cup and serve others from the overflow in your saucer - MJ: Create a support system before you need one Learn More: Jennifer Ballard: https://Facebook.com/JoyScoutz Jenny Calcoen: https://JennyCalcoen.com M.J. Fievre: https://BadassBlackGirl.com Debra Eckerling: https://TheDEBMethod.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week on The DEB ShowI, host Debra Eckerling discusses journaling with Jen Jones Donatelli, Creative Groove; Lynda Monk, director of the International Association for Journal Writing; and cartoonist Chari Pere. There are plenty of benefits to journaling from self-care and emotional wellbeing to problem solving and productivity. The panel shared their early journaling experiences, as well as thoughts on the value of a regular practice, options for journaling, and so much more. The Benefits of Journaling - Lynda: Journaling helps you to know – and craft – who you truly are. It's one thing to think our thoughts, it's another to write them down. Plus, knowing yourself improves you relationships with others - Jen: It gives you a reason to carve out time for yourself every day - Chari: You get to say things to yourself that you wouldn't necessarily say out loud - Jen: Journaling also helps you track synchronicity - Lynda: Manifestation happens when you think about what you want, write it down, and speak it Journaling Prompts - Lynda: Use visuals, quotes, and questions to inspire you - Chari: Write your future in the present tense - Jen: Highlight self-care in morning mojo sessions; ask what your body, mind, and spirit are trying to tell you on this day Goals - Chari: Pick one thing to write about: gratitude, a good deed, etc. Then, put a doodle next to it. The doodle should add to what you are writing - Jen: Find ways to make your journaling routine really juicy: find your ideal spot, snack, or practice to make the entire experience enticing - Lynda: Join a journaling community Final Thoughts - Jen: Give yourself some grace around your journaling practice - Cheri: Start by writing in 15 minutes sessions - Lynda: Write about your thoughts and feelings, not just what you see and experience Learn More: Jen Jones Donatelli: CreativeGroove.com Lynda Monk: LyndaMonk.com, IAJW.orh/journalwriting Chari Pere: ChariPere.com Debra Eckerling: TheDEBMethod.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Did you need a laugh tonight? Then we got you covered with One Funny Mother! In this lighthearted and humorous post, MomCave's Jennifer Weedon Palazzo and One Funny Mother's Dena Blizzard share all about motherhood and the funny moments that happened to them.Jennifer Weedon Palazzo and Dena Blizzard share amusing stories and reflections about family and aging. They cover topics such as Valentine's Day, toe cramps, aging, such as hygiene, bedspreads, the discomfort of pants, and inheriting physical characteristics from their mothers. OH MY! Their conversation is lighthearted and includes personal experiences and jokes they can't wait to share with you. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Did you need a laugh tonight? Then we got you covered with One Funny Mother! In this lighthearted and humorous post, MomCave's Jennifer Weedon Palazzo and One Funny Mother's Dena Blizzard share all about motherhood and the funny moments that happened to them.Jennifer Weedon Palazzo and Dena Blizzard share amusing stories and reflections about family and aging. They cover topics such as Valentine's Day, toe cramps, aging, such as hygiene, bedspreads, the discomfort of pants, and inheriting physical characteristics from their mothers. OH MY! Their conversation is lighthearted and includes personal experiences and jokes they can't wait to share with you. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We know you've heard the old saying it takes a village! In this day of age, we understand it may be hard, but not impossible, to have your own village.Jen and Florence Ann Romano discuss the importance of building a "village" of supportive relationships, particularly for mothers. They emphasize that building a village isn't always easy, and it takes time and effort to find the right people who align with your values and personalities. Florence also stresses that having a full social calendar doesn't necessarily mean you have the right people in your life, as the right people should "fill up your cup, not deplete it." She shares her personal experience about how one of her best friendships was formed through a mutual friend and how she encourages readers to share their own stories of how they met their best mom friends.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------SUBSCRIBE NOW
We know you've heard the old saying it takes a village! In this day of age, we understand it may be hard, but not impossible, to have your own village.Jen and Florence Ann Romano discuss the importance of building a "village" of supportive relationships, particularly for mothers. They emphasize that building a village isn't always easy, and it takes time and effort to find the right people who align with your values and personalities. Florence also stresses that having a full social calendar doesn't necessarily mean you have the right people in your life, as the right people should "fill up your cup, not deplete it." She shares her personal experience about how one of her best friendships was formed through a mutual friend and how she encourages readers to share their own stories of how they met their best mom friends.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------SUBSCRIBE NOW
Today we're talking about the spiritual discipline of spending time with Jesus. Is there any more transformational practice than spending time with Jesus? When we talk with Him and listen to Him and love Him and let Him love us back, it changes everything. We are no longer who we were after we've spent time with Christ. In this episode, AJ and Jen share: Ideas to freshen up your quiet time Creative ways to find time to spend with Jesus when your kids are little or homeschooling And the remembrance that all it takes is one step at a time in the direction of Jesus to shape a life. Key Quotes “God's heart's desire is for us to remain with Him.” - AJ and Jen “Everything in my life is intended to be for the glory of God.” - AJ and Jen “It's okay to schedule time with God; it doesn't mean I'm not spiritual because I don't get up at 4 a.m. and study.” - AJ and Jen “It was my desperation that forced me to make the shift from checking off the list of spiritual things to, ‘I really need Jesus Himself.'” - AJ and Jen “Embrace the difficult season you're in, and don't feel guilty about what you can't do or are not doing. Instead, allow that situation to drive you to Jesus.” - AJ and Jen “I tend to have spiritual ADHD, and I rush through things so fast that I miss the point.” - AJ and Jen “I made my quiet time portable through meditation.” - AJ and Jen “The Lord will increase your desire and your ability to find the cracks and the in-between moments.” - AJ and Jen As Mentioned in the Podcast The FCC requires that I tell you that I'm an Amazon Affiliate, which means I earn a bit of commission on each sale. But don't worry, there's no added cost to you! #113: Grace + Your Body: Aging with grace Day By Day Chronological Bible Dwell App Sojo Academy The Sojo Show Sojo Hub Praying the Promises of God About AJ and Jen AJ is a career missionary, and Jen is a pastor's wife. Together, they have spent the last 27+ years mentoring others in their relationship with God. Collectively, they've adopted internationally, lived in five different countries, gone through medical school, put their husbands through seminary, planted churches, worked as professionals, started their own businesses, served as military wives, volunteered in schools, and homeschooled kids. Because of this, they bring decades of ministry and life experience to the women they serve in Sojo Academy, the global community of women they run together. Here's how to connect with AJ and Jen Podcast Instagram YouTube Here's how to connect with Jill Website GraceInRealLifePodcast.com Instagram Facebook group Facebook page Subscribe to Jill's weekly “the good + the grace” email
Jen and Renee Rhinehart from Party Host Helpers chat about how to celebrate Valentine's Day when you have young children. They discuss how date nights are a way to connect with your partner, even if you have to rely on a babysitter. Jen and Renee speak about finding small ways to celebrate throughout the day, such as sending thoughtful texts or leaving a love note. What they both can agree on is that it is important to prioritize your relationship, even when you are busy with young children.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------SUBSCRIBE NOW
Jen and Renee Rhinehart from Party Host Helpers chat about how to celebrate Valentine's Day when you have young children. They discuss how date nights are a way to connect with your partner, even if you have to rely on a babysitter. Jen and Renee speak about finding small ways to celebrate throughout the day, such as sending thoughtful texts or leaving a love note. What they both can agree on is that it is important to prioritize your relationship, even when you are busy with young children.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------SUBSCRIBE NOW
Jen talks holiday traditions (some touching, some funny) with Maia Hagg, children's book author and founder of I See Me Personalized Children's Books. What are YOUR holiday traditions?
Jen talks holiday traditions (some touching, some funny) with Maia Hagg, children's book author and founder of I See Me Personalized Children's Books. What are YOUR holiday traditions?
In this episode, I talk to Jen Coken. She is a coach, speaker, and comedian who has coached thousands of people for nearly 20 years to go beyond their self-made limitations and produce breakthrough results. She uses humor to help her clients transition through tough times to rediscover their joy, purpose, and passion.We talk about imposter syndrome, how it works, Jen's five-step formula: The P.O.W.E.R code, depth of dissatisfaction, and more. Shownotes:(03:00): Imposter syndrome(05:18): How does imposter syndrome work?(10:05): Turn impostor syndrome into your superpower (15:16): Five-Step Formula: The P.O.W.E.R Code (16:35): Rediscover the best version of you(19:38): Depth of dissatisfaction(30:47): How to build a relationship(35:14): Your freedom to produce results(44:49): Beginner's MindHow to connect with Jen: Website: https://www.jencoken.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jencoken/Linktr.ee: https://linktr.ee/jencokenLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coken/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfF6gn4O5o3Z4MTvrXzB5NATwitter: https://twitter.com/jcokenFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/jenncokenResources mentioned: The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael Singer The Surrender Experiment: My Journey into Life's Perfection by Michael SingerDr. Joe DispenzaTop Gun: MaverickSmokelore: A Short History of Barbecue in America by Jim Auchmutey“Your thoughts become your thoughts turn into words, words become actions, actions become your personality.”- Misbah“When we're at the present, there's no past there no future.” - Jen“Leave people at choice, who they are, how they want to show up and owning their most authentic self, by being real about who they are in a professional way.” - Jen“It's unique to ask.” - Jen
October is Infant Loss Awareness Month. We're talking live with Alison Jacobson, CEO of @FirstCandle, a non-profit whose mission is to end SIDS. She'll share the story of her son and her wisdom on this serious topic.---------------------------------------------------------Subscribe to our mailing list for exclusive content, new videos, giveaways, and free nannies. (Okay, that part's a lie...): http://eepurl.com/SJxVjSUBSCRIBE on Youtube: http://goo.gl/QSV97mFollow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/MomCaveTVLike us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MomCaveTVPin with Us: http://www.pinterest.com/MomCaveTVInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/momcavetvTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@momcavetvOur blog/giveaways: http://www.MomCaveTV.com--------------------------------------------------------Here's a bit of a transcript. You can read the full interview at MomCaveTV.com:Jen: Hi, this is Jen and this is Mom Cave Live, where we may have lost our minds, but we haven't lost our sense of humor. I am Jen and I'm here with our special guest this week, Alison Jacobson from First Candle.org who is discussing Infant Loss as well as Safe Sleep Awareness Month.It's going to be a little more serious of an episode, though. Of course, you know, we can't help but make jokes all the time about everything.Infant Loss Awareness MonthBut it's because this is Infant Loss Awareness Month. So we're going to talk to Alison a bit about that. Hi, Alison.Alison Jacobson: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.Jen: Thank you for being here. It's such a really, really important topic that a lot of us don't know as much about as we should or think we do. So I'm grateful for you being here.Alison Jacobson: Thank you.Jen: Can you tell us first, what is First Candle.org? How did it come about and where can they find it?Alison Jacobson: So First Candle is a 40-year-old organization that's been around – a nonprofit organization. We are national. We used to be known as the SIDS Alliance. And we have been involved in SIDS and Safe Sleep forever. In fact, we were instrumental in getting all the messages out about “Back to Sleep.”And because of that, the rates of SIDS declined by 50 percent. But then all of a sudden they stopped. And about 10 years ago, they leveled out. So we started looking at the government level and pediatricians about what was happening.And it was more than just “Back to Sleep.” The reality was that a lot of these incidents were sleep-related infant deaths with accidental suffocation. Now, the reality is that's bad news, but it's good news, because with SIDS, you didn't know how to prevent it or how to to do anything.Jen: It was very mysterious.Safe SleepAlison Jacobson: Right! Exactly. It was this great mystery and scary as heck! With accidental suffocation, there are absolutely things we can do to help prevent it. What I wanted to point out is that it is Infant Loss Awareness Month, but it's Safe Sleep Awareness Month as well.And, you know, I'm not trying to make it more positive, but there are things we absolutely can do. Moms, grandmas, everybody needs to know there are simple things we can do to keep our babies safe.Alison Jacobson: Right.Jen: So why is it that babies should be on their backs?Read the rest here: https://www.momcavetv.com/safe-sleep-for-babies-with-alison-jacobson/
October is Infant Loss Awareness Month. We're talking live with Alison Jacobson, CEO of @FirstCandle, a non-profit whose mission is to end SIDS. She'll share the story of her son and her wisdom on this serious topic.---------------------------------------------------------Subscribe to our mailing list for exclusive content, new videos, giveaways, and free nannies. (Okay, that part's a lie...): http://eepurl.com/SJxVjSUBSCRIBE on Youtube: http://goo.gl/QSV97mFollow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/MomCaveTVLike us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MomCaveTVPin with Us: http://www.pinterest.com/MomCaveTVInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/momcavetvTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@momcavetvOur blog/giveaways: http://www.MomCaveTV.com--------------------------------------------------------Here's a bit of a transcript. You can read the full interview at MomCaveTV.com:Jen: Hi, this is Jen and this is Mom Cave Live, where we may have lost our minds, but we haven't lost our sense of humor. I am Jen and I'm here with our special guest this week, Alison Jacobson from First Candle.org who is discussing Infant Loss as well as Safe Sleep Awareness Month.It's going to be a little more serious of an episode, though. Of course, you know, we can't help but make jokes all the time about everything.Infant Loss Awareness MonthBut it's because this is Infant Loss Awareness Month. So we're going to talk to Alison a bit about that. Hi, Alison.Alison Jacobson: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.Jen: Thank you for being here. It's such a really, really important topic that a lot of us don't know as much about as we should or think we do. So I'm grateful for you being here.Alison Jacobson: Thank you.Jen: Can you tell us first, what is First Candle.org? How did it come about and where can they find it?Alison Jacobson: So First Candle is a 40-year-old organization that's been around – a nonprofit organization. We are national. We used to be known as the SIDS Alliance. And we have been involved in SIDS and Safe Sleep forever. In fact, we were instrumental in getting all the messages out about “Back to Sleep.”And because of that, the rates of SIDS declined by 50 percent. But then all of a sudden they stopped. And about 10 years ago, they leveled out. So we started looking at the government level and pediatricians about what was happening.And it was more than just “Back to Sleep.” The reality was that a lot of these incidents were sleep-related infant deaths with accidental suffocation. Now, the reality is that's bad news, but it's good news, because with SIDS, you didn't know how to prevent it or how to to do anything.Jen: It was very mysterious.Safe SleepAlison Jacobson: Right! Exactly. It was this great mystery and scary as heck! With accidental suffocation, there are absolutely things we can do to help prevent it. What I wanted to point out is that it is Infant Loss Awareness Month, but it's Safe Sleep Awareness Month as well.And, you know, I'm not trying to make it more positive, but there are things we absolutely can do. Moms, grandmas, everybody needs to know there are simple things we can do to keep our babies safe.Alison Jacobson: Right.Jen: So why is it that babies should be on their backs?Read the rest here: https://www.momcavetv.com/safe-sleep-for-babies-with-alison-jacobson/
Does the sugar-rush of post Trick or Treating scare you more than ghosts? How do you celebrate Halloween with a diabetic child? Meet Bethany Braun Silva, former editor of Parenting.com, What to Expect, and Big Apple Parents. We chat and laugh about NON-candy Halloween treats and fun activities for the whole family.SUBSCRIBE on Youtube: http://goo.gl/QSV97mFollow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/MomCaveTVLike us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MomCaveTVPin with Us: http://www.pinterest.com/MomCaveTVInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/momcavetvTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@momcavetvOur blog/giveaways: http://www.MomCaveTV.comHere's a bit of a transcript. You can read the full interview at: https://www.momcavetv.com/non-candy-halloween-treats------------------------------------------Jen: Welcome to MomCave Live where we may have lost our minds, but we have not lost our sense of humor. I'm Jen and my guest today is Bethany Braun Silva. Hi, Bethany.Bethany Braun Silva: Hi. How's it going?Jen: Great. I want to give you an intro, but it's so hard to say she's been on all the places because she is a parenting and lifestyle expert editor. So Bethany has worked for Parenting.com, Big Apple Parent, and What to Expect. And so she is here to help us with one of the big questions every parent has around Halloween, which is how can we make it not be about just candy?Bethany Braun Silva: You know, it's so funny. Like I even after 10 years of being in this industry, I still kind of cringe when I hear the word expert and my parenting expert, parenting plus expert. It always seems like an oxymoron to me.Jen: It is. I mean,maybe I'm an expert on the digital media side, but with my own kids, no, I don't consider myself an expert. And this is something I'm definitely a work in progress, especially around this holiday time struggle with Halloween candy.Bethany Braun Silva: So this is something that I'm like actively, proactively dealing with myself. And I have a few tips that have worked with me, some I've learned from my mom friends, some non-candy Halloween treat ideas and activities… things like that. And really the first one that I want to talk about is this idea of the Switch Witch.Jen: Right, so OK.Bethany Braun Silva:: And people sometimes call it the Halloween fairy. There are different names. You can Google it-Jen: I guess for some kids, witch is just too scary. We'll make it a “fairy.”Bethany Braun Silva: So this is really a way to kind of incentivize your kids. And I learned this from a neighbor of mine, and I have to tell her that I gave her props right here. So essentially what you do is… You don't have to NOT go trick or treating. You can still have fun, trick or treating.You can get all the candy. I know for me it was like a big deal counting. My kids have to count it and tally up all the pieces. Right. So you don't have to eliminate that because that is really fun.Read the rest of the transcript at: https://www.momcavetv.com/non-candy-halloween-treats
Does the sugar-rush of post Trick or Treating scare you more than ghosts? How do you celebrate Halloween with a diabetic child? Meet Bethany Braun Silva, former editor of Parenting.com, What to Expect, and Big Apple Parents. We chat and laugh about NON-candy Halloween treats and fun activities for the whole family.SUBSCRIBE on Youtube: http://goo.gl/QSV97mFollow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/MomCaveTVLike us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MomCaveTVPin with Us: http://www.pinterest.com/MomCaveTVInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/momcavetvTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@momcavetvOur blog/giveaways: http://www.MomCaveTV.comHere's a bit of a transcript. You can read the full interview at: https://www.momcavetv.com/non-candy-halloween-treats------------------------------------------Jen: Welcome to MomCave Live where we may have lost our minds, but we have not lost our sense of humor. I'm Jen and my guest today is Bethany Braun Silva. Hi, Bethany.Bethany Braun Silva: Hi. How's it going?Jen: Great. I want to give you an intro, but it's so hard to say she's been on all the places because she is a parenting and lifestyle expert editor. So Bethany has worked for Parenting.com, Big Apple Parent, and What to Expect. And so she is here to help us with one of the big questions every parent has around Halloween, which is how can we make it not be about just candy?Bethany Braun Silva: You know, it's so funny. Like I even after 10 years of being in this industry, I still kind of cringe when I hear the word expert and my parenting expert, parenting plus expert. It always seems like an oxymoron to me.Jen: It is. I mean,maybe I'm an expert on the digital media side, but with my own kids, no, I don't consider myself an expert. And this is something I'm definitely a work in progress, especially around this holiday time struggle with Halloween candy.Bethany Braun Silva: So this is something that I'm like actively, proactively dealing with myself. And I have a few tips that have worked with me, some I've learned from my mom friends, some non-candy Halloween treat ideas and activities… things like that. And really the first one that I want to talk about is this idea of the Switch Witch.Jen: Right, so OK.Bethany Braun Silva:: And people sometimes call it the Halloween fairy. There are different names. You can Google it-Jen: I guess for some kids, witch is just too scary. We'll make it a “fairy.”Bethany Braun Silva: So this is really a way to kind of incentivize your kids. And I learned this from a neighbor of mine, and I have to tell her that I gave her props right here. So essentially what you do is… You don't have to NOT go trick or treating. You can still have fun, trick or treating.You can get all the candy. I know for me it was like a big deal counting. My kids have to count it and tally up all the pieces. Right. So you don't have to eliminate that because that is really fun.Read the rest of the transcript at: https://www.momcavetv.com/non-candy-halloween-treats
00:47 - Jen's Superpower: Being Optimistic * Recognizing Negative Loops * Intentionality & Prioritization * Preventing Security Vulnerabilities 10:13 - Working On Open-Source Projects vs Commercial Software/Products * Gathering Feedback (RFCs) * Baby Steps = Big Impact 12:57 - Major vs Minor Releases * Semantic Versioning * Deprecation Warnings * Advanced Notice * Incremental Rollouts 18:45 - RFC / Feedback Processes * Dealing with Contradictory Feedback * Reaching Consensus * Visionary Leadership * Additions 23:25 - The Ember Core Team (https://emberjs.com/teams/) * ~30 People * Funding * LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/) (Corporate Sponsorship) * Consultants & Consultancies * Volunteers 26:31 - Doing Open Source Better * Sponsor Company (Time) * Knowledge Sharing * Framing Work As How It Values Contributors * Reframing How We Think About Open Source Sustainability (i.e. Company-Wide Open Source Work Days) * Frame Value to Company * Frame Value to Users * Frame Value to Engineering Teams * Attitude Shifts 39:56 - Participation Encouragement & Engagement Tips * Use The Buddy System * Having Well-Scoped Issues * Increasing Levels of Challenge (Subtle Cheerleading) * Help People Spin Up Quickly 46:00 - Widening the Pool of Participants * Being Easy to Reach * Social Media Activity * Working In The Open 47:36 - UX-Driven Design (User Experience-Driven Design) Reflections: Damien: Perspective of those impacted. Sponsors, users, etc. Arty: What it's like to work on a big open source project and the challenges we face. Jen: Exploring small-project lifecycles. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: ARTY: Hi, everyone and welcome to Episode 253 of Greater Than Code. I am Artemis Starr and I am here with my fabulous co-host, Damien Burke. DAMIEN: And we are here with our fabulous guest, Jen Weber. Jen Weber is a member of the Ember.js core team and is a senior software engineer at ActBlue Technical Services. Jen loves open source, rapid prototyping, and making tech a more welcoming industry. Jen, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show. JEN: Thank you so much for having me. DAMIEN: So you should have gotten an email preparing you for the first and most difficult part of every appearance on Greater Than Code. Are you ready for this? JEN: I am. DAMIEN: What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? JEN: All right. So I did get that email and I've been thinking about those for the last couple of days. I think my superpower is being able to imagine the ways that things can go well. DAMIEN: Wow. That's very special. JEN: Thank you. DAMIEN: How did you acquire that? JEN: So I used to be very good at imagining all of the ways that things can go badly. Those are still the patterns that my mind walks whenever I'm confronted with a challenge, but someone gave me some advice. I was recounting to them all of the ways that things could go badly, they were like, “What would it look like if things went well?” I've been trying to build that as a muscle and a skill anytime I'm working on a new project, or something hasn't gone well, something's already gone badly, and I'm trying to figure out what to do next. I found that helped me open up to more creative thinking. ARTY: I really think that is a superpower and in order for things to go well, for us to manifest good things toward a good direction, we have to be able to see the steps to get there, imagine ourselves walking in that direction to be able to do it. And if we're caught in a loop of worrying about all the things that are going to go wrong, anticipating those things going wrong, then it's like we're going to be waiting for him and doing things that help bring those things that we don't want into being. So if you find yourself in this mode, it sounds like this is something that you struggled with and learned this adaptive skill to break out of this pattern. So what kind of things do you do? Like, do you tell yourself things or ask yourself certain questions, or how do you snap out of that mode and get to a better place where you're thinking about things in a positive frame? JEN: Sure. I think for me, the first step is just recognizing when I'm in that negative loop and accepting that it's my first reaction, but that doesn't need to be my conclusion to my thought process. If I'm working on let's say, there's a real-world challenge. Just to give an example as part of my work on the Ember core team, I might think about how do I engage the community and announce that there's going to be this new version of Ember? If I imagine things going badly, I imagine like, “O, wow, nobody even retweets it a single time,” and if I imagine things going well, I think like, “Wow, it's this big moment in tech.” And if it was a big moment in tech, what would have the involved people done to get to that successful end point and trying to work backwards from that to connect the dots. It takes some intentionality, it takes having enough rest, it takes not being over-caffeinated to be able to unlock that kind of thinking. DAMIEN: But it sounds so powerful, especially as an engineer, or as an advocate. It's like because we're in the role of making things into what we want them to be, which is things going well, right? JEN: Yeah, and it's a little different than a wishful thinking, I would say, because you're still thinking in order for things to go, well, you have to overcome challenges, you have to solve problems, you have to prioritize, there's going to be difficult moments. So you're not just dreaming that this good feature is going to come into existence, but actually figuring out what are the nuts and bolts, and pieces, like, what are the ingredients to that recipe? When we think and reflect on that, how can we take those ingredients and apply them to right now to get where we want to go? ARTY: So you take that vision and then work backwards and translate that to actual action. These are things that we can do right now to walk the path of getting where we want to go. JEN: Mm hm, and it might take you somewhere totally different direction. It might be very different by the time you're done. But usually, you can figure out a few things here and there that are steps in the right direction, and the right direction could be one of many different directions. ARTY: Do you find yourself ever getting disappointed that things don't go the way you envisioned? JEN: Oh yeah, for sure. [laughter] Yeah, and I think that's a little bit part of the rollercoaster of being involved in software. Like every single day is a series of things going a little different than you thought they would. You read the code; you think it's going to go a certain way. You're wrong; you change your plan. You have this idea of a direction you're going to go, you've thought about what are the successful steps to get there, and then you end up in the wrong corner and you have to go back to the drawing board and surviving those cycles is just part of what we do. ARTY: So does that superpower help you escape those feelings of disappointment then? JEN: Oh yeah, I think so because not that I have some way to see the future, but more that I have tools for helping to figure out what my next step could be. ARTY: So then you're always focused back on action. JEN: Mm hm. ARTY: And how can I take what I learned and this vision of what a good direction would be, taking these new data points and things into account, and then reimagine and translating that back into action. JEN: Yeah. ARTY: I think that qualifies as a superpower. DAMIEN: Yeah, I think about it, I guess because I was writing code this morning, and so often, when you're writing – when I'm writing code at least, it's like oh, the phrase was “defensive programming” from a long time ago. How can this go wrong? What happens if this is nil? What happens if some evil guy in a black hat comes in and tries to do something here? And what I've had to learn and still need to remind myself of is the good case. What is it that we're doing good for our users, or whoever else the code touches? What are they trying to accomplish and what experience are we trying to create for them? And so, both, as an engineer and a product manager, just being able to ask that question and see an answer on a small scale on a feature in stories, super important. JEN: Yeah, and even if you're thinking of that adversarial aspect where it's like, you're trying to think through all of the security risks that are involved in developing some software, you can still use this thinking to your advantage. What would a successful future be where somebody tries to exploit that vulnerability and they fail? You've got them. What are the things you built? What are the strategies and habits that that team had? What is the monitoring and infrastructure that resulted in successfully preventing this, or that problem from occurring? DAMIEN: It's not only a useful strategy and also, feels really good. JEN: Mm hm. DAMIEN: That's great. ARTY: I like that, though just thinking from a standpoint of just vulnerability, or even a case where things go “wrong,” in the case that you do have somebody hacking your system, or trying to exploit some vulnerability, what's the logging and information infrastructure? What does that story look like where even though these things are happening, we're prepared, we have the right things in place to give us visibility into what's going on, and be able to catch it and address it quickly. Like what do all those things look like such that we're ready to go and can still have a success story, even in the case of these challenges that come up? DAMIEN: That sounds connected to something, I think we want to talk about today, which is what goes well when you get a major library upgrade, what does that look like? JEN: Yeah. I've been thinking about this a lot lately; informed by two things. So one is that I'm involved in an Ember, which is a frontend JavaScript framework, and we're getting ready to do a 4.0 major release. So going through all of those exercises to have preparedness all comes back to how do we do this, or what do our users need, what are the resources that are missing? That's one thing on my mind and the other is that I've recently updated some dependencies in the apps that I work in and had a hard time. What can I learn for myself about what to do differently? What can I learn that might be takeaways for library maintainers? What can I share with my coworkers and my collaborators to make this easier next time? ARTY: What's it like working on an open source project and how does that feel different? What are the different aspects of that from working on a commercial product versus something in the open source community? JEN: There's a couple of pieces. The biggest one is that when you're working in your own code base, you have at least a fuzzy picture of what the product is, what the constraints are, how many users there are, and the things that the developers on your team generally know and the things that they don't know. You have all this information that would help you inform how do I roll out some new, big feature, or something like that. When you're working at open source, your universe of possible products, developers, and users is huge. Like, you could never write down a list of all the ways that somebody is going to be using that software and so, it becomes really different than having a set of well-defined products requirements; we want to get from point A to point B. It's like, we need to give everybody a path forward even though they're using this tool in all these different ways. To do that, a lot of effort goes into gathering feedback from other people in the community. So we use a process called RFCs, or Requests for Comments where someone says, “Hey, I think this would be a good feature. Hey, I think this thing should be removed, or deprecated,” and you have to get feedback. Because we can't imagine all the ways ourselves that someone could use this feature, or tool and then once there's consensus amongst the core team, then something can move forward. But everything goes through a lot of iteration as part of that process. So the overall progress can sometimes feel slow because you have to think through all of this extra weight—the weight of depending on thousands and thousands of developers and billions of users on you to make the right decision. It means you can't just “Oh, let's just merge this breaking change and I'll make this breaking change and I'll just post on Slack to everybody like, ‘Hey, watch out. I just changed this one thing. I documented it here. Good luck.'” You can't really quite pull that lever in the same way, but when you do have a step forward, it's a step forward for all of these apps, for all of these projects, for all of their users and so, little baby steps can still translate into really big impact. ARTY: So when you have something that's a major release in that context, like a major release of Ember versus a minor release. How are those different? What kind of things do you do in major releases? JEN: Yeah, that's a good question. So I'll just provide a little bit of background information on this vocabulary that we're using for anyone who's listening in. A lot of projects follow semantic versioning, which is a set of rules that a lot of projects agree to follow that if you ever see a version number that's like 4.2.1.—oftentimes, that's semantic versioning and action in the first number—is for major releases and a major release is one that has a breaking change. So that means that I make a change in that code base. I would expect that other people would have to change the code in their own apps and they would be forced to go through that—make that change—in order to upgrade to that version for the library I'm working on. Minor is usually used for features. Patch, the last one, is used for bug fixes and internal refactors, things like that. Not all projects follow in the same way. Some projects have time-based cycles where they say, “Oh, we do a major release every six months,” or something like that. But for us major releases are breaking changes and the things that are different about them is that we have to give people a path forward to get to the next version. That could include putting some deprecation warnings, any code that's going to get removed or change any API that are going to shift in the next major version. We want to let people know, with a little warning, if they're using those older syntaxes, or APIs, whatever's going to be removed. We also want to try to give a lot of advanced notice about what's going to change, or be removed via blog posts, things like having a help channel set up maybe that's just for those upgrades. When it's time to actually do the major release, we try to make it boring. This is something that I would like to see happen across the rest of the JavaScript ecosystem. It does seem to be catching on more, which is that when you do a major version release, all it does is it removes the things that need to be removed. You make your breaking changes and that's it, and then in follow-up releases is when you add in all the new features. So let's say, some API is just the old way of doing things. It doesn't match up with a new rendering engine, or something like that. You're going to want to remove the old thing and then incrementally work to roll out these big splashy, new, exciting features. So maybe your exciting release is actually going to be 4.1, or 4.2, or 4.3. This has a couple benefits. It lets your major releases be a little less risky because you're not just removing code and then adding new code at the same time. It lets people not be as overwhelmed like, “Oh, first I have to deal with all of these things that are removed, or changed and then now I also have to learn this whole new way of thinking about how to write my app using this tool.” It lets you take little baby steps towards doing things in a different way. DAMIEN: Does this mean, in an ideal scenario, that if you don't have any deprecation warnings—if you're taking care of all the deprecation warnings—then your major release can go – you can upgrade some next major version without a code change. JEN: Yeah, that's the dream. DAMIEN: It does sound like a dream. JEN: Yeah, and it's not always perfect, but it's an important pathway towards including more people and participating in upgrades, app maintenance, and creating sustainable code bases so you don't have to follow the Twitter, the blog post, and be checking the JavaScript subreddit just to keep up on with what's going on. You're not going to be surprised by big sweeping changes. So coming back to this experience I had with upgrading a different library recently, I was upgrading major Jest versions and was very surprised to see that there were a ton of breaking changes in a changelog and I got a little bit frustrated with that. And then I went back and I read the blog posts and I saw a blog post from 2 years ago saying, “These are the things that we are doing, this is what is happening,” and that was great, but I wasn't doing Jest tests 2 years ago and so, I missed all of that. Can we use the code base itself to connect those dots, make those suggestions, and guide people towards the work that they do? DAMIEN: If they put those deprecation warnings in 2 years ago, you would've had 2 years to make those changes. JEN: Yeah. DAMIEN: And then when you finally upgraded, it would have been a dream, or have been painless. JEN: Yeah, and maybe they're there. Maybe there are some and I just need to pass the debug flag, or something. Hopefully, there's nobody who's shouting at their computer. But there's this one thing that we put it in the console log output, or something. It's possible I overlooked it but. DAMIEN: I want to rewind a little bit back to the challenge of dealing with a product that is used in so many contexts by so many people, like Ember is, and the RFC process. The first thing I thought of when you mentioned that is what do you do with contradictory feedback? Surely, you must have hundreds of engineers who say, “You have to get rid of this,” and hundreds who say, “No, this has to stay.” How does the core team manage that? JEN: Yeah. So I think the most important piece is the contradictory feedback needs to be considered. So it's not just like, “Oh, let's collect these comments as annual feedback forms,” or anything like that. [chuckles] This isn't like, “Oh, let's do some natural language processing on these comments to figure out if the sentiment is positive, or negative.” [chuckles] None of that stuff you have to actually read through them and think what could I do using this new feature to help meet this person's needs, or what's at the heart of the objection that they're making? If someone is saying, “This doesn't work for my team,” and entering that process with a willingness to iterate. In the end, we can't make everybody happy all the time, or no RFC would ever get moved forward. There's always going to be a point where you have to prioritize the pros and cons, and ultimately, the decision comes down to reaching consensus amongst the core team members. So being able to say, as a group, “We believe that the feedback has been considered. We believe that the iterations have been incorporated, the people's concerns have been addressed,” or “We're going to work to create tools that think that problem be not a problem for them,” and find a way to move forward with whatever the proposal is. Or sometimes, the proposals don't move forward. Sometimes, they get closed. ARTY: Is the work you end up choosing to do primarily driven by this feedback process, or do you have some visionary leadership within the core team that drives a lot of things forward that aren't necessarily coming via feedback? JEN: That's a good question. I think it's a little bit of both. So certainly, a lot of RFCs have come from the community and from people asking like, “Hey, can we have this better way of doing things? I have an idea.” And then other times, you do have to have that visionary leadership. So to give an example, we have just started doing – well, I shouldn't say just started doing that. I think it's been like 2 years now. We have started doing this process called additions where if there's a big splashy set of cool features that are meant to be used together, we give it a name. That's separate from the breaking changes process, ideally. We can create nice, new splashy sets of features without breaking people's apps and trying to design that experience isn't something that you can just piecemeal through RFCs waiting for feedback to come through. There were quite a few members of the core team that designed a new way of building Ember apps that was better aligned with focusing on HTML as the core of building for the web and focusing on JavaScript features as opposed to requiring developers to know and understand the special API syntaxes. You can just write JavaScript classes instead of needing to understand what an Ember object is. So aligning ourselves more with the skills that everybody, who works in the web, has at least a little bit of. That took a lot of brainstorming, a lot of planning, and ultimately, introducing those things still follows an RFC process. Somebody still has to say, “Here's the thing we want to change, or do, or add. Here's the greater vision for it.” But to get that big picture look still requires the big thinking. So the core team, I don't even know how much time. They must've spent countless hours trying to hash out those details. ARTY: How big is the core team? JEN: So there's several core teams. Though when you say the core team as a whole encompasses people who work on the data layer, the command line tools, the learning tools, and then the framework itself. I want to say, could look this up, it's like upwards of 30 people, I think. ARTY: Wow. JEN: I can get you the exact number later, [chuckles] but everyone's pulling out their different area of domain and so, all of those teams also have to coordinate around these major releases because we want to make sure the work that we're doing is complimentary. If we do the framework improvements, but we don't fix up the docs, we're not on the good path for a successful release. ARTY: Are people working on this stuff full-time? Are people funded, or doing this in their free time, or how does that work? Because there's this big picture challenge of we have this ideal of community sourced, open source projects, and then the realities of trying to fund and support that effort bumps up to constraints of needing to make a living and things and these sorts of difficulties. How do y'all manage that? JEN: It's a mixture. So the Ember project is fortunate to have a major player—LinkedIn—that uses Ember and so, some of the core team members, their work on Ember is part of their LinkedIn work because of the frameworks doing well, then LinkedIn projects that are going to be doing well. There's also a number of people who are consultants, or who run consultancies that do Ember work, they're involved. Their voice is an important part of making sure that again, we're serving a variety of apps, not just ah, this is this tool that's just for the LinkedIn websites. But it's like, they've seen so many different kinds of apps; they're working on so many different kinds of apps right now. And then there's people who help out on more of a volunteer basis. So I've been in my past work, it was at a different job. It was part of my job responsibilities to participate on the framework core team. These days, I'm more of a volunteer and I mostly help organize other volunteers—people who want to do some professional development to learn, people who want to network, people who found something that they're frustrated about enough that they want to fix it themselves. That's how I got involved; I wanted to learn. So that's the sustainability of having people involved is always an ongoing challenge it is for every open source organization, I think. ARTY: Yeah. Do you have any ideas on how we can do those sorts of things better? As you said, it's a concern, in general with how do we do open source better with these kinds of constraints? And then two, I feel like there's been some cultural shifts, I guess, you could say over time of you think about when the open source movement first started. We had a lot more of this community ownership ideal where we really were going and building software together and now, there's a lot more of, well, there's all this free software out there that we use, that we build on top of to build our apps on, but that ownership piece isn't really there. It's an expectation that there should just be this free software out there that's maintained that we get and why is it falling apart? So I feel like, culturally, just over time, some of those things have shifted as far as expectations around open source and then you talked about some of the corporate sponsorship aspects with usage as being one way these things get funded. But I'm wondering if you have ideas on how some of these things could work better. JEN: People have done PhDs on this topic, I'm pretty sure. [chuckles] Like, theses. I read a white paper, a really involved white paper, a few weeks ago that was about, what was it? it was called something like the Burden of Maintaining Software, or something like that and it did this deep dive into how much goes in and just keeping the ship afloat. How much goes into just if there's a package that needs to be updated? That kind of ongoing, constant, mundane work that adds up really, really big. So for very large projects, I think it's a good thing to have some sort of an evolvement of a sponsor company, if you will and so, that sponsor company may not actually ever donate any money, but the time of their engineers that they say like, “Hey, we're willing to help support this project” is really important. I think another piece is that the leadership of projects should consider the people involved, that that group is going to be rotating. That people's involvement is ephemeral. Every time somebody changes jobs, maybe they're not going to be involved in that project anymore. If we can think about that ahead of time, plan for it, and make sure that we are sharing knowledge with each other such that the project can survive somebody moving onto something else, it can survive somebody going on vacation for a while. So I think that's another key component of success is how do you make it so that you're not just relying on the same set of people still being there so many years later? We've been very fortunate within the Ember community that a lot of the same people have stuck around, but I try really hard not to bank on that. The group of contributors that I help organize, I think, “Hey.” We have a chat every time somebody joins the learning core team and say, “Hey, we get that you're not going to be here forever. Please let us know what we can do to support you. Please let us know when you're thinking of taking a break, or taking a step back. Please involve other people on any project that you're working on so that they will also continue your work and also support you so you don't get burnt out. Another thing I try to do is always framing the work into how it values the contributor. Sometimes in open source you hear this discussion of like, “Oh, well, everyone should participate in open source because we all benefit from it.” There's a better attitude that we can have, I think, which is that for people who are interested in participating, what can they get out of it? What can I do as a leader to help them get something out of this? If you just approach it with this altruism of “This is a community and I want to help,” that'll get you like a little bit. But if you can say, “I want to help because I want to learn from other developers,” that's something I can deliver on. That's something that they can take. That's valuable for their future earning potential, income, confidence, maybe they'll make the connection that helps them find their next job. Even if someone isn't being paid to help out, is there something that they can take away from this? And lastly, just acknowledging that doing work for free is a privilege as well. We have to reframe how we think about open source sustainability, too. Not everybody can devote a few hours after work here and there and involving them and including them means that it's got to be part of their workday. So continuing to socialize from the company level that engineers should have a little bit of time here and there to try to help improve an open source project. Everybody doing that just a little bit helps with quite a few of the problems that these projects face. ARTY: I've been thinking about this myself and you work directly, you're significantly involved in a major open source project, and so, you see things that a lot of people don't have perspective on. So I appreciate your insights on this. I'm wondering what if major companies that were using open source software, if we made more efforts for companies to be a project sponsor and donate part of the company somebody who's on the company's time to help contribute to projects as like a thing. I feel like if that thing caught on, that the companies that were using this software for free [chuckles] had more of a sense of a social obligation to be one of the people that contribute some time to helping with that. Or get some companies that are big enough, too. It's probably easier and they have more interest in those sorts of things. But I feel like if we did make that more of a thing, that that would be useful because as you're saying, somehow realistically speaking, this has to be something that can be worked into the workday. JEN: Yes. ARTY: For us to be able to support and sustain these things. And people that can do that outside of their workday as an extra free time thing. It really is a privilege. JEN: Yeah. I think a couple of strategies that can help here are to frame it in the value to the company and frame it as a value to the users, frame it as a value to the engineering team. So rather than having it be like, “Oh, you use free software, you should do this thing.” Instead more like engineers, we always need to learn constantly in order to keep improving our own skills and to keep up with things that are changing. So having an open source hour, or something like that—it takes a little more than an hour usually to accomplish much. But having a period of time that engineers were allowed to contribute to open sources. Professional development that you don't have to pay for a subscription. You don't have to pay for a licensing fee. You don't have to pay for somebody's conference submission. If someone has the opportunity to reach outside of their sphere of knowledge, or comfort zone and it just so happens that if they succeed, it'll benefit your company maybe indirectly. Another piece is what's the value to the users? So there were a bunch of people who all contributed effort towards bringing some improved linting tools for the template system within Ember. When we think of linting tools, we usually think that's like, “Oh, here's this thing to remind me to use nice tidy syntax and don't make my variable names too long and space everything out in a certain way,” but they can also help us find real actual problems in our apps. So an example that this team worked on is they introduced some more linting rules for accessibility. If one person succeeds in introducing this new linting rule for accessibility, then it's there in their app for their team and they get to stop talking about, “Hey, make sure you do this one thing” over and over again because now it's enforced in the code base. Also, they've brought this benefit to all of the other apps that are out there. Again, sometimes you can tie it back in to that value for the product and for the users, and really trying to think creatively about that connection. Because there's so many different things we can all spend our time on, you've really got to sell it in a way that aligns with the goals, or values of that organization. ARTY: Yeah. I like that reframing. I can see just how important that is. Other things I'm thinking about if you had a dev team and one of your developers was really involved with the Ember core team, you'd have more knowledge about how things worked. So when something was broken, or something, you probably have more insight into what was going on and being able to help the team more effectively – JEN: Yeah. [overtalk] ARTY: To build stuff. And then if there's any suggestions, or things that could make things easier for your team, you'd have the ability to have influence with getting RFPs through to get changes made and things. I think you're right. It needs to be reframed as a value proposition. JEN: Yeah, and it also requires an attitude shift on the side of the projects as well. There's tons of people who've tried to do open source and hit running straight into a wall of they open up pull requests that are never merged, or even reviewed and that can be a really frustrating experience. And some projects just don't have the feedback structure, or the governance structure that really allows open participation either. So that's something that I think is an ongoing journey with lots of projects. It's like, how do we communicate? How do we involve other people? What types of decisions do we say like, “Hey, implementer, or community, you're in charge, you can make this” versus things that have to pass some sort of review. It's not just a one side of companies need to step up, but also, maintainers seem to have a long-term vision of how they're interacting with everybody else. DAMIEN: Yeah, I really love that frame of this is professional development and that you can get for free. That's like how would you like to educate your engineers and make them better engineers, especially on the tools you work on and not –? Yeah, that's really awesome. But then of course, on the other side, you need a welcoming environment. That's like, “Oh yeah, when you make a contribution, we're going to look at it. We're going to give you useful feedback on it.” JEN: Yeah. I tried to get an open source project going a few years ago and I struggled for a while and eventually ended up giving up. But some of the things I ran into, I'd have somebody that would volunteer to help out with things and I'd work with them long enough to just start to get a feel for things and be able to contribute and then they would disappear. [laughs] And I go through that process a few times. It's like, “Oh, yay. I'm excited, I get –” another person has volunteered and so, then I go and start working with them and trying to – and I put a lot of attention into trying to get things going and then they disappear. t was difficult to try and get traction in that way and eventually, I went, “Well, I'm back by myself again” [laughs] and that I just need to keep going. ARTY: Right. So what kind of things have you found help with getting that participation aspect going and what kind of things are barriers that get in the way that maybe we can be better at? JEN: Yeah. So my advice is always start with using the buddy system. Trying to pair program with people, who I'm hoping to stay involved, and the leveling up version of that is the people who are contributing pair with each other. It's so much more fun. There's so much more of a learning experience when it's two developers working on the project. Left to my own devices, the projects that I work on, I have to really dig into my willpower to keep them moving if I'm the only person working on it versus if we're pairing, what's the value that I'm getting? It's like, I get to hear how the other person approaches the problem. I get to experience how they work. They teach me things. I teach them things. We have this good rapport. So I pair once a week with my friend, Chris, and we work on everything from this kind of mundane stuff to the big vision, like what would we do if we could totally change how this thing works, or something like that, and that kind of energy and get ideas, they build up. So that's one piece. The other, this one's difficult, but having well-scoped, well-written issues is a huge time sink, but also, it can be one of the best ways get people engaged and keep them engaged. If I stop writing really specific issues, people peter off. Someone will ask, maybe only once, they'll ask, “Hey, I want to help out, or something. What should I pick up next?” They don't usually ask a second time, but I don't have something right away to hand off to them. So what is the momentum? Can I keep writing up issues and things that other people can follow through with? And then presenting them with increasing levels of challenge of like, “I have this unstructured problem. We've worked on this a lot together. You can do this. How would you approach this? What do you think we should do?” I don't necessarily say,” You can do this,” because it's more of a subtle cheerleading that's happening than that. But “I'd love to hear your proposal of what should happen next” just is a really powerful moment and sometimes, that can be the thing that catapults somebody into taking more ownership of a project and gathering together other people to help them out. And then people do come and go, but the commits are still there! So that's something, right? [chuckles] Like, things have taken some steps forward. DAMIEN: Yeah. People come and go, that's something you know you have to accept on an open source project, but it happens in other places, too. [chuckles] No team stays together for all of eternity. JEN: Right. DAMIEN: Is the project going to live on and how can you make it so that it does? So these are very good lessons, even for that. ARTY: It seems like just investing in thinking about, we were talking initially about planning for the success case, even when things happen. So if we think about the case of okay, people are going to leave the team. [chuckles] What's the success case look like? Imagining the way that things go really well when people are leaving the team, what does that look like? What are the things that we wish we had in place to be able to ramp people up quickly, to be able to find new people, to work on the project quickly? All of those things that we can think about and open source has this to a much larger degree and challenge so that you really have to think about it a lot. Where on a commercial project, it's one of those things that often happens when you wish it wouldn't and one of the things I see in corporate companies is you'll have a management change, or something will happen with a product that upsets a bunch of people and you'll have exodus phase on the project and then ending up often rewriting things because you lose your core knowledge on the project and nobody knows what's going on anymore and it actually becomes easier to rewrite the things than to [chuckles] figure out how it works. If we had imagined the ways that things could go well and prepared for those certain circumstances, maybe we wouldn't be in that situation. ARTY: Yeah. You mentioned something really important there, too, which is what can we do to help people spin up more quickly on something. That's another big piece of sustained engagement because you need a group of people spun up quickly. You need a group of people who can figure out the next steps on their own. And so, we've spent a lot of time, the projects that I work most actively on, making sure that everything is there in the Read Me, making sure that if you run npm start that things work if you're running it on a different environment. Those types of little things, reducing those barriers can also go a long way and just widening the pool of people who could potentially help is another big one. DAMIEN: How do you do that? Because you're a core contributor on the project. You have the curse of knowledge. JEN: Yes. DAMIEN: You have a development scene that is tightly home to work on this project. JEN: That's a great question. Ah, I do have the curse of knowledge. Being easy to reach so that if people do encounter problems that they can find you and tell you, which can be, it can be a small step. Just making sure that if you have a documentation page, it's got a link at the bottom that's like, “Find a problem, open an issue!” That sort of thing. Also, I'm pretty active on Twitter. Sometimes other contributors, experienced contributors, they'll spot something that somebody else has posted and they'll say, “Hey, Jen, take a look at this,” and they bring it to my attention. There's this team effort to uncover those gaps. Another aspect is just working in the open. So having open meetings, having open chat channels, places where people can interact with the people leading the projects, they can come to the meetings, things like that means that we're more likely to hear their feedback. So if we get feedback, “Hey, this thing was difficult,” making sure that we address it. DAMIEN: Wow. Well. JEN: I'm really big into user experience driven design. We've been talking about maintainability a lot, we've been talking about the code, and versions, and things, but coming back to what is the impact for our users. If you accept a user experience driven way of developing software, it means that you're always going to need to be upgrading, you're always going to have to be flexing, changing, and growing because the products of 2 years ago versus the product of today can be really different. Open source library that you needed to rely on 2 years ago versus today. Maybe the web app ecosystem has shifted. Maybe there's new ways of doing things. Maybe there's new syntaxes that are available. Sometimes, it can be a little frustrating because you feel like, “Oh, there's this endless pile of work. We made all these wrong choices back in the day and now this thing's hard to upgrade,” and all that. A different mindset is to think about what do we know today that is different than what we knew yesterday? What are the things we know today about our users that inform our next move? How do these upgrades, or improvements, or my choice of open source library help the end user have a better experience? And trying to come back to that big picture from time to time, because it can be pretty frustrating. When you get stuck, you think like, “Oh, I can't. I just tried to upgrade this major version and everything broke and everything's terrible. But what's the feature list look like, how am I going to use this to deliver something better to the users can really help?” DAMIEN: Wow. ARTY: So at this part of the show, we usually do reflections and finish off with any final thoughts we had, or takeaways from the episode. Damien, you want to start? DAMIEN: The big takeaway I got from this is kind of… it's perspective. Jen, you mentioned a user experience driven design. I was already really close to that language, but from a perspective of contributors to an open source project, sponsors—both in terms of engineering and then money—and then also, users. Like, these are also users. These are also people who are impacted by the work we do. So in order to do it successfully, it's very important to think of how can this go well for them and then move to that direction. So thank you, that was really great. M: For me, the big takeaway, I feel like I learned a whole lot just perspective wise of what it's like to work on a big open source project. I haven't really had a conversation like this with someone that's been that involved with a major resource project before. So I found that really insightful. One of the big questions I asked you about how do we make this sustainable? [laughs] Like all the challenges around things. I know they're big challenges that we face in figuring that out and you had some really key insights around how we can frame things differently as opposed to framing it as an obligation, like a social obligation, or you should do this altruistically because it's the right thing to do as the appeal that we make is when you're talking to a contributor, how do you frame things to be a value proposition for them as an individual. When we're talking to a company, how do we frame things in a way so there's a value proposition for the company to get involved with doing something? And change the way that we frame all these things to be able to get folks involved because they realize benefits as individuals, as company, as people being directly involved in things? I feel like if we can do some work to maybe change some of the framing around things. That maybe there's a pathway there to increase engagement and support of open source projects, which I think is one of those things that we really need to figure out. There's not really easy answers to that, but I feel like some of the insights you came to there are really key in finding a pathway to get there. So thank you, Jen. I appreciate the conversation. JEN: So for me, when I'm reflecting on the most is the story that you shared already of trying to get people involved and just having them leave. They show up for a little while and then they disappear and where does all that work go? I'm interested to explore a little bit more of that small project life cycle. I was pretty fortunate to just come in at a time where there was already a well-established community when I started getting involved in Ember and I'd love to hear more from other people about what are the success stories of those first few steps where someone began this little project and it really started to grow and take off. This might be a case where like some of the strategies I described, they work when you already have an established community. So it's kind of like a catch-22. I don't know, that could be a really cool future episode is the beginning. DAMIEN: Yeah. That's something I'd definitely like to hear about. ARTY: Well, thank you for joining us, Jen. It was really a pleasure talking with you. JEN: Thanks so much for having me! Special Guest: Jen Weber.
In today's guest episode, Angie is joined by Jen Mons who is the host of The Embodied Healing Self and Founder of the Embodied Soul Coach Academy for a heart-to-heart conversation around being a conscious mother. Jen shares her greatest lessons she has learned from her two daughters, how motherhood changed her life course, and many nuggets of wisdom as a coach and healer. Listen in and be inspired as a woman, mother and daughter. Sacred Soul Quotes by Jen:“It takes a huge act of surrender to listen and allow our children to fully be who they are and not put our ego into it.”“There have been many times my life has dramatically altered course because I allowed my children to be my teacher. We are in a time of collective rising especially around the healing of the feminine and the children (boys and girls) are here supporting us and, if we listen, our children are all teaching us.”“Letting your children be who they are and not making it about us.”“When we can witness ourselves as mothers and daughters and see how we do it differently and when we can stop making ourselves wrong and stop being in the guilt and shame, we can see a lot more and we create the space to allow the healing.”You can learn more about Jen and her work on IG @jen.mons or @embodiedsoulcoachacademy, listen to her podcast “The Embodied Healing Self” and visit her website @ www.jenmons.com.As always, you can connect with Angie @ www.angieschaffer.com or on IG @angielynnschaffer.
Todd: Okay, so I'm here with Jen and we're talking about clothing. Now, Jen, I'm a bit older than you, so I probably don't really care about what I wear so much. I always kind of pay the same price for my clothing. So I'm wondering, what's it like for a younger person? How much are you willing to pay? What is your price range?Jen: It depends upon like what you're buying. For example, if it's a pair of jeans then I would pay around 4,000 yen, that's Japanese yen. $40?Todd: Oh really? That's still relatively cheap. Like some people pay like $100, right? Or $200.Jen: I don't think I would ever pay that much because I'm a student right now,so paying more than that would be something I wouldn't do.Todd: Well what about in your home country of Nepal? How much would people pay for pants there?Jen: In Nepal, like compared to Japan, it's really cheap there. You can actually get a really decent pant in 1,500 yen.Todd: That's like $15.Jen: Yes.Todd: Around. Oh that's good. What's the cheapest you would pay? I mean, I guess you could get stuff for free, but what's the lowest you pay for clothes? Or for pants? For pants?Jen: Okay, so sometimes when there's a sale and especially if there's shorts then you can just get it for like 500 yen.Todd: Oh wow. Five bucks.Jen: Like five bucks, yeah.Todd: That's good. Now what about shoes? Do you have a lot of shoes?Jen: Yes I do.Todd: Okay, for some people like shoes they spend a lot of money on shoes. I have a rule, unless it's dress shoes for work, I don't like to spend anything over $100. If it's athletic shoes, like sneakers, never more than $50. Ever.Jen: Okay.Todd: Like how much do you on average pay for shoes?Jen: I think it's different for girls, because our shoes range from $10 to, you know, a lot of money.Todd: What's the most you've ever paid for a pair of shoes?Jen: $100.Todd: Oh really? That's not too bad.Jen: Yeah, it's not bad at all.Todd: Yeah, no, that's good. Kind of good range. How about the cheapest? Five bucks?Jen: Not five bucks, maybe 10 bucks, yeah.Todd: 10 bucks, yeah. All right. I don't even know if I could find shoes for five dollars. They'd fall apart, right?Jen: You can, though.Todd: Oh yeah?Jen: Yeah. On sale you can even get it in like three bucks.Todd: Okay. That brings up a good question because we're talking about shoes. How important is fashion for you? Are you willing to wear uncomfortable clothing to look good?Jen: Not always, because I really like comfort. I would rather wear pajamas and go out than, like you know, wear something really uncomfortable. But it depends, like if you're going to a party then you would obviously want to look good and wouldn't really care about comfort much. But in a daily basis, I would go for comfort always.Todd: Okay. Nice. How about for example, jewelry? Do you like to wear necklaces, earrings, rings, things like that?Jen: No, I'm not much of an accessories person.Todd: Okay. Now in your home country, Nepal, is it common for people to wear a lot of jewelry?Jen: Yes, they do.Todd: Oh yeah? Oh, okay. What do people like to wear?Jen: Everyone prefers gold I guess, because it's like people think that if you wear gold then you are rich. And yeah, gold, silver, and some wear diamonds.Todd: Okay, nice. Nice. I don't have any jewelry, I don't think. Oh wow, I didn't even realize that. I don't have one piece of jewelry.Jen: Really?Todd: Yeah, I have no rings. No necklaces. I have a broken watch. But yeah.Jen: Don't you ever feel like buying one though? Don't you ever follow a trend and thought about piercing your ears or something?Todd: That would be interesting, piercing my ears. You know, when I was your age, which was about over 20 years ago, it was just starting to happen that boys or men would pierce their ears. But it was a bit controversial, it wasn't like it's common now. So yeah.Jen: What about necklaces?Todd: Yeah, I used to have a necklace, yeah. And I just stopped wearing them, it's just not a thing. Yeah. How about you? Would you like to have piercings? Like do you have, you have earrings, right?Jen: Yes, I do, but I rarely use them because at some point it's just hurts and you just feel like you don't really need it, so yeah.Todd: What about in your country, do people have piercings in different places like eyelids or lips or ... ? Like a nose ring?Jen: Yeah, they have nose ring and then they also pierce their ears, like in so many different places. But I've never really seen anyone really piercing their eyelids or stuff. I would want to pierce my-Todd: Belly button? The belly button?Jen: Yes.Todd: Oh my gosh, that looks like it would hurt.Jen: I know-Todd: So much.Jen: -but I really want to do it.Todd: Really? All right, well, just be careful.Jen: Okay, I will
Todd: Okay, so I'm here with Jen and we're talking about clothing. Now, Jen, I'm a bit older than you, so I probably don't really care about what I wear so much. I always kind of pay the same price for my clothing. So I'm wondering, what's it like for a younger person? How much are you willing to pay? What is your price range?Jen: It depends upon like what you're buying. For example, if it's a pair of jeans then I would pay around 4,000 yen, that's Japanese yen. $40?Todd: Oh really? That's still relatively cheap. Like some people pay like $100, right? Or $200.Jen: I don't think I would ever pay that much because I'm a student right now,so paying more than that would be something I wouldn't do.Todd: Well what about in your home country of Nepal? How much would people pay for pants there?Jen: In Nepal, like compared to Japan, it's really cheap there. You can actually get a really decent pant in 1,500 yen.Todd: That's like $15.Jen: Yes.Todd: Around. Oh that's good. What's the cheapest you would pay? I mean, I guess you could get stuff for free, but what's the lowest you pay for clothes? Or for pants? For pants?Jen: Okay, so sometimes when there's a sale and especially if there's shorts then you can just get it for like 500 yen.Todd: Oh wow. Five bucks.Jen: Like five bucks, yeah.Todd: That's good. Now what about shoes? Do you have a lot of shoes?Jen: Yes I do.Todd: Okay, for some people like shoes they spend a lot of money on shoes. I have a rule, unless it's dress shoes for work, I don't like to spend anything over $100. If it's athletic shoes, like sneakers, never more than $50. Ever.Jen: Okay.Todd: Like how much do you on average pay for shoes?Jen: I think it's different for girls, because our shoes range from $10 to, you know, a lot of money.Todd: What's the most you've ever paid for a pair of shoes?Jen: $100.Todd: Oh really? That's not too bad.Jen: Yeah, it's not bad at all.Todd: Yeah, no, that's good. Kind of good range. How about the cheapest? Five bucks?Jen: Not five bucks, maybe 10 bucks, yeah.Todd: 10 bucks, yeah. All right. I don't even know if I could find shoes for five dollars. They'd fall apart, right?Jen: You can, though.Todd: Oh yeah?Jen: Yeah. On sale you can even get it in like three bucks.Todd: Okay. That brings up a good question because we're talking about shoes. How important is fashion for you? Are you willing to wear uncomfortable clothing to look good?Jen: Not always, because I really like comfort. I would rather wear pajamas and go out than, like you know, wear something really uncomfortable. But it depends, like if you're going to a party then you would obviously want to look good and wouldn't really care about comfort much. But in a daily basis, I would go for comfort always.Todd: Okay. Nice. How about for example, jewelry? Do you like to wear necklaces, earrings, rings, things like that?Jen: No, I'm not much of an accessories person.Todd: Okay. Now in your home country, Nepal, is it common for people to wear a lot of jewelry?Jen: Yes, they do.Todd: Oh yeah? Oh, okay. What do people like to wear?Jen: Everyone prefers gold I guess, because it's like people think that if you wear gold then you are rich. And yeah, gold, silver, and some wear diamonds.Todd: Okay, nice. Nice. I don't have any jewelry, I don't think. Oh wow, I didn't even realize that. I don't have one piece of jewelry.Jen: Really?Todd: Yeah, I have no rings. No necklaces. I have a broken watch. But yeah.Jen: Don't you ever feel like buying one though? Don't you ever follow a trend and thought about piercing your ears or something?Todd: That would be interesting, piercing my ears. You know, when I was your age, which was about over 20 years ago, it was just starting to happen that boys or men would pierce their ears. But it was a bit controversial, it wasn't like it's common now. So yeah.Jen: What about necklaces?Todd: Yeah, I used to have a necklace, yeah. And I just stopped wearing them, it's just not a thing. Yeah. How about you? Would you like to have piercings? Like do you have, you have earrings, right?Jen: Yes, I do, but I rarely use them because at some point it's just hurts and you just feel like you don't really need it, so yeah.Todd: What about in your country, do people have piercings in different places like eyelids or lips or ... ? Like a nose ring?Jen: Yeah, they have nose ring and then they also pierce their ears, like in so many different places. But I've never really seen anyone really piercing their eyelids or stuff. I would want to pierce my-Todd: Belly button? The belly button?Jen: Yes.Todd: Oh my gosh, that looks like it would hurt.Jen: I know-Todd: So much.Jen: -but I really want to do it.Todd: Really? All right, well, just be careful.Jen: Okay, I will
Todd: Hey Jenn, how are you today?Jen: Hi Todd, I'm fine thank you. How are you?Todd: I am doing pretty good. It's kind of getting colder, so I like that, I don't like super hot weather.Jen: Really, it's kind of opposite for me because I really hate that it's getting colder day by day.Todd: Oh you don't like the cooler weather?Jen: No, my fingers start swelling and it's really tough because you cannot really go outside. You just want to stay in your bed all day, you become very unproductive I guess.Todd: Yeah, I guess I can kind of ... Yeah, I know what you mean by that. But, at least in the winter, at least in the fall you can wear warmer clothes so I enjoy that. Although I don't like having to do so much laundry because you wear so many more clothes. In summer, it's just so easy to do your laundry I think.Jen: Yeah, you're talking about warmer clothes. But the thing is, if it was summer you wouldn't really feel like wearing any warm clothes at all because that would be unnecessary. That's why I would rather go for summer than winter.Todd: Well I know, but what I'm saying is that in the summer you don't have to wear so many clothes. You just have a tee-shirt, shorts, that's about it, pants.Jen: Yeah, and your laundry problem would also not exist.Todd: Exactly. Although, I don't have that many clothes anyway. I have the same three pairs of pants that I wear, so that's the benefit of being much older. How about you, do you have lots of clothes?Jen: Yeah, but I think even if I was older I would still have a lot of clothes. Maybe it has to do with me always shopping all the time.Todd: Actually, what do you do with your clothes for the season? Do you pack away your clothes for the season? Do you pack away your winter clothes or your summer clothes?Jen: Yes, actually during winter I pack all my summer clothes and tuck it away somewhere. And during summer, I do the opposite yeah.Todd: Yeah, I now am regretting it so much because in the summer it was so hot this summer and I had these big sweatpants and sweaters and they were taking up space in my closet and I just threw them away. And I knew winter was coming and I would regret it, and now I regret it because I have to go buy all new sweatshirts.Jen: Why would you do that?Todd: I just hate clutter and yeah, it was really short-sighted wasn't it?Jen: Yeah, it was. I'm so sorry, but yeah I'm being blunt but you should have just packed it and put it somewhere you couldn't see so it didn't bother you that much.Todd: I know. About clothing, how often do you keep clothes? So, you're young but you've reached, you're not going to grow too much anymore, right? You can keep your clothes a long time. Unlike me, unless I get fatter, I'm not going to grow any taller because I'm so much older. I keep my clothes sometimes for like ten years.Jen: Ten years?Todd: Yeah. What about your parents? I bet your dad has shirts and pants that he's had for ten years.Jen: Yeah, that's true actually my dad does use old clothes. But sometimes I also use his clothes because I think it's kind of cool.Todd: It is cool.Jen: It's like recycling.Todd: That's sweet, like so what is a piece of clothing that your dad has that you wear sometimes?Jen: Actually the jacket that I was wearing yesterday, I got it from my dad and I wear it so much because I love it.Todd: But so , it's a woman's jacket?Jen: No, it's a guy's jacket but I wear it.Todd: Oh really, it was his jacket?Jen: Yes.Todd: Oh really? Okay, that is cool.Jen: And I miss him a lot so that just reminds me of him and that's why I like to wear it a lot.Todd: That's really nice. How about your mom, do you share clothes with your mother?Jen: I'm very thin and she's not so thin, so we cannot share the same clothes.Todd: Yeah. My stepfather and I used to always be the same size, and now I'm a little bit bigger than him. And he says that his pants are only 34 inches, which is quite small in America, and I'm like there's no way. It looks like we're the same size, but we're not I guess.Jen: I mean I could wear my moms clothes, like I did my dad's, because, but then you cannot really do that because if you wear your mom's clothes it will just look like you borrowed clothes from someone. But if you wear your dad's clothes it will look cooler I guess.Todd: Right, yeah. I know what you mean. That's cool, how about your friends, do you share clothes with your friends?Jen: No, not with my friends but with my cousins, sisters, yeah.Todd: Oh really, oh nice.
Todd: Hey Jenn, how are you today?Jen: Hi Todd, I'm fine thank you. How are you?Todd: I am doing pretty good. It's kind of getting colder, so I like that, I don't like super hot weather.Jen: Really, it's kind of opposite for me because I really hate that it's getting colder day by day.Todd: Oh you don't like the cooler weather?Jen: No, my fingers start swelling and it's really tough because you cannot really go outside. You just want to stay in your bed all day, you become very unproductive I guess.Todd: Yeah, I guess I can kind of ... Yeah, I know what you mean by that. But, at least in the winter, at least in the fall you can wear warmer clothes so I enjoy that. Although I don't like having to do so much laundry because you wear so many more clothes. In summer, it's just so easy to do your laundry I think.Jen: Yeah, you're talking about warmer clothes. But the thing is, if it was summer you wouldn't really feel like wearing any warm clothes at all because that would be unnecessary. That's why I would rather go for summer than winter.Todd: Well I know, but what I'm saying is that in the summer you don't have to wear so many clothes. You just have a tee-shirt, shorts, that's about it, pants.Jen: Yeah, and your laundry problem would also not exist.Todd: Exactly. Although, I don't have that many clothes anyway. I have the same three pairs of pants that I wear, so that's the benefit of being much older. How about you, do you have lots of clothes?Jen: Yeah, but I think even if I was older I would still have a lot of clothes. Maybe it has to do with me always shopping all the time.Todd: Actually, what do you do with your clothes for the season? Do you pack away your clothes for the season? Do you pack away your winter clothes or your summer clothes?Jen: Yes, actually during winter I pack all my summer clothes and tuck it away somewhere. And during summer, I do the opposite yeah.Todd: Yeah, I now am regretting it so much because in the summer it was so hot this summer and I had these big sweatpants and sweaters and they were taking up space in my closet and I just threw them away. And I knew winter was coming and I would regret it, and now I regret it because I have to go buy all new sweatshirts.Jen: Why would you do that?Todd: I just hate clutter and yeah, it was really short-sighted wasn't it?Jen: Yeah, it was. I'm so sorry, but yeah I'm being blunt but you should have just packed it and put it somewhere you couldn't see so it didn't bother you that much.Todd: I know. About clothing, how often do you keep clothes? So, you're young but you've reached, you're not going to grow too much anymore, right? You can keep your clothes a long time. Unlike me, unless I get fatter, I'm not going to grow any taller because I'm so much older. I keep my clothes sometimes for like ten years.Jen: Ten years?Todd: Yeah. What about your parents? I bet your dad has shirts and pants that he's had for ten years.Jen: Yeah, that's true actually my dad does use old clothes. But sometimes I also use his clothes because I think it's kind of cool.Todd: It is cool.Jen: It's like recycling.Todd: That's sweet, like so what is a piece of clothing that your dad has that you wear sometimes?Jen: Actually the jacket that I was wearing yesterday, I got it from my dad and I wear it so much because I love it.Todd: But so , it's a woman's jacket?Jen: No, it's a guy's jacket but I wear it.Todd: Oh really, it was his jacket?Jen: Yes.Todd: Oh really? Okay, that is cool.Jen: And I miss him a lot so that just reminds me of him and that's why I like to wear it a lot.Todd: That's really nice. How about your mom, do you share clothes with your mother?Jen: I'm very thin and she's not so thin, so we cannot share the same clothes.Todd: Yeah. My stepfather and I used to always be the same size, and now I'm a little bit bigger than him. And he says that his pants are only 34 inches, which is quite small in America, and I'm like there's no way. It looks like we're the same size, but we're not I guess.Jen: I mean I could wear my moms clothes, like I did my dad's, because, but then you cannot really do that because if you wear your mom's clothes it will just look like you borrowed clothes from someone. But if you wear your dad's clothes it will look cooler I guess.Todd: Right, yeah. I know what you mean. That's cool, how about your friends, do you share clothes with your friends?Jen: No, not with my friends but with my cousins, sisters, yeah.Todd: Oh really, oh nice.
RESOURCESThe Biology of Belief, by Dr. Bruce LiptonThe Emotion Code, by Dr. Bradley NelsonThe Tapping Solution- Emotional Freedom Technique Video16 Ashley Meyer: How Authenticity Led to Her WholenessInsight Timer AppSHOW NOTES“So what does holistic mean? It is all about our physical, emotional and spiritual beings. It's not that we are just physical; we’re so much more. It also means that we are always looking to the root of the problem, so we see symptoms as your check engine light. And so why is your check engine light on? Mainstream is all about treating the symptoms, and we are more about asking why...Going to the root is really where the answers become really prominent...We want to get to the root of the problem.” -Jen“Emotions are inherited...Each member of the family has similar DNA, but we don’t all turn out the same. So we might all have similar core emotions… but the culture that we are in can produce some different results in each one of us.”“Emotions aren’t just about me, they can be from the next generations passed on.” -Kaylin“Love is the highest vibrational frequency...it’s where we were created.” -Jen“Energy attracts like energy.” -Jen“In this country, 90% of disease and illness is caused by stress.” -Jen“If we’re running in fight or flight 100% of the time, our adrenals are burnt out, our immune system is not working whatsoever.” -Jen“We have to find the beautiful harmonious balance in emotional life just like we do in the rest of life. The good comes with the bad.” -Jen“It is ok to have all these emotions and be human.” -Kaylin“It takes some love and some courage to go within...Some people think the scariest place is to go within, so that’s why we have become so busy so that we can ignore all those things.” -Jen“Take a moment, be present...stop and ask, ‘why? What’s going on?’...You have the choice always to be in control of your emotions.” -Jen“Meditation literally means being still in your mind...breathing techniques, music, there’s many ways to use meditation.” -Jen“Nature has so much to offer us...God created everything.” -Jen
Interview with Accepted MBA/EMBA admissions consultants, Cindy Tokumitsu and Jen Weld [Show summary] Should you apply to an Executive MBA program or a regular MBA program? And if you decide on the Executive MBA, what do you need to do to get in? And which EMBA should you apply to? These are the questions that we are going to address with today’s guests, Accepted’s EMBA experts, Cindy Tokumitsu and Jen Weld. Admissions consultants share tips for crafting an acceptance-worthy EMBA application [Show notes] Our guests today, Cindy Tokumitsu and Jennifer Weld, are both Accepted consultants. Cindy joined Accepted in 1998. Since then she has carved out a niche for herself working with EMBA and older MBA applicants. She is the author of Ace the EMBA and Top Executive MBA Program Essay Questions: How to Answer Them Right. Jen Weld served for four years on the Cornell Executive MBA admissions committee and later joined Accepted in 2010. She has authored numerous blog posts on MBA and EMBA admissions including the new free guide, Perfect Answers to MBA Interview Questions. Let’s say I’m in my early to mid 30’s and I’m in middle management and have c-suite ambitions. I have a fairly strong technical background. Should I apply for an MBA or an EMBA and why? [2:51] Cindy: Linda, you mentioned early-30s and mid-30s, and for MBA programs I think there is a big difference between them. Early 30s is still the upper range of full-time MBAs, whereas mid-30s is really getting out of the full-time range, but also may be even early for an EMBA program. You need to look at what programs are looking at to see whether you qualify. EMBA programs sometimes want a certain level of experience and specifically managerial experience so it is important to consider that. hbspt.cta.load(58291, '088cf431-34b3-4030-9c1e-432eee48f613', {}); Jen: It also can depend on whether or not you are interested in changing industries or job functions to get to a C-suite eventually. A full-time MBA can advantage you if you are a career switcher, but if you are continuing on with your organization or job function an EMBA might make more sense. https://youtu.be/5AMDp4TtzKI What makes for a good EMBA candidate? [4:36] Jen: Having some managerial experience is important, as is being able to see that progression on an applicant’s resume. With a full-time MBA applicant, an admissions committee is really looking at career potential, but with an EMBA applicant, they should see that you have already been moving up the rungs of the ladder. I think it’s also really important to find someone who feels comfortable being an active participant in the program. You don’t want a wallflower in the program, but rather someone pushing the discussion forward, providing just as much learning as faculty who teach in the program. Cindy: I totally agree, and to build on that, something I try to drive with clients is that to be a good contributor and participant, you need to be a person with something to say about your function or industry. Show that you are reflective, thoughtful, and have a point of view, and you are not afraid to express that. How are the criteria for admissions different for Executive MBA vs MBA programs? [6:54] Cindy: Key criteria are the same but weighted differently. Test scores and GPA weigh less, and career experience weighs more with an EMBA program as opposed to a full-time program. Jen: Short- and long-term goals tend to be different for the different applicants as well. With full-time there is a general understanding that again a ladder has to be climbed – so if you are planning to go into investment banking, there is an understanding you will first be an associate, then a senior associate, then a vice president, and so on before moving into a senior role. EMBA students are often already on the precipice of moving into general management, already having a lot of depth in a particular subject matter and looking for more...
Following a difficult, traumatic, or violent incident, there are a lot of challenges to work through. But when planning and thinking through how to handle these situations, we often focus almost wholly on the response and tend to ignore the short and long-term recovery challenges. In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser and Senior Consultant Jennifer Otremba talk through their own experiences in the aftermath of major crisis situations. Topics discussed include grief counseling, post-traumatic stress, managing the press, post-disaster payroll policies, and more. //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Jen: I read this article where there was a grief counselor that was interviewed and taking specifically around the aftermath of a situation and how its managed and how its handled. This grief counselor actually would get called onsite for various different high-level incidents, much like the shooting in Florida, 9-11, things like that. The grief counselor would come onsite and they would help the people involved through the situation. We saw that at our previous employer where if there was a big incident that happened we would have counselors that were onsite. Bryan: It was part of our SOP really. Jen: Absolutely, and help out. I just thought this would be a great topic to talk about to kind of educate those around what it's like to go through an aftermath. Bryan and I have both gone through many situations- Bryan: Numerous. Jen: Where we dealt with an aftermath of a traumatic incident so we thought it would be a good idea to talk about what that looks like. Bryan: For me it always ... This kind of is just ... This issue gets overlooked a lot, but because of what I've learned through my experience and our experiences together is that this always seems to be part of the right of boom process. When I talk about left of boom, right of boom, you've got the bad thing that happened, the boom, and there's what you can do before that, the preparation and the training and the exercises and whatever, but then the bad thing happens, you respond to it and then part of your long-term recovery, which what we're talking about here falls right on getting out of that immediate response stage, is how do you deal with the aftermath of the situation in terms of taking care of the team, taking care of the survivors or the victims and their families and the organization, how do you make sure that people are okay through this. Jen: Right, and like you said, this should actually be part of your crisis planning. Bryan: It should be. Jen: It should be part of the plan. Bryan: It needs to be one of the first things that you do once you've gotten to that immediate response and we're sure that people are safe and the immediate danger has passed, is how do you start to help people with the immediate and long-term aftermath of the situation that has impacted them. Jen: Yeah, and understanding some of the things you can expect to see. Some individuals may need to take some time off. They might need to take some time away from where it happened before they can ... Yeah. Bryan: If you're a multi-facility company they may want to work at a different facility moving forward. Jen: Yeah. It might be temporary or that might be permanent, but you need to take that in consideration and understand that that might be part of your planning process. Bryan: You'll find ... And this is definitely not ... This is something that you need to involve a professional organization, outside organization, to do and there's a number of companies that provide this, it's really kind of in the medical field. Whether you call it grief counseling or you call it just kind of the post-traumatic incident counseling, there's a lot of terminology to be used. But what you often see is these services will come in and they will do a combination of kind of group conversation, of working through what has happened, and some individual conversation. It's not ... I wouldn't characterize this as you're hiring counselors for everyone, but you are bringing somebody in that's an expert in dealing with these situations and helping your team talk through that. And then you may have folks, as Jen says, may need some time off and in an ethical organization you're going to find a way to accommodate that, regardless of what your policy is. Say that you're going to help them through the situation, and you may have folks that will need, through your medical coverage, long-term psychological, psychiatric counseling in order to deal with the aftermath of the situation. Jen: Right. I think one of the big things is you need to understand that there's a short-term and a long-term recovery process. Bryan: Right. Jen: There's what happens in the aftermath as far as the immediate aftermath, within days or weeks of something happening, but then understanding what that looks like long-term for people because everyone handles it differently. Bryan: I know one thing to consider, whatever the incident is that causes this workplace trauma, this traumatic incident that occurred. It can be a shooting situation, it could be an industrial accident, it could be a natural disaster, a tornado or whatever. What often I have done in my experience is we have made sure that folks are safe and we realize that we've had this horrible thing has happened, whatever it is. It's going to bring media attention, it's likely going to involve law enforcement and the emergency services. We would often think about how can we get the team out of that situation and somewhere safe. I'm often reminded of an issue we dealt with in my experience in 2010 where I had an individual come into a location and shoot and kill an employee and then took his own life. There's the immediate response, which is there's as run-hide-fight process and even before that was popular, everybody got out of the building. The first thing that the local leadership did for my employer at the time was: Okay, I'm going to account for everybody. I've got a competitor next door, we're going in there, they've offered us a conference room. We're going to get in there. We're going to sit down. We're going to get our families in here. We're going to make the call to the outside counselors to come help us out. We're going to be over here shielded from the media and all of the crazy stuff that comes in. I thought that was extremely astute work by the young leader that was there that day. Did everything right, but that's what we had taught them how to do. Jen: Yeah. I've experienced, aside from some of the ones that Bryan and I have experienced together, definitely experienced a lot of these types of scenarios, particularly at the beginning of the war when I was responding to mass casualty events. Some of the things that we used to do is, immediately following a mass casualty event we would get everyone together and talk about it and make sure everyone was doing okay. Bryan: That's right. Jen: But one thing we don't always do great on is the long-term and how that can affect people long-term. There's no way of knowing how it's going to affect any one person, but there is definitely going to be some kind of effect one way or another, whether it's conscious or subconscious. With good leaders, it's a matter of continuing to check in with your people, make sure they're doing okay and they have the resources that they need. Bryan: When I was a young leader, I was in New England for 9-11 and I had locations that were in southwestern Connecticut near New York City and that's where I was, I was in the Hartford area on the morning of 9-11 when all of those events transpired. I remember, my counterpart and I went back the next day and toured all of our Connecticut stores, not because we really cared about what was going on in terms of the business, but we were worried about the team. Folks there knew people who worked at the World Trade Center, had family members. They had this deep connection to the events in New York City in particular and all we really did was go from location to location and just talk with everybody, like: Is everybody okay? How are you doing? Is there anything we can do? Years later, this still comes up when I talk to people from Connecticut that they had my counterpart and I kind of making this circuit throughout the area to make sure that folks were okay. That was a conversation that we continued as leaders for years, all tied back to that traumatic incident that many of us experienced on the morning of 9-11. Jen: Yeah. You find when you go through something as traumatic as that, people really come together and create bonds that never go away, which is great because with those bonds, years down the road ... I know I can call some of my buddies that I was involved in some of those mass casualty incidents with, that I can call them any time and we can talk through things. There's kind of an untold bond between you because you were together. Those relationships are excellent to keep to continue to help each other through things like this, even down the road. That's a good way to talk about through getting your employees and that through those types of situations, but the one thing we don't always talk about is leaders. Bryan: We are not immune from this. Jen: Not immune to it at all. Leaders also experience the same levels of stress as anyone else does, plus they have the responsibility to take care of all of these people. Bryan: I think when we're talking about leaders, it's not just leaders at the site because I think of them as being directly impacted, but I've worked in crisis management for almost 20 years and it doesn't go away. Even if you're leading at a enterprise level and you're thousands of miles away from the incident that you're managing, it's that you still have impact from that, particularly if it's ... For me if it's one of two things: It's that sharp, traumatic incident, particularly if lives were lost, but it's also the ... Okay, we've had this major incident and we've dodged the ... We've not had people seriously injured, we've not lost anyone or a family member, but we have all of this work that has to be done to get the business back up and running and make sure that the team is made as whole as they can through the process because of damage to their community and homes and schools and what have you. Man, that takes a lot out of people and honestly most companies don't really put a lot of resources into crisis management, so it's often one, two, three people that are trying to manage this or with the help of a place like ours. I think it's very challenging and we miss this a lot, as it happens. Jen: And it's a high burnout career. Bryan: Oh, totally, as we know. Jen: Yes. That chronic stress, chronic fatigue takes a toll on you, both mentally and physically, for not just leaders but for everyone, but definitely leaders probably experience it the most because they're also trying to manage people that are experience it. You can see where the domino effect would happen. Bryan: We've talked before about the National Preparedness Leadership program at Harvard. Jen: Yes. Bryan: And their idea of meta-leadership through a crisis situation, the emergency situation. I remember that a big part of what we learned going through that program and a big part of their research is the psychology of being that leader in the critical moment and how do you make the decisions and what have you. But the question that Dr. Lenny Marcus would always ask, when he would get in the room and ... So there you are at Deep Water Horizon and you've got admiral Thad Allen from the Coast Guard is now the incident commander and calling the shots is, when they're in private: How are you doing? How are you feeling about this? I just saw you do X, Y, Z. Why did you make those decisions? It always came back to: How are you feeling? What are you thinking about emotionally as a leader as you're going through that? Those things are hard to manage through. Jen: Yeah. And what do you need? Bryan: What do you need? Jen: Leaders need time off too. Bryan: What do you need as a leader? Jen: Yeah. Bryan: I think back to that situation in 2010 with the ... That was a violent crime with the employee that was killed. That was my first one managing something like that at that scale and even though I was an experienced crisis manager, I had never done that. I remember coming off the first conference call with the team down there that had just gone through this and lost one of their own and we're trying to manage through the details and then calling a peer of mine that used to be in this job and just went: Okay, I have to ... I've got to walk you through what I'm thinking and what I want to do, but can I talk to you about how I feel for a minute because I'm trying to figure out how to process this. Jen: Yeah. Bryan: I think we often don't think about doing that and we don't think about or have somebody that we can do that with, that understands what you're going through. It's not the same as going home and having this conversation with your spouse, unless you're me and we work in the same field. Jen: That's true. Bryan: You can't just go to the random friend and say: Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah because they're not in that same ... They've never been in your shoes, they don't really understand that. I think it's important to find people that you can have that conversation with. Jen: Yeah. That's where I go back to some of my old buddies that I used to work with because they've been through stressful situations too, so you really lean on each other when that happens. Bryan: One of the more moving things for me in the last hurricane season that was so big, and this goes back to the National Preparedness Leadership, the NPLI program at Harvard. There was about 800 and some alumni of the program and the faculty would send us updates during major situations because they go out and deploy and they're walking with us. They sent a pretty heartfelt note one day about halfway through Hurricane Maria that said: Here's some things we're seeing and thinking about ... But it ended with: Look, we know what it's like to be at the tip of the spear as leading through these situations and that it's important to have somebody to talk to. If you don't have anybody to talk to, call us. Here's the phone number. Promise not to make you a research subject, but call us or call somebody in the program that you know, or don't know. I think we could all do that for each other. It's important to do that, but I think the bigger challenge is recognizing as a leader that you're not going to be immune to the stress and you're going to need to find ways to deal with this and seek help with this where necessary as it starts to impact you. Jen: I think what's good in this day and age, we have so many tools out there and there's so much more education and knowledge around this than there once was. Things like meditation and yoga that used to get kind of balked at but they're actually now ... My doctor actually recommends meditation now and this is well-studied stuff, but some of the preventative things that you can do. We also know, and there's been a lot of testing around this, that to reduce the effects of stress and fatigue as these things happen are the self-imposed stressors. Drugs, alcohol although you don't want to be a Drunk Driver, exhaustion, tobacco and ... Bryan: Too much coffee. Jen: Hypoglycemia. Exactly. All of these things can really amplify the effects of stress. Staying away from the excessive amounts of caffeine, which is laughable because I don't know any crisis manager ... Bryan: That is not addicted to coffee. Jen: ... That does not drink copious amounts of coffee. Bryan: Totally. Jen: And then often times at the end of the day, enjoying a beer after the effects of things. But keeping in mind that anything in moderation is okay, but once you've gone to the excessive amounts, no good. Exhaustion is huge. Getting enough rest before incidents happen and then also during the incident you have to take a break, you have to take a step away. Bryan: We forget about this because there's usually somebody in charge. There's an incident commander, there's ... You're the city emergency management director, you're the director of crisis management for a company, but that does not mean that you have to be there all the time because it will dull your ability to make decisions and deal with stress. Jen: Right. Exactly. Bryan: You've got to go home and you have to let somebody else run the thing until tomorrow or whenever. Jen: Exactly. Yeah. Tobacco, I mean need I say more? Hypoglycemia. Okay, again, I don't know an emergency manager out there that can't enjoy a good piece of pizza during an incident, even if it means you're shoving food in your mouth in between trying to get stuff done. It's really important that you're taking care of yourself one way or another. Bryan: Right. Jen: It doesn't have to be pizza, but ... Bryan: Our key message is here: As a part of your recovery, short- and long-term recovery following that immediate response is: Determine the need to bring in assistance to help with the team, understand the signs of stress, particularly post-traumatic stress and what that means and can look like. Make it a priority to touch base with the team as a leader and encourage others to do so to really just check in and just ask folks if they're okay, if there's anything they want to talk about or is there anything you can do to help them through that. You'd be surprised sometimes, I think, at the answers again. Jen: Agree. Make sure some of this is a part of your planning process, let's not forget that. Bryan: Right. And get the vendor lined up. Jen: Yes, exactly. Bryan: And then for yourself, you're not immune. We highly encourage you to find a partner in the field, a peer at another company, the person that held your job before you, or call us, we'd be happy to talk. Jen: Absolutely. Bryan: Best of luck.
The Hermit's Lamp Podcast - A place for witches, hermits, mystics, healers, and seekers
The band brings back Jenn Zahrt to catch up on how the winds of change are moving everyone. The gang gets into how to roll with change and work magic to aid it too. Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by Spotify, RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. Fabeku is at Fabeku.com and Facebook. Aidan is at AidanWachter.com on Facebook and Instagram Jenn JennZahrt.com or CelestialSpark.com and on Facebook and Instagram. Andrew is on Facebook, Instagram, and TheHermit'sLamp.com. Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world. Andrew You can book time with Andrew through his site here. Transcript ANDREW: [00:00:03] Hey everybody, welcome to episode 100 of The Hermit's Lamp podcast. I decided to get the band together for this episode. So, I am here with Stacking Skulls, being Fabeku and Aidan and myself and we have corralled [00:00:18] Jen Zahrt to come in and add to the mix today. So, hey, everybody! FABEKU: Hey. AIDAN: Howdy. ANDREW: It's three months since we recorded, four months since we recorded, what's going on in your worlds? How are things, what's up? [00:00:34] AIDAN: I've been good. I'm just enjoying the spring. Weather has been lovely. We got new kittens and yeah, everything is good. I, since the last time, we crested the one [00:00:49] year on Six Ways. So that's kind of wild, is to realize that that's been out and perking for more than a year. ANDREW: Yeah. JEN: Wow. AIDAN: And yeah, it's just, just keepin' on! ANDREW: That's great. [00:01:04] How 'bout you, Fabeku? FABEKU: Uh, good. It's been, yeah, probably the best thing for me. I've been doing tons of art, just cranking out tons and tons of art on an almost daily basis, which is good and [00:01:19] fun and exciting and then writing like crazy, usually in the middle of the night, which kind of sucks, but you know, at least it's getting done. Yeah, digging the spring/summerish weather that's finally happening, and [00:01:35] yeah, it's good, mostly things are good. Tea, donuts, cats, you know, usual shit. So. ANDREW: Usual stuff. FABEKU: Yeah. For sure. ANDREW: Curtains being destroyed. FABEKU: Yes, every day, every day. [laughs] ANDREW: How about you, Jen, [00:01:50] you went on a bit of an adventure? JEN: Yeah. I realized I'm on day 87 of my trip. [laughter] JEN: And it's been um, three continents, and also, you know, [00:02:05] I thought to myself like when I go home, I'm not really going home to anywhere specific and that it's been almost just over 400 days since my apartment flooded last year. So, I really haven't been home for quite a long time. Yeah, so [00:02:20] it's a wild ride. ANDREW: How do you find that sense of continuously shifting right? Because since the flood you've been sort of on the move in one sense or another that whole time, right? [00:02:35] JEN: Yeah, pretty much. I always have traveled to England for work. So, when I come here, I feel . . . That's where I am right now. I'm in Bristol, United Kingdom right now. So, I'm staying with somebody who I've stayed with for longer than I ever lived in the apartment that I had, so [00:02:50] it feels more like home than my home did, but it doesn't have any of my stuff in it. So that's a continuity. And yeah, it really makes you think about continuity and change. I really enjoyed the cross-country trip that I took last year, [00:03:05] and I went to Mongolia last year as well. So, these things were sort of moments of excitement and I was staying in a temporary place in Seattle. But yeah, so it's just kind of, it's been kind of having to roll with it. And ironically, [00:03:20] it's been amazing creatively because I've had all of this energy unlocked to just do my stuff, you know, like, and try to do magic on the run. [laughs] So, yeah. ANDREW: And how is magic on the run? JEN: [00:03:37] Not as easy as you'd think. Well, I mean, maybe you wouldn't think it's easy. [laughter] JEN: But yeah, it can happen. You can do it. It's possible. You just have to get really creative and not be too attached to certain things. You know, you can't reify like, that object, you [00:03:52] know, you sort of have to just launch a sigil when you need to launch a sigil and not be too concerned about being precious about the things that you're using. ANDREW: But do you think it's changed your, the way you're approaching stuff going [00:04:07] forward, or do you think you'll sort of revert to what you were up to before once that's more of an option? JEN: I don't really know. The astrology's showing me that it's going to be quite a while until I have something that people [00:04:22] would consider fixed and stable. So . . . [laughs] Knowing that, I'm just kind of like, okay, you know what? Here we go, swim, you know, you can't really fight it. So I'm really trying to go with it. Yeah. ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: We're trying to pretend that we're being, that we're fixed and stable but we expected this. [00:04:37] [laughter] JEN: Well, that's just it, you know, it is actually an illusion! [laughter] AIDAN: It's probably a load of crap, so . . . [laughter] JEN: It's an illusion, and sadly, Andrew knows all too well! You know, you have this thing where you're like, it's all good, it's going, it's going, and suddenly, boosh, it's gone. And like what are you going to do, you know? ANDREW: Yeah. JEN: And you just have to keep going, you know? AIDAN: Well, that was my interpretation of Andrew's stream of questioning, is he's like, okay! [laughter] What can I dig out of here that would be helpful? [laughter] ANDREW: Right? For sure! For folks who may not know, on March [00:05:08] 20th, my store had a fire and basically everything was destroyed. You know, nobody was . . . Nobody was hurt seriously. Firemen had some issues with smoke during the fire. But other than that, everybody was okay, and they're okay now. [00:05:23] But yeah, it's a big change, right? You know, I've been running the shop for six, almost seven years, I've been in that space for almost, for over 5, you know, and it's . . . Yeah, what can you do, right? [00:05:38] Uranus transits your midheaven and you're like, "Oh, I guess I'm changing a whole lot of stuff about where I'm going." [laughter] ANDREW: Unexpectedly, right? JEN: Yeah. Exactly. ANDREW: Yeah, and you know, I mean, kind of what I hear from what you're saying, Jen, which is what I've been [00:05:53] really trying to do is: Okay, how do you just lean into that change, right? JEN: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: Instead of being like, "Oh my God, how do I get back to where I was?" How do you, how do you kind of lean into that? How do you accept that and embody that? You know and I, [00:06:08] because you know, after the fire, there's so many questions about whether or not, like what would be the future of the space that I was in. I have the answer now. It's going to be a very long time and I'm not going back there. So, that's done. [00:06:24] You know, what's, what do you do next? How do you do stuff? You know? JEN: Yeah. ANDREW: And when you've been doing it for a while, it's often, if, it's often so much easier to sustain than it is to step [00:06:39] back into it as if you're starting over, you know? And so, you know, for me, the the prospect of retail is a big question mark, as it stands because rents in Toronto are insane, and because I'd been there [00:06:54] for such a long time. I had such a good deal, right? So. JEN: Yeah. ANDREW: Looking at all those possibilities, but also endeavoring to lean deeply into that change and be like: Okay, what what can I do? What would I like to do? Where's my excitement about this [00:07:09] stuff? You know? And so, just last week, from the recording of this, I took over a space that I'm calling The Hermit's Lab, and it's a space to, you know, see clients and teach, but also to work magic [00:07:24] and make products and make art and you know, really kind of get into what I've been enjoying anyways, which is the, the process of, like, you know, collecting plants and making things from them, and you know, doing stuff like that, that sort [00:07:39] of more, more, more active magic and craftsmanship, and more stuff that comes out of, you know, my, my sense of connection to the land and the plants and the things that are here, you know, [00:07:54] so, yeah. JEN: Yeah, yeah, it's, it just clears the decks in a way, and you think differently because all the potential things that used to be habits are completely shifted and you can't rely on that default mode anymore. ANDREW: Yeah, exactly. [00:08:10] AIDAN: Yeah, it is an interesting thing to think about cause there's a way that I look at . . . I know what Fabeku's up to, I know what y'all are up to, and the shifts that I did in the shop and everything kind of produced that same thing. You know, Blu and I just looked at it and went: [00:08:25] Okay, if we do this, we'll be able to pay the rent, and so, let's just do that and see where we end up and what makes sense to do in there. And we're way deep in that process because it's, it is, it's like, yeah, we've gotten into the habit we were in, even though we've [00:08:40] moved a lot, and switching that up changes, changes the possibilities. FABEKU: Yeah. I think it's interesting because I was thinking about, I mean for me, a lot of the flux and shift . . . It hasn't been location-based so much, because that's not, [00:08:55] that's hasn't been much of my experience. But you know, there's just been weird health shit in the last handful of years and stuff just pops up out of the blue like, every, everything is totally cool, and the next thing you're in the emergency room. And they're like, "Oh, you could have died." And it's like, what the fuck is happening, right? And then [00:09:10] on the other side of that things are different, and you, like Jen was saying, you, you end up doing magic differently. Again, for me, not because I'm traveling and don't have access to my stuff, because there's, there's different physical capacity, there's different energetic capacity, or there's just different bandwidth. And [00:09:25] you know, I was thinking, I think originally, one of my main drivers in getting into magic was I wanted . . . This was, you know, 30 whatever years ago. So it shows the sort of naivete of youth, but it was this desire [00:09:40] to somehow control the chaos, right? Like if I can, if I can just get a firm enough grip on it, then shit won't pop up out of the blue and shit doesn't happen and these weird things . . . you know, of course, all this anxiety, fear-driven kind of stuff. And then at some point, you realize: "Oh, [00:09:55] that's, that's not the way life works." Right? So instead now, it feels to me like magic is more about, for me, figuring out how to sort of surf that chaos, you know, how to stay on the board, instead of getting taken under by the waves and drowning [00:10:10] in the process and, realizing as the wave travels, as it goes, life looks different, magic looks different, the responses to magic looks different, and just learning to be way more fluid with that then, then I ever really thought I would be or could be, [00:10:25] or wanted to be, really, so. ANDREW: Yeah, I mean, I think that the, the magical cultivation of resilience and capacity to go with the flow. You know, it's [00:10:40] not, it's not sexy. Right? You know? [laughter] FABEKU: Not at all. Not at all. JEN: I think I make it pretty sexy. I have to differ! [laughter] ANDREW: I think we all make it pretty sexy. But I think if one was to publish a book that says, you know, The Magical [00:10:55] Guide to Resilience. I'm not sure it'd be a best-seller, you know? JEN: Are you challenging me? Are you challenging? That's a challenge! I'm writing this down. [laughter] AIDAN: Don't worry, I think we could have-- ANDREW: I'll write a chapter, it'll be lovely. JEN: Good! AIDAN: Exactly. Surviving the chaos . . . ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: . . . while generating chaos. Yeah. ANDREW: [00:11:19] But yeah, that's, I mean, that is a lot of what's been going on. Right? And a lot of what I've been doing, you know, I mean, I only recently returned to divining for myself. I was just like, "I don't know. What am I going to ask? Is it going to be okay? Is it going to be okay? Is it going to be okay? [00:11:34] It's like, well, you know, just work at it, work at making it okay, as opposed to like, you know, going to the cards all the time and you know that kind of stuff. And you know, and I think that a lot of the, [00:11:50] the stuff that makes getting through these challenging times possible, is about just showing up where you're at and being, "Okay, you know, this is, this is where my health capacity is. This is where my energetic capacity is. This is . . ." [00:12:05] You know, it's like, you just, you go there and then you work from that place and then, that's either the new limit for the time being, or a permanent limit or whatever, but you just kind of keep trucking with that, right? I mean, I think that's, [00:12:20] that's the deal. AIDAN: Absolutely, and I think it's super interesting because it's a . . . There was a guy who was one of the co-trainers at a strength-training seminar thing that I did years and years ago, who dropped [00:12:35] off the map. He had kind of a highly relevant website for me for a while in the . . . Around 2010, is when I was kind of really involved in his stuff. I don't remember him from the seminar, but I know he was there assisting. And he just popped [00:12:50] back up on my radar because he had, in the interim, become a Green Beret medic, and then got blown up and lost both of his legs. And the thing that was, is the most fascinating [00:13:05] about that, to me, is, it's like it really made me look at how much I kind of . . . Because the guy looks great. You know. He's like . . . His target is like, "I won't be able to ski this year, but next year I'm skiing." You know? And he's got that kind of [00:13:20] capability to ride that, go, "Okay, I did this thing that truly mattered to me, and this is part of what came from that, and so that's just what it is, and let's continue, you know?" And I think it's been very helpful for me, that he popped [00:13:35] up when he did because I was kind of being a whiny whiny person about some stuff. And it's like, oh, yeah. No. No, all of this is kind of because of how I chose to live my life and all of that. And I haven't had anything severe happen. It's all good. It's all, it's all stuff I can [00:13:50] functionally work with, you know? JEN: Yeah. I mean the length of my lease-less-ness or home-free-ness, I would say, is my own fault because I could have easily flipped around and said, "Oh, my apartment flooded, let me sign a lease," but my goal was actually to travel, [00:14:06] and then I just didn't stop. AIDAN: Right. JEN: And I haven't stopped and now I'm actually getting to the point where I'm realizing what my limits are, because I've finally met them, but I didn't, I hadn't met them until this point, you know? And so, and it's good like, now I know, but I just kept going, [00:14:21] you know, it wasn't enough. I had to go to Mongolia. I had to spend three months in Africa, you know? And now I finally get it and it's like, "Oh, I think I could probably be okay with signing a lease now, you know?" But for 400 days, it wasn't okay, you know, and I was choosing not to have that, so I wasn't [00:14:36] complaining about having a home. It was more like, I'm, I just, wasn't done with my trip. You know. [laughs] I was choosing to continue it as much as it needed to be, I guess. AIDAN: Yeah. Well, it's [00:14:51] interesting. I was, I've been thinking a lot about you, Andrew as you roll through with the Instagram feed and stuff and seeing your thing. And it is such an interesting . . . It's an interesting experience when kind of life makes the move, right? Because [00:15:06] we like to have that impression that we make the move, and in general, we just don't, right? [laughs] Or we pick the really safe minor ones, and then something really major that is seemingly random, you know, from our control [00:15:21] side. And it's been interesting to see because I can kind of cycle going like, "Okay, what are all the things he's got to figure out now?" ANDREW: Mm-hmm. AIDAN: Because I know you're not really . . . There are some folks that, that happens, and they go, "Okay, [00:15:37] 90 days, I'm back in business as I was before, bigger and better," right? That's kind of, we're not going to tip. We're not necessarily going to take any information out of what occurred. What do you find is kind of, what's the process [00:15:52] that you have going on with you about that? What are you thinking about? What do you find is brought up by this? ANDREW: So, I think that leading up to the fire, like always, I'm always sort of like, looking at: [00:16:08] Where am I? Where am I enjoying stuff? Where am I not enjoying stuff? Right? What are the challenges? And you know, I sort of had like an 18-month to two-year plan to shimmy stuff in different directions, right? And, you know, I had been finding myself [00:16:23] realizing that there were things that I wanted to do that having a retail store kind of acted more like an anchor to, you know? Going to a conference is a huge effort [00:16:38] when you have to make sure that the store is running in your absence. Right? Taking time off is more complicated when you don't have full, full-time staff and you have to kind of cover payroll and make sure everything's flowing around your work time. [00:16:54] And I've been having this sort of impulse towards making more art, making a new deck, you know, like a bunch of stuff like that, and, and I didn't have any time for them. And not because I'm [00:17:09] like, horrible at managing my time, but between, you know, having, having two kids half the time and running the store, it's not a lot of spare time left over, you know? And so, when [00:17:24] this happened, my first impulse was like, I mean, I certainly felt that like, "Hey, you should decide stuff now, you should get going," and my first impulse was like, "I'm not doing anything for like two or three weeks. I'm just not going to think of a decision. I'm just [00:17:39] going to deal with immediate stuff, insurance and what-have-you," right? And then, and then, I felt this like, push, be like, you know, you should, you should re-establish something, you should whatever and I was like, "No, you should make a list of things [00:17:54] that you would like," you know? And it . . . One of the things that it started with, so, in Toronto, I live, some people would say downtown, but kind of downtown-ish. Right? And when you go north to where the shop was, there's, for Toronto, [00:18:09] not for where Aidan lives, a big hill, right? AIDAN: [laughing] ANDREW: And it used to be that I cycled everywhere, right? But I'm a person who gets kind of sweaty, and [00:18:24] in the winter, it's dangerous, because we get snow and ice, right? To go up and down that hill. And I don't have a shower at the space, or anything like that. And I was thinking about where it would be nice to be and kind of one of the, like what I would like? I was like, you know, it'd be really nice, [00:18:39] really nice, if I could just cycle to work again all the time. Like if I could just not take transit very much, and just, you know, just cycle, and then as I was sort of kicking around looking at opportunities, you know, there's . . . [00:18:54] I was out strolling around with my partner, Sarah, and we saw this place in Chinatown. And I was like, "How great would it be, to like, you know, be, be just 15 minutes from my house?" As opposed to like the, [00:19:09] you know, somewhere between 40 minutes and an hour that it takes depending on transit. You know? I was like, "That'd be really nice," and it just sort of became this like question of like, what's possible? And what can I make happen? And so on? And then, [00:19:26] my other partner, Erin, sent me a link to this space that I ended up getting, which is literally a five-minute walk from my house. And it's just kind of, it's amazing. Right? And so now, they're these changes that happen where, [00:19:43] things that I wanted to do but wasn't doing because of time, things that I wanted to do, like, I've been thinking about running a men's circle for a couple years now, but it doesn't make any sense if I have [00:19:58] to commute an hour each way to get there to run it or go in that much earlier than my regular day. But now, I'm like, oh, that's a five-minute walk. I can just, I can do it on any day that I feel like, and just be like, oh, yeah. I'm going to walk down to the shop. [00:20:13] You know? I'm gonna be there in five minutes. I'll be there a few minutes early, we'll hang out, we'll do our thing, we'll go home or whatever. Like, it's easy, right? And you know, the, the prospect of, you know, I mean, having kids, it's easier now, but I live [00:20:28] in Toronto. I don't have a huge place. And having space to make art and really like make a mess and whatever, you know, it's complicated, right? And leaving out my paints and stuff. I mean, the kids are great about it now, but it's like, there's not a lot of room, you know. The place [00:20:43] where . . . I either was thinking about setting up some space and giving up the walk-in closet in my room, glamorous space, right? Or it's the kitchen table, which you can't leave it on indefinitely, right? But now I have this space where I'm just going to have a permanent [00:20:58] worktable and easel and wall space for doing big stuff and you know, these kinds of things. Because that was one of the other things. I was like, thinking about . . . People kept . . . People have been making references between the Orisha deck I made and Basquiat's art. And [00:21:13] I remember how much I loved how big a lot of his stuff was. And I'm like, I would love to be painting big, but I just have nowhere to do that. Well, you know, I've got 25 feet of wall space here. It's got enough and it's just, I can have it [00:21:28] on the floor. I can do whatever I want on it, you know. So, so it's this process of like looking for where the excitement is, looking at . . . You know, I sat down one night and made, [00:21:43] made this big list of, okay, kind of panicking about the future, is how do I, how do I make the kind of money I was making before? Which I need to support everything that I do in my life. How do I get to that? [00:21:58] You know? And my partner Sarah and I made this list of like, okay, well, what's everything that you can or have or would like to do for money, you know? It's just like going down a list of all these things. You know? One of the great realizations was, I was like, okay, what do I need [00:22:13] for these things? And the only one that requires a store was retail, right? AIDAN: Right. ANDREW: You know, that was the only one on the list that actually required it, you know. There's like, a whole, you know, field notes little pocket journal of like list of like 25 [00:22:28] things that I could do or have done or, you know, are currently doing, that I can just opt into instead, right? And it's just, so, it's not like I've been sort of, I don't know, [00:22:43] aimlessly leaning into abundance mentality and thinking that I'm going to just manifest everything without kind of thinking about it or working at it, but it's a lot more like I've been looking at possibilities, challenging assumptions, [00:22:59] looking, looking to keep an open-ended set of possibilities, you know? Like, even the place that I'm in now, you know, the advertisement said that you had to be willing to sign a year lease and I, when I came and I was, met the landlord and was getting shown around, I was like, [00:23:14] "So, what do you think about six months, because this is my situation" and they were like, "Yeah, that's cool. We can do that." You know, like, it's like, let's see what's possible, you know, and I think that when that happens then, you know, more becomes possible [00:23:29] and, you know, I've been thinking about stuff that I never even considered before, you know? One of the projects that I'm going to start undertaking is I'm going to hand paint a set of majors, [00:23:44] major tarot cards, and you know, and then depending on how that feels, maybe I'm going to offer to do that for people, you know? AIDAN: Right. ANDREW: Like, you know, it's like, my friend Sullivan, who from [00:23:59] Tarot Sheet Revival, who does the Budapest Tarot and other stuff. Hey Sullivan, if you're listening, this is, this, this is a question I'm going to email you about soon. I'm like, he mixed cards in the traditional way, right? And he comes to Toronto sometimes. And that, you know, so he hand laminates all the layers, [00:24:14] and folds the background onto the front, and does all this stuff, I'm like how, let's do a workshop on that because like I want to learn, I'm sure there's lots of people that want to learn, you know, and so stuff that, that was never even on the table, that migrates in different directions starts to feel [00:24:29] really possible. And then also noticing the, like, yeah, that's what I want to spend my time doing, you know, really, really takes it that way, you know, so. Anyway, that's my long-winded rambling answer to your question, Aidan. AIDAN: No, [00:24:44] that's awesome. And it syncs up with my kind of experience so well and it's interesting because I'm like, I don't have much resistance to change compared to most people, but I still do have that [00:24:59] thing? ANDREW: Sure. AIDAN: And then I have all the kind of layers of worry that come along with, if you're going to make a big change and it's going to directly impact your ability to pay the bills and, you know, feed your people and all that stuff, but . . . ANDREW: You've got kittens to take care of, right? AIDAN: [00:25:16] I've got kittens to take care of! Kittens need beef! [laughter] AIDAN: Beef is the answer to all kitten ills, truly. A little off [00:25:31] and not right. We switched them to half beef and they're giant now and totally healthy. So, beef is the answer. ANDREW: Perfect. FABEKU: I think the piece of it that makes sense, in my experience. What you're talking about is that [00:25:47] that kind of figuring out where the zing is, you know, figuring out the things that are exciting, figuring out like it sort of, once the chaos happens, it creates this weird kind of break in state where, rather than just continue to roll through the list of shit [00:26:02] that you do every day and assume that that's the program and that's the thing, you have a moment where you either get to or have to look at that stuff and say wait, is this really the stuff I want to do? Is this the stuff that matters? is the stuff I'm excited about? Is this the stuff that drives me? It's [00:26:17] this, you know, whatever it is. And you know, I mean it's certainly been, you know, kind of a big reassessing and reshuffling of some of that stuff for me, and you know, kind of redistributing the weight of attention and you know, what I'm, what I'm spending my time doing, and [00:26:32] you know, I think for me that kind of sinks up to that deeper idea of looking at that chaos and kind of relating to it as like sort of building materials. You know, it's like somebody takes it and throws it all up in the air and it's like, okay, now that it's everywhere, rather [00:26:47] than look at that as some tragedy, and not that there's not tragic components to it, obviously, but you know, rather than sort of drown in that, looking at okay, now that the deck has been reshuffled, how can I how can I reassemble this stuff? You know, what do I want to keep? [00:27:02] What do I want to toss out? And if this is what's left, then, you know, what is, what is the new, the new octave of stuff look like on the other side of this, this weird chaotic event, so. ANDREW: Yeah. I mean, one of the things I find myself saying [00:27:17] sometimes to people around the Tower card is, you know, when when the Tower gets struck or whatever that disruption is, you have a choice, right? You can either be like Bugs Bunny in the cartoon sticking fingers in holes in the dam and hoping [00:27:32] that it's not coming down, or you can get at the sledgehammer and help, and then once it's disassembled, then you call in the architect and the engineers and, you know, work together to figure out what's happening next, right? FABEKU: Yeah. ANDREW: So. Mm-hmm. So, and I also think [00:27:47] that you know, one of the things, you know, to be clear too, because I think that there's a lot of "rah, rah, I just overcome stuff," out there, right, you know? And, like, this process [00:28:02] and what I'm talking about now, you know, it's almost three months post fire, you know, and, like, you know, I was in shock for the first two to three weeks, like literally just still physically in shock, you know, and [00:28:18] there were, there were times, you know, like I . . . I'm usually a person who has a lot of control over their mind, you know, I mean, I spent years sitting and meditating and training myself in different magical and sort of yogic [00:28:33] driven ways. So, like, for me to not be able to wrangle my mind back under to, you know, some semblance of control is, you know, it doesn't really happen much. And it totally happened after this, you know, I was out [00:28:49] at a concert, and I was I was just watching my friend play, and then this thought just came to my brain, which is your house is on fire, your house is totally burning down right now, and people are trying to call you, and you're in the concert and you can't hear them. And [00:29:04] I couldn't restrain it. I . . . In the end, I pulled my phone out and looked at it. I'm like, nobody's called me. If someone . . . at that point, I was like, okay, now, nobody's called me. Somebody would have called me if my place was on fire. There are lots of people who would get direct ahold of me. It's fine. But [00:29:19] you know, it's, it's important to really notice that stuff and to deal with that too, right? FABEKU: Yeah. ANDREW: Because even, you know, even as somebody who has, you know, a lot of experience sort of wrangling back their mind from various things, [00:29:35] there comes a point where it's just not controllable and that's fine. You know, it's acceptable. It's real, you know, and to, to work with that, you know? And like, I also, you know, I have a person I do peer counseling with, [00:29:50] and other friends I get a lot of support with, and, you know, my friend that I do peer counseling with was like, I'm available as much as you want, and I saw them like, a couple times a week for the first stretch, just you know, and just one-sided more than an exchange, because it's just [00:30:05] like, I just need the support. I just got, I just need to talk this through, you know? And so, I think that leaning into the possibilities is absolutely crucial, and, you know, dealing with the trauma of it, whatever [00:30:20] level that's at, is the other side of that equation, right? Because without that, you know, I feel like I would just carry the sense of worry about stuff going forward . . . FABEKU: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And it would make every exchange with things, you know, like, [00:30:35] you know, like when my landlord voided my lease, you know, that would be a re-triggering thing, when, you know, this happens, you know when you're sitting waiting for the insurance to tell you how much money they're going to give you, that'd be another thing, and you know, just keep stirring [00:30:50] it up and stirring it up. And instead, I'm like, you know, have done a lot of cleaning up of it and so, it's way way easier now. So, yeah. FABEKU: Well, you know, one of the things that happened for me after the [00:31:05] other big health event last year, which was about . . . It was mid-April last year, and after that for like six to nine months every time I would have even a tiny sensation anywhere in my body that didn't seem completely normal, [00:31:20] I would freak the fuck out. It was like, that's it. It's happening again. I'm about to drop dead. What's going on? At one point, I was talking my doctor and I said "Listen, this is a thing that happens." And she said, "Right, you get that like people get PTSD or some version of PTSD from events like that [00:31:35] that pop up." And I was like, "What?" And she was like, you know, "Come on, like, this is a thing that happens to people." And so, I get that, I think that there . . . And, and I appreciate that you brought that up, because I do think that it gets a little . . . The conversations [00:31:50] about it get a little one-sided. I mean the possibility is great and that's useful and important and helpful and there is this other shit that you know, it just kind of goes along for the ride with these weird kind of chaotic life events. And then figuring out how [00:32:05] to manage that and how like you said kind of clean it up, and for me it was a process, and it's still kind of a process sometimes, of, you know, like how do you peel, how do you peel those layers of that charge off of that thing to where, you know, when your, when your leg goes numb because you're sitting weird, you're [00:32:20] all of a sudden like, "I'm about to drop dead," and then you just lose your shit, you know, it's inaccurate and not helpful, you know? But I think that that's it and you know, one of the things that my doctor said to me, it was interesting, was she said, well, you know, over time, [00:32:35] just, that I get that you're not going to love this answer, but, she said, "Over time you'll get that you're actually not about to drop dead, you know, because these things have come and gone, and you know, they pass and you're still here and it's fine." And yeah, I didn't, I didn't really love [00:32:50] that answer too much. But, but that's it. I mean that is part of the, that sort of peeling off of the charge, and I think that's that's a huge part of the process. It's a huge part of the process, for sure. JEN: Yeah, it took me a long time to feel that [00:33:05] charge dissipate. When I was in downtown Seattle, it hurt and that's one reason why I kept leaving, was because it hurt too much to be near my old apartment. I felt like it had somehow spontaneously rejected me and said no, you can't live in downtown Seattle anymore [00:33:20] and it was physically painful and it took . . . It wasn't until I got back from Mongolia that it started to be, and that was about four months after the event? And then it slowly started when I would leave and come back and leave and come back, [00:33:35] each time I came back from a long trip, it would be less painful and less painful. And now I can walk around just fine, and I don't feel as much, but being there was painful, so I had to go and then return and . . . Just that, it was almost like I had to establish a new [00:33:50] story of my relationship to the city, because my only relationship had been with that apartment, and suddenly that was gone, and it was like, now, how do I live here? I don't know how to live here. It doesn't want me. You know, it felt like it was rejecting me. So, I had to re-establish that [00:34:05] relationship by rejecting it many many times before I could say, oh, okay. Yeah, I know, I think I can actually do this, you know. AIDAN: Yeah. It is really interesting . . . ANDREW: [34:15 something is missing] AIDAN: [chuckles] Yeah, it's super interesting, because I do think that we, and I think that we've been [00:34:20] over all pretty good in these conversations in kind of going back to the reality, because it's you know, it's like, Fabeku and I have kind of, you know, I was thinking about this the other day, our time lining on a bunch [00:34:35] of stuff has been really similar, even though what's gone on for us is very different. And for a lot of that, I was a wreck, you know, it's like I was totally able to do certain pieces of what needed to be done. And then there was a bunch of shit that [00:34:50] just kind of had to be jettisoned. And I do think that it's kind of what you were talking about, Jen, is like post injury and surgery and stuff like that. It's been really a weird feeling out process, getting comfortable [00:35:05] moving pretty actively, and doing what I do, because it is, it's like, so, I can pick this thing up. And I know that that will be good for my body overall if I get back to working out because I kind of need it, but is this going to cause me [00:35:20] to have to go back and get opened up again and fixed again, right? And you've slowly got to go, okay, we just take it easy and do what you can do in any moment, but I think yeah, it's a . . . The Instagram culture [00:35:35] is right. Nothing ever, nothing bad ever happens, if you have, if you have the ability to grind hard enough. [laughs] ANDREW: Well, that's just it, right? You know, for me, you know, back when I used to do martial arts, it was like, oh [00:35:50] you just sprained your ankle. Here. Here's some tape. Let's go, you know? Tape it up and keep moving. Right? You know? It was such a bizarre, otherworldly thing, right? And so, you know, I kind of got to the place where I would get injured, and my response to it [00:36:05] was, did I go into shock? Because if I didn't go into shock, I don't need to go to the hospital. I'm probably okay. Which is which is really not ideal at all. Right? And so like, you know, as I've get, you know some injuries and stuff around climbing, you know, and going [00:36:20] back to climbing, it's always tempting just to push, and I'm still, you know, you could still be strong and weak at the same time, right? With injuries, you know? And so, I was like, how do I control this? How do I like, derail my impulse just to like [00:36:36] get excited? And it's not even about being macho in that sense. It's just like, oh my God, this is so fun, and this is so exciting. I really want to like, hang off this upside-down thing and try and do this move now, right? And it's like, oh no, that's not good. And so [00:36:51] I was like, okay, what I'm going to do is this: I'm gonna go to the gym and I'm a climb every single climb of one level in an evening, and when I can do that, then I'll go up one notch, you know? And you know, it's like, but it's this constant [00:37:06] thing, and you know, just be like seeing stuff and looking at it, being like, oh my god, I'd be so excited to do that. But then it's like, well but can my body, actually, in a deep way, sustain that, right? You know? AIDAN: Right. ANDREW: It's, yeah, requires patience and attention, you know. [00:37:22] So. AIDAN: Yep. ANDREW: Well, and the other thing that's, you know, interesting for me is, I mean, all my Orishas are at my house. So, they're fine. [00:37:38] But almost all of my functional magical gear and altars and statuary and all of those things all burned, right? They're all gone. You know. I saved one meteorite that I had, that I found, I'm like [00:37:53] if it can go through the atmosphere, it can go through this. That's not a big deal. I'm gonna see if I can, if I can clean, and I mean like not spiritually, but just practically, clean my, [00:38:08] moldavite pendulum. I'm not sure, you know, it was exposed to a lot of smoke stuff. And, and that's it. You know, all my, all my cards are gone, you know? All the decks that I've had over the years are gone. [00:38:23] You know, and I mean, for me it's fine. I can replace many, if not all of them, and I don't really need a ton anyway, but yeah, it's this question of like, okay, what do I need? You know. And I just remember it was a time in the process where [00:38:38] it was kind of getting down to, they're like, okay, so the engineers have been in, it's safe, you need to go in and decide what you're taking, and then everything else will get disposed of," right? Because you know, although a lot of people were like, oh you can clean stuff [00:38:53] and whatever, it's like, you know, my couch burned, so like all that Styrofoam smoke is in the space, you know, like so much toxic stuff, right? And it's like yeah, maybe you can clean that off, but I'm not really sure. And I don't know, [00:39:08] it's got toxic stuff on it, and I don't want to keep a lot of stuff, you know, and that smell is really hard to get rid of, even off of hard stuff, right? And so, I just kind of went in and I went where all the, all the shrine stuff was, [00:39:23] and just brought flowers, and I'm like, all right. So, this is a juncture, my friends. If you want to continue with me, let's continue, carry forward, and if this is a time at which you want to, you know, go on to do something else and then then let's called it at that, [00:39:38] you know, and just spending some time there. And you know, it's sort of, there's been a bunch of conversations where people, you know, expressed sort of that the loss of these items was the loss of that connection to spirit and, you [00:39:53] know, for me it hasn't really been, you know, and I don't think that it ever needs to be, but I think it's easy to identify in those kinds of ways, and you know, I'm like, I wonder how that is for you, Jen, too, like, did you lose magical things that you've [00:40:08] had to reorganize yourself around? JEN: I did not. I had a very lucky experience in that the part of my house that flooded destroyed property I was already getting rid of but that was quite valuable [00:40:23] and so it turned into a car. So, my apartment left, my things were fine. But . . . And the flood happened in a part of the apartment that made it unlivable. It was the entryway, the bathroom, and the front hallway. [00:40:38] And there was nothing in the bathroom of worth, and then the front hallway, there were stacks and stacks of astrology books that I was going to sell but they were all destroyed so I couldn't sell them. And then, the insurance replacement cost was enough for a down payment on the car. So, [00:40:53] I ended up converting them that way and yeah, anything else, it was, you know, not really things that I missed. You know, certain things I had to get rid. I had to get rid of because they got wet and just was, you know, [00:41:08] we didn't know what was in the water, basically, but overall, the most important things did get saved and so I was lucky in that way. But I put it all in storage. So, I haven't really had access to it up until just before this trip, [00:41:23] but then I left for 90 days. So, it still is like not in my possession. But so, yeah, our stories differ somewhat in that respect and I feel really lucky that I didn't lose everything in that way. Yeah, [00:41:38] I had a feeling that the protection magic that I had set up in my house was quite strong and it could have easily been that the water had gone in the other direction, which would have been catastrophic, but it didn't go that way. So. And also in terms of timing, is, Aidan, you were speaking that you and [00:41:53] Fabeku had the line up, Fabeku's health incident happened the exact same weekend that my flood happened. So, we were commiserating about that at the same time. AIDAN: Right. JEN: "Holy shit. What is going on right now?" AIDAN: Yep. JEN: Yeah. AIDAN: Yep. [00:42:09] Yeah, it is. It's a peculiar thing I had . . . This is kind of a switch of topics. But one of the things that was really kind of fascinating, this [00:42:24] last week, is I went and visited my brother in San Francisco. And his place is super cool. They're like, they do an amazing amount of really cool work. [00:42:39] Some of that is art and a lot of it is food and fermenting, and you know, they've got the bees and all of that stuff. But one of the things that I found really interesting is that there was a big fire on their block that took out [00:42:54] the building next to them, basically, even though it was a gas line fire in the streets, just because of the way that the pipe was pierced. It like shot this jet of fire at that building and messed that up. And then, [00:43:09] to get that building put out, the fire department ended up destroying a number of apartments basically, just with water damage, you know, that were attached to that. And then across the street, but moving away from their apartment, got taken [00:43:24] out by smoke and heat, because of the way the wind was blowing, you know. So, it was really, I'm sure they had a mass-, way more awareness that I did. It was very odd being in this house that was like, you know, a couple of feet [00:43:39] away from not existing with so much stuff in it. That was, that they've put so much work into. And it's, yeah, it's pretty interesting, because we've moved so much, we've become kind of so [00:43:55] minimalist, in some ways, though not in the way that usually gets used, that there's not much here if that happened. And that's where I kind of went. Like, I don't have much left, you know. It would be easier if I could grab [00:44:10] my computer. I would be happier if I could also grab a couple of guitars, but other than that, other than that, it's just the animals but there's really not, there's not much left in here that I am attached. And so that's an odd . . . It was just kind [00:44:25] of an odd thing. Like, yeah, if this place burned down, I could walk away. I could just walk away, and it would be no . . . It wouldn't be fun and there would be shit after the fact, I'm sure. But in general, I don't have enough for it to get taken out. That's [00:44:41] a weird thing, though. JEN: Yeah, I think it all goes down to also like an illusion of stability, you know, we can set up shop somewhere and unpack and feel the continuity of a certain [00:44:56] period of time and then if it gets cut short, out of our control, and it's not our choice to move, or our choice to end the lease, it feels totally destabilizing, and yet we were actually unstable the whole time, really. You know, it's, it was sort of a, [00:45:12] I don't know. I've been thinking about that a lot. Like what is continuity? what is rupture? You know, how . . . What is security, even? And you know, through these types of challenges, can we still feel a type of security, even though we know at any moment it could change, you know? [00:45:28] FABEKU: Well, you know, for me what's been interesting with that, kind of going back to that kind of post-event sort of panic trauma stuff that would kick up. I -- and I'm not pretending it's all the way resolved. But I think the way that I finally figured out how to manage [00:45:43] it on a day-to-day basis was, like I started to figure out like how do I, what do I do? Like, how do I amp this anxiety down? So, it's not a constant thing, and I was I was failing at that, because I was trying to grab hold of something [00:45:58] that would say: Oh, you're fine. It's stable. Nothing to worry about, nothing will happen again. It's not a big deal. And that was bullshit and I know it's bullshit because you know, that's, Jesus, I mean, I'm 44, shit happens. But, and so that's ultimately how I started [00:46:13] to amp it down. It's like, well, the way you amp it down is you realize everybody dies, and everybody dies at some point, for some reason, however that happens, and you really have zero control over it. So, this constant anxiety and this, this grasping [00:46:28] for some kind of control mechanism that absolutely doesn't exist. It's a . . . it's an unwise investment at the end of the day. It's unwise, and it's ineffective and so it really was that kind of almost cliché thing of like making as much peace as you can with your [00:46:43] death, right? It happens, people die. And the only thing that I can reliably trust is that I'm in the current. I have no idea what the current's going to do. I don't know where it's going to go. But I'm in the current and that's all I know and that's it. And again, [00:46:58] I don't love that. You know, I mean, if somebody gave me the option of, you know, here's a, here's a foolproof control mechanism, I would probably take hold of it and say "give me door number one," but that's not a thing. It's not a thing. And the interesting thing . . . And I fought that [00:47:13] as a resolution because there was, there was a part of me that that kind of increased the panic for a minute, like well, that's a shitty answer to the question. But then when I realized that's literally the only answer to the question. That is it. There is, it might be shitty, but [00:47:28] there is no other answer. Then there is, then there was a whole lot of levels that started to settle in, and, and it's just stay in the current, that's it. And then that also then circles back to what we were saying about, you know, figuring out what you're [00:47:43] actually excited about, and prioritizing the shit you spend time on, and the people you spend time with, and, you know, all of it. It's, so that's, that for me is the thing, and I don't, and I want to be clear, like I'm not, I'm not coming at that from some enlightened state. Like, it's not like, [00:47:58] "Oh, I realized my own mortality and I'm at peace." I'm not at peace with any of it, but it is what it is. And so that, the constant trauma response has amped down considerably, once I realized that, just stay in the fucking current. That's it. That's [00:48:13] the only option you have, really, so. ANDREW: Well, and I think that, you know, too like, you know, we all do some form of looking towards the future in divination and astrology and whatever, right? And you know, people ask me like, oh is that, you know, did [00:48:28] you see it coming? Did you whatever? And I was like no. No, I mean I didn't see it coming, right? And you know, there's, there's, in the Lukumí divination that I do, there's, when, [00:48:43] when you're in a sign of loss, say or like, you know, whatever, right? And I was in a sign, in a negative sign, when the fire happened, unsurprisingly, but there's a modifier that goes with it, which is Otonawa, right? And it means, [00:49:00] kind of loosely translated as that which you brought with you from heaven, right? And it tells you that it's, it was immutable, right? That whatever, whatever this is going on, the actual core of it you can't change. Maybe you can mitigate [00:49:15] it. Maybe you can bob and weave with it. Possibly, hopefully, you can accelerate your, you know, ramping up back out of it, but it means it's coming, right? And you're not going to be able to change that and make that happen--make [00:49:30] that not happen. And, you know, understanding and thinking about life in those ways, where it's like I'm literally in a time where this is . . . So many things are beyond my control. And that that energy continued for a good stretch, right? Because, [00:49:45] you know, the insurance company is going to do what the insurance company's going to do. I have some say in that, but not a lot, you know. The landlord is going to do what they're going to do. The other people are going to do what they're going to do. And you know, you have to, you know, you have to [00:50:00] make some kind of peace with the fact that all you can do is are those things that are in your control and keeps, as you say, staying in that flow and moving forward, you know? So. FABEKU: Well, one of the two things for me was-- JEN: When I-- FABEKU: I did a consult [00:50:15] with Jen last year and, we're kind of looking ahead at the year, and she said, "Well, you know, like I kind of hate to tell you but like in October there's a thing that looks a whole lot like the thing the past April where the big health--" and I was like, [00:50:30] "Fuck me, are you serious?" Like what the fuck! And then it was this whole conversation around so what can we do about it? Right? So, like you're saying, fundamentally the energy is there. That's the frequency. And then I think as magicians the question [00:50:45] becomes, how do I, how do I handle that frequency? It's not like I can just hit the delete button and it's gone. So instead, you know for me it was this whole Saturn thing that was happening. So, I did this nine week long thing with Saturn and all kinds of shit. [00:51:00] And so something that could have been a life-threatening thing: I still got sick, weird shit still happened, and I saw the potential in it for things to get super serious, but it didn't. It wasn't serious. And I moved on the other side of it, because I think again, [00:51:15] there was this looking to the future, and okay, how do we and-- Listen, I wanted to completely eliminate the energy, but I got that's not how it's going to work. So instead, how do I shape this shit so that it's as least problematic as possible. You [00:51:30] know? And again, I didn't love any of that. But, but for me, that was, that was, that was the way to stay in the current at the time, and continue to maintain a relationship to the current as a magician, when it would have been super easy for [00:51:45] me to just lose my fucking mind about the fact that oh, this period of time looks a whole lot like that period of time that was super horrible. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JEN: Yeah. So, did you, Andrew, [00:52:00] do the Lukumí reading right after the fire, to get that message? ANDREW: I was already in a reading. JEN: Oh, okay. ANDREW: They govern at least 28 days. So yeah, I was already within that structure. So, yeah. JEN: So [00:52:15] when my flood happened, the city condemned the apartment as unlivable, and I had five days to move, and they would help fund relocating. So basically, just pay you a bunch of money to leave. But you have to leave within that period of time. And I called my neighbor and I said, "I [00:52:30] have to go, because there's a lot of money on the line, and I'm ready and willing. I mean, you guys know me, you say 'jump,' I'm just gone," you know. So, I was already packing and everything and I said, "I just need a mover, tell me who I should get." So, she said, "Call TGA Movers," so I called his number, and this guy named Harvey [00:52:45] comes on, and he comes by on Saturday, and I have to leave by that Tuesday. He appraises everything, and says, "I'll come by tomorrow with my truck and a guy named Eddie." I was like, "Okay, cool." So, on Sunday, he rocks up in this truck. It's this white van. And on the outside of [00:53:00] the van, there's this massive black elephant. And on it, it says, "The Great Ancestors Moving and Maintenance." ANDREW: Mm-hmm. [laughter] JEN: So, I'm like, you mean the great ancestors are moving me out of this [00:53:15] flooded apartment? [laughter] JEN: Like it suddenly went from being this like very traumatic, like holy crap, my life is just completely changed in one weekend, and I had to come back from, you know, speaking in a planetarium about astrology early, from, I was in Alaska when the flood happened, so [00:53:30] I had to fly home early, and this was so chaotic and everything, and then suddenly like within that week the ancestors are moving me? And I was just like, "How can this be a bad thing?" You know, and it suddenly from that point on was like, oh, okay, like this is actually something good, you know, and it feels bad [00:53:45] now and it's definitely traumatic, but you just can't ignore a sign like that. I mean, what are the chances? I didn't even look what TGA stood for, you know, and then there it was, like the great ancestors, you know. So. ANDREW: That's amazing. FABEKU: I think that kind [00:54:00] of going back to that thing I said earlier about originally wanting to kind of control or eliminate the chaos. Now a lot of my magic is focused on sort of asking that the chaos works out in my favor. You know? That it, and again not in some weird Pollyanna [00:54:15] like, oh everything works out the way it should, because I think that's a fucked-up idea. But it, to me, that's the way I shifted, like, as much as I would love to eliminate that kind of chaos all together, realizing that's not going to happen. So instead if we can kind of slant it [00:54:30] so ultimately, as shitty as it might be, as uncomfortable as it might be, as horrifying as it might be, somehow it sort of shakes out in my favor at the end, as opposed to . . . So again, to me that's the sort of asking the current to carry me forward versus, you know, kind of pulling you under [00:54:45] and the undertow at some point. So. ANDREW: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I did a lot of praying to have the intelligence and awareness to benefit from situations [00:55:00] and to find my way through them, right? You know, they're like, I'm like, there's definitely some like, "Hey everybody, grease the wheels for me, please," but then there's also like "and help me see, help me be aware, help me like, notice these things instead of just gloss [00:55:15] over them," you know, so that I can actually, you know, benefit from those opportunities and so on. So. FABEKU: Yeah, for sure. AIDAN: I think that's a really, that's a really brilliant thing. And it's something that is actually kind of came up in a way this morning in the Six Ways group. [00:55:31] Is there's this, to me now, there's this difference of how I work. Like there's, there's the stuff like, the sigils on the wall are saying, "I want this, like this," right? But the vast majority of the work is more in line with what you were just describing. [00:55:46] It's like, there's all the stuff that is always going on and always changing, and this is the general direction I'm trying to go, and what's really important is that I keep going into something that is pretty similar to that, but [00:56:01] I don't care, in truth, most of the sigils are the best idea I have of what would get me there, right? But kind of the offering side or the prayer side, if that was how I thought of that, [00:56:16] is way more geared towards "yeah, let's, let this, let's let all these crazy things that occur, occur in a way that I could use more so than not, and yeah, let me have the brains [00:56:31] to not fight it and be able to get on that right track or get into that right current. Let me know when I actually need the paddle board rather than the straight up surfboard because otherwise it could be a very slow ride," you [00:56:46] know. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Well, you know, that kind of, kind of segues into one of the questions that we got on Facebook. I think it was Dre was asking what skills, what [00:57:01] skills do you not have, you know, that you would like to have, and how might that relate to your magic as well? Like not necessarily just magical skills, but kind of skills in general, you know? Is there stuff you're thinking about learning, [00:57:16] building up, adding to your to your vocabulary, or the things that anybody needs to kind of, or sees it as a benefit for moving forward? AIDAN: Man, that's such an interesting [00:57:31] one, because I'm always working that stuff. ANDREW: It's clean and press, isn't it? Or . . . AIDAN: Yeah. ANDREW: More clean than press. AIDAN: Yeah, totally. Yeah for me it's, it's like, [00:57:46] I'm trying to not live so entirely in my own head. Like I'm aware of it, but I still get trapped by it, and how that usually happens is that someone else will say something that seems [00:58:01] crystal clear, but that I have actually totally misread, [laughs] and that's my biggest thing, and that's really interpersonal more than specifically magical, but that's I would say my biggest kind of . . . That's the [00:58:16] biggest hole that I'm aware of that I'm really working on is, especially if I think it's totally crystal clear, asking for . . . to verify, you know, because I find that I'm usually wrong. FABEKU: [00:58:33] I think for me, I was just having a conversation. A couple weeks ago, my oldest friend in the world was in town and we were, we've known each other since we were three or four. And we were talking kind of late at night. And, and I said, "You know, I feel like the next level for me [00:58:48] personally and probably beyond that is," and one of the things you said, when we very first started, Andrew. This thing of, after these things happen, like you're not the same anymore, and I think that what I've realized for me [00:59:03] is an in response to the last handful of years and some, just events and shit that have happened, there's . . . When I was in some, doing some trance work, one of the others spoke about it as, spoke about it as like this, this accretion of grief, which I thought was kind [00:59:18] of a fascinating language and it made it clear for me in a way that it was a little--it wasn't before--in this, the way that these, almost like the way a pearl forms, you know, like these layers of grief kind of buildup. And sometimes it settles, sometimes it's not, [00:59:33] but then over time, all of a sudden, there's this thing that just sits there and you're like, fuck, what is this thing? And then, you know, you realize what it is. And so, I've been kind of looking at that and the way that that's affected me and you know, how to deal with that magically, how to deal with it in other ways, just how to deal [00:59:48] with it personally, and kind of moving through that, and, and again, not in the sense of being who you were before, because I don't think that's the way things work. But, but how to peel off some of those layers, that, that begin for me to feel really problematic [01:00:03] at a certain point. And I don't, I'm making some progress, but I, I for sure know that I don't have the . . . I don't have the skills yet and I don't even necessarily have the full sense of the right angle of approach. [01:00:18] You know, it's more, it feels, and I've had a few of these dreams, where it's like being inside of an egg and kind of pecking at the wall to figure out, okay, where's the where's the thinnest place to make this kind of initial puncture? Kind of a thing. [01:00:34] And I don't know if that makes sense as I'm saying it. I don't know how lucid that sounds, but yeah, I think for me that's, that's the focus. You know, how do you, how do you work through and sort of peel off some of those layers that have built up over time? ANDREW: Yeah. I mean, [01:00:49] I think that it fits with stuff that I've talked about on the podcast somewhere, but I no longer remember where, about my work with meteorites and my idea of sort of like leaving, leaving the, the Earth or leaving for a different orbit and a bigger, [01:01:04] sort of more universal picture, right? You know. FABEKU: Yeah. ANDREW: I wouldn't have sort of said originally that that was tied to grief, but it definitely was tied to a process of shedding a lot of things that . . . FABEKU: Yeah. ANDREW: . . . Have their roots back in some of those kinds of things. [01:01:19] FABEKU: Yeah. ANDREW: And either were, you know, either became dead and unhelpful or were just problematic to start with, you know, so. FABEKU: Well, and it's interesting you mention it because I'm sitting next to this heart-shaped meteorite that I've been hanging out with for weeks and weeks and weeks and I, I [01:01:34] get, I get, yeah, I get what you mean on a real visceral level with that. AIDAN: Yeah, that's pretty interesting. That's, that's, as you know, Fabeku, cause we've talked about it some, that that's a lot of what I've been doing for the last chunk of time, both on [01:01:49] grief and then kind of on the PTSD from just being fucked with in various ways at different points, you know? ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: And running a couple of people now through the process that I was given by the allies to see if it works for anybody else. [laughs] Cause [01:02:04] that's not always the case, but so far it seems to be doing its thing. Yeah. I think that's a very real thing. FABEKU: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: How 'bout you, Jen, anything, anything that you're working on, hoping [01:02:19] for? JEN: I don't have anything specific in mind at the moment. I think what I need to work on is not traveling. [laughter] JEN: And actually understanding [01:02:34] what it means to be in place and develop a kind of soft momentum as opposed to the fire hose that I'm used to. So, if anything, it would be learning how to throttle down and understand [01:02:49] sort of compa-, not capacity, but like amount, you know? Like not turning everything all the way up to 11 all the time, but figuring out more subtle modes, and also, you know learning [01:03:04] how to gather moss a little bit, because I feel like at this point, I'm like a polished little bullet, you know? And that can be fun to a point b
Often women are socialized to present as if they need nothing from the world. While the spirit of independence is inspiring, the reality is that as humans we do need things and that isn’t about weakness, it’s about humanity. In today’s episode, Jen and Annie talk to clinical social worker Mel Bosna to explore human needs and why they matter. What you’ll hear in this episode: How to begin identifying our needs and how to meet them in a healthy way Societal messages around women’s needs Why it’s not really noble to ignore your own needs Anti-dependency culture and what it means Uncommunicated needs and expectations Maslow's hierarchy of needs When we put unmet needs onto our body and our food Food, exercise and belonging Finding validation from within versus outsourcing that Getting needs met within a family system Motherhood and how we de-prioritize our basic needs ahead of the wants of others Getting comfortable with the discomfort of vocalizing our own needs The discomfort of trying to be someone you’re not Getting curious about the kind of women we elevate and why The initial disruption that comes from laying down boundaries The habituation process as family acclimatize to everyone having needs Setting boundaries or choosing resentment How resilient relationships adjust to change Two dominant narratives around needs Coming to the realization that your happiness is worth the discomfort of others with meeting your needs Self-soothing after the discomfort of advocating for your needs Learning to advocate for your needs Learning to need without self-judgment Scheduling in time for family, self and relationship Shifting mindset from scarcity to abundance Role-modelling self care and examining the messaging we perpetuate when we don’t advocate for our needs Resources: Mel Bosna’s Website Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Welcome to Balance 365 Life Radio, a podcast that delivers honest conversations about food, fitness, weight, and wellness. I'm your host Annie Brees along with Jennifer Campbell and Lauren Koski. We are personal trainers, nutritionists and founders of Balance365. Together we coach thousands of women each day and are on a mission to help them feel healthy, happy, and confident in their bodies, on their own terms. Join us here every week as we discuss hot topics pertaining to our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing with amazing guests. Enjoy. We live in a culture that often labels women who express their needs as needy or high maintenance. We praise women for being needless, for ignoring their own wishes and desires so everyone else around them can thrive. But denying your needs can ultimately leave you feeling resentful, misunderstood, or even downright angry. Clinical social worker, feminist therapist and artist Mel Bosna understands that having needs doesn't make you needy, it makes you human. Mel is a licensed clinician in the state of Arizona and believes that our best chance at health involve both individual and societal changes and as a result, Mel aims to validate the broader context of what contributes to the stories we're living while supporting clients to change what's within their control to change. Mel feels that it's been a profound honor for her to support women. Together they are learning how to walk away, claim new life, root into new ground, speak the unspeakable, own the narrative, change the script and to say enough to the shame and the lies that have haunted them for too long. On today's episode, Mel offers amazing insight on how to begin identifying our needs and how to meet them in a healthy way. Mel acknowledges that honoring and communicating our needs can leave many of us feeling vulnerable, but encourages us to acknowledge the discomfort as an opportunity for new growth. As always, if you want to continue the discussion from today's episode, we invite you to join our free Facebook group, Healthy Habits Happy Moms. Enjoy! Jen, we have a special guest, like a VIP guest with us today. Are you so stoked? Jen: I am. Annie: Yeah. Mel, how are you? Welcome to Balance365 Life Radio. Mel: I am so thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me. Annie: We are so happy that you're here. You've been around our community for a while. Like you go, you go way back. Mel: Beginning. Annie: How did you, how did you find, well, it probably was Healthy Habits Happy Moms. Mel: Yeah. Annie: -at the time, how did you find us? Or how did we find you or do you remember that? Mel: To be clear, I really don't. I, I think I probably found you as like a recommended group on Facebook, which I'm no longer on, but- Annie: Thanks, Facebook. Mel: No, I stumbled across it and having worked in the eating disorder recovery field for quite awhile, I was always looking for resources that were balanced and appropriate to send people to. And so I just kind of fell into the group. I really enjoyed it for the season that I was involved and have just loved cheerleading, watching, you know, what you guys are doing, it's been really great. Annie: Well, we appreciate it. Do you want to take just a quick second to explain to our audience about your work, what you do? Mel: Sure. I am a clinical social worker in private practice in Scottsdale, Arizona. I've been in private practice now for about seven years, but prior to that I'd worked at a number of different facilities. So I did inpatient eating disorder work for about four years, specialize in body image work, sexuality, trauma, our relationship with food and spirituality and one another. From there I was the director of a group home for girls who'd been sex trafficked, was only there for about a year. Loved the population. The agency wasn't a great fit for me. And then I started having kids and you know, reevaluated my career at that point. And so I've been in private practice since then and really specialize with things that fall under the umbrella of women's issues. So I do a lot of complex trauma, attachment, parenting, sexuality, relationship issues, lots of codependency work and really just trying to empower women to discover who they want to be and to, yeah, just give themselves permission to find their own path, ways of meeting their own needs. Mel: And as they do that, it's just compounding, right. All the growth and freedom and vitality within their families and communities. So I definitely look at things from a specific social work perspective. I like to challenge systems. I like to dismantle them, I like to see, yeah, I just like to see people experience a lot more freedom. So- Annie: Right on and you're just, you're a good human and like a powerful, powerful woman. Mel: I definitely feel my power. That's good. Jen: You also are very, you're very creative, Mel. You have, you're an amazing photographer. Mel: Yes. That's kind of been a side project that I fell into. I never set out to, um, be a photographer. It's kind of funny that that word still doesn't roll off my tongue very naturally, but finding ways to integrate art within my activism and healing spaces has been really profound and healing for me, on both a personal and a professional level. So I do have a passion project where I photograph women who are telling their own stories so you can find that work on Melbosna.com. Women getting to share their stories with the hope of just kind of reducing the fear that often comes from just not knowing or understanding one another. Annie: Yeah, it's beautiful. Circling back to something you said when you were telling us about your work was you mentioned women acknowledging their needs, getting their needs met. And that's what we wanted to bring you on to talk to us about today because you and Jen had a little private conversation in the Instagram dm's which so frequently happens with, Jennifer, which I love and adore. That's how we get a lot of our podcast guests is that this, there's this concept and I really identify this, so I'm so excited to see what you have to say on it is, women are taught to be needless, that I always kind of attribute it to, and I know this wasn't her intention and I'm not pointing the finger, but this like kind of this Beyonce attitude, this like, "I don't need anyone. I'm too cool to care. Like I can do it myself." And like, and as a result, I often struggle for asking for help or even really being very clear on what, what do I need? Like what am I feeling? What do I need? And again, the messages is that we shouldn't be needy. Or if we're needy that we're high maintenance. And I think you'd probably want to, argue against that, right? That having needs does not make you high maintenance. Right? Mel: Right. Having needs makes you human. And so our rejection of our needs is actually a rejection of our own humanity and it makes it very difficult then to be a healthy human, are good human if we're rejecting such a core part of ourself. And there are so many different messages that we are raised with about having needs. So whether that's, you know, "Don't be dependent on anyone to meet your needs" like you were just referencing, kind of the anti dependency spirit, right? Like I don't need nobody or where we get those messages that say, that it's like good to be needless, that it's noble to be needless. Don't be aware of having needs or if you are aware that you should sacrifice them and that there's an honor in that. And women particularly are rewarded for being self sacrificial in that way, but it's not really sacrifice in a holy way. It's actually neglectful and it's destructive. Jen: Yeah. That's more where I identify with the word needless, where Annie thinks of Beyonce. And I think of like being subservient and quiet and small and being rewarded for that and feeling loved and validated as a woman because I don't take up space and I don't need anything. Mel: Right. Jen: I find that, I suppose they're both destructive in their own way, but I find that concept of womanhood more destructive than the Beyonce analogy. But I don't know if I've ever lived the Beyonce, perhaps that's why I find it more destructive and that's definitely my background is if anyone who's followed me for any amount of time, I've had a big breakthrough blog post about five years ago called The Selfish Mom in which I wrote about my transformation of, from just serving my partner and my children to kind of stepping out in the world and going, "Hey, wait a moment like this, this doesn't feel very good and I have needs and you four have to make space for those needs in our life." And just how inconvenient I felt and how uncomfortable I was. But, that went, I mean, millions of people have read that blog post now and I think it resonated with a lot of women. So, that's more my experience of wanting to be needless. Mel: Well, I think deep down, we know that we have needs, but we're not taught, again, how to recognize them or meet them appropriately. And so what I see happening is that because we don't know how to steward them or meet them in appropriate ways, that it will always come out sideways in our life. And so whether that's displacement through putting our needs onto other people around us with the expectation that they're just going to meet them on their own, or be able to read them or anticipate what our needs are or displacement onto other areas in our life that are inappropriate, that are illegitimate, expecting that to fulfill our needs. So, you know, at a very base level, we all, humans all have the needs for, you know, safety, shelter, food, water, stability, community, family, right? Like relationship, belonging. But above that, like if we look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs right above that, then we look at our needs for worth, for identity, for romance and sexual, you know, fulfillment or connection and self actualization and purpose and these other needs that, again, are, they're valid and human. Mel: And we all have them, whether we acknowledge that we have them or not. And so if they're not met appropriately, which most of us don't grow up learning how to meet them appropriately, they will inevitably come out sideways. And so in my work with women, I have seen it most problematic when women displace their needs for belonging, acceptance, worth identity, I see them displace that onto food or onto their bodies as a way of trying to meet that need and fulfill it, which will never happen appropriately because food was never meant to fulfill our identity. Jen: There's, another thing too, and inside of this idea that we can meet our needs with food or a body size, you have whole communities that have risen up to support these pursuits. And so what happens is you, you find, you feel as if you, you can find a place to belong if you, too, participate in this, whether it's these food rules or becoming this body size. And that can feel really good, especially for somebody who might actually feel pretty lonely or has been experiencing rejection, or has struggled with just fitting into this culture that does seem to be consumed with food. So it can feel really good initially. And you hear a lot of people, I think, they defend their diets, or they defend, you know, what they're doing, what their goal is because they still have the warm and fuzzies perhaps. Mel: That meets the need. It actually does meet the need. And so it's really hard to walk away from something that's meeting the need, even if it's also costing, you. Jen: Right. Mel: In the process. And so, I mean, I don't think anybody's crazy or stupid for engaging in those types of behaviors because they are, they are actually meeting a need, but it's not meeting it the way that it's designed to be met, if that makes sense. And so because of, because it's an illegitimate way to meet the need, there are all these, like, negative consequences or costs in the process, right? And it's so fluid. So you have to maintain a destructive habit in order to continue to belong or feel accepted or valued. Jen: Right, right. Annie: On a personal note, I found that a lot of the needs that I've been trying to meet, I've been trying to meet them from the outside in versus inside out, if that makes sense. You know, like I was trying to outsource my confidence or put my confidence in my self worth in the hands of other people. Like if my peers like my work, if my husband thinks I'm attractive, if my girlfriends like my outfit, if they think I'm funny, if they think I'm smart then like, you know, then I feel seen or I feel worthy or I feel good enough but it doesn't, it's not super sustainable because then I felt like I was forever reliant on this like applause or this like, "Hey, you like me, right? Like, I'm still doing a good enough job, right? Like, hey, like I'm okay, right? Did I do a good job? Jen: If you like me then I can like me. Annie: Instead of just like checking in with myself. Like, in fact, I've shared many times, Mel, you are actually one of the reasons I started going to therapy because you're like, maybe you need to talk to someone about that. Jen: Maybe just stop messaging me on Instagram. Annie: It was on Instagram. Jen: Mel set a boundary. Annie: And it was wonderful, but one of the things she said was like, "Well, what's your experience? What do you think?" And I'm like, "Well, they liked it so it was good enough." And she's like, "Uh uh. No, you didn't answer the question." And so turning inward or reflecting inward before trying to like outsource all that has been a lot, a lot of work, but it feels like I'm on the right path. Mel: Mmhmmm. It is an inside job and there's both power and grief related to that. Right? Like it's, we still want to have that validation or affirmation given to us from others because again, as women, that's what we've been taught is the path forward, right? As long as we're needless, as long as we're pleasing to others, accommodating others, meeting other people's needs for what, for how we should act or what we should look like, then we think that we can provide ourselves with that type of security. So it can feel really scary to start elevating our own voice, right? And our own validation, it can feel really scary initially because it's just such a unfamiliar pattern for us. But it is rewarding, like you're talking about, to feel so firmly rooted in knowing who we are and also how to meet our needs. Mel: So then it's not dependent on all these other people around us. When we know how to appropriately meet our needs, then we're not just outsourcing them and then scared or powerless with, like, whether or not other people are going to be able to come along and validate, support, fulfill what it is that we're looking for. I see a lot of women do this within their own family, again, because they don't know how to meet their needs. They'll just place their need for validation, for worth, for fulfillment onto their kids or onto their partner. Again, such a, such a vulnerability for their own growth as well as like a huge responsibility for their kids then to have to grow up with making mom happy, making sure mom's okay, making sure mom feels good about herself and so again, the more that we can learn appropriately how to validate and meet our own needs so they're not coming out sideways in our marriages and our parenting or communities, just the healthier the whole system functions. Mel: So it's taken a lot of work. I mean, from, also from a personal place. Like I didn't grow up aware of what my needs were or how to meet them. I am the daughter of a pastor and his wife and I love my parents so much, but both within the spiritual community I grew up with as well as the traditional family system I grew up with, I just was completely clueless and I just thought that my husband was going to know how to meet my needs when I got married at 24 and so this process for me of identifying what my needs actually are and taking ownership of them and then learning how to ask for support at times with meeting them, has been bumpy. It's been sold with a lot of trial and error. But the more that I've taken risk with owning what those needs are and learning how to nurture them and steward them, again, the healthier I have felt and the healthier my family system functions. Jen: I'm circling back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This is quite common. I see this and with women I talked to is that, they are making sure or they are the facilitators or the supporter of members of their family reaching higher levels when their baseline is not even being met. And so sometimes I have to, really, it's hard, right? Cause everybody's operating from their own level of awareness. And you know, when I see a woman post, one happened in our community that she couldn't afford pelvic floor physiotherapy after paying all of her children's sports fees for the year. And something like that just breaks my heart, although I can't say I haven't been there right where you are so low on the to do list that your children are participating in multiple extra curricular activities before your own basic health care can be tended to. And what we talk about in Balance365, actually in our program is this, if you are a member of a family, this is a family job to sit down and make sure everybody's needs are being met. And that is so uncomfortable for so many women, me included. So I was wondering if you can help us in, sharing with our audience how a woman can get started there, what that's going to feel like. Mel: Sure. That's such a great question, Jen. I'm glad you asked it. I think one of the first things that I would, um, encourage anybody who's curious about this process is to start exploring what makes them feel so uncomfortable to begin with, right? And perhaps that's through journaling. Perhaps that's through talking with like, a good friend or your Facebook group. But really just starting to, to evaluate what is it that feels so risky about having needs and prioritizing them and when we bump up against our discomfort or that vulnerability, that's a prime opportunity always for new ground to take place in our life. And so again, we have been taught to avoid discomfort, I think culturally, on a societal level. Like we see it as like risky and just maintain the status quo. But again, that's always where new ground takes place. Mel: And so if we can get comfortable being uncomfortable, right? Like embracing, like, this feels really risky for me to take up space. Why? What messages have I received about taking up space? And whether that's with my physical body or the fact that I need a nap or I'm hungry right now, or I want a vacation away from my family. Or like, I need new clothes or I haven't bought new underwear and you know, so my clients haven't bought new underwear in two years. Jen: Right. Mel: And they're like buying their kids, like, whatever their needs are on a regular basis. So whatever that is, to be able to just say, what is uncomfortable about taking up space here? We just start with looking at the messages that women have heard and the stories they tell themselves. And the behaviors don't change if the story doesn't change. Jen: Mhmm, I think sometimes, you know, for me, I've had to look at the way, what type of woman I've glorified and what type of woman has been glorified within my family and my community or socially, right? So, members of my family, me included, we have glorified the woman who does it all. The woman who wants to be with our kids 24/7 and so I was trying to make myself into a woman who I have seen glorified, not into the woman who I actually am. And that's like square peg, round hole. It doesn't fit very well and it doesn't feel very good when you're trying to squeeze yourself into being something who you aren't. Mel: Right. Right. So I what I love about that, it's just the questioning, right? Of what's the story I've been given about what it is to be a woman, a mother, a partner and does the story serve me? Jen: Right? And the other thing you, a lot of women, have to eventually look at is who have they judged before? Right. So, in my story as I went about trying to be this woman, I was very judgmental to other women who weren't doing that same thing. I was very judgmental towards women who were being more fearless than me, setting boundaries in their family. I think I was maybe maybe resentful towards these women. Jealous? I don't know what it was, but they just weren't fitting into my narrow view of the way women should be which in the end ultimately made it even harder for me to kind of let go of this because I had a lot invested. My ego was totally invested in this way of living. So yeah. Mel: Yeah. It can make it hard when we're invested in a particular narrative, and I'm just going to say this cause I think it might be something that your community bumps up against. It's also really hard when those around us are also invested in this narrative. And so when a woman decides that they are going to start validating and honoring the needs that she has and her children, her partner, her, again, the community at large isn't used to her having needs. There is a disruption that can follow that initially, which is why we need the support and validation of others as well as we do find this new narrative. So I tell people it's kind of like a baby mobile. If you can picture one above a crib, right when you add or take away any part of that baby mobile, right? Like say it's a bunch of teddy bears. Mel: There is an immediate disruption to it, right? Like where it moves around and it feels like chaos and it's unsettling and uncomfortable for every part of that mobile, but eventually it habituates. It finds a new norm. And so for women who are learning, again, how to start to take up more space and ownership of what needs they do have, there is often that initial disruption where where their kids, their partner again, maybe like, "Hey, I don't know. I don't know that I like that you're leaving right now. Right? Or that you're going to go lay down right now or that you're readjusting the budget to buy your underwear when I was planning on getting a new, like, game boy or something." Like there's that initial disruption as everyone's finding like this new norm of what this woman's needs look like within the family system, but it will habituate. And so if we can get comfortable with that initial discomfort or disruption, we can trust that it is what's healthy and good for everyone involved. Annie: This is so hitting home right now because, this probably isn't going to come as a shocker, but I pride myself on being like strong. Like no, I'll just do it myself. Everything from like opening the pickle jar to, like, pushing a car out of the driveway if the battery's dead, like no, like I don't want to ask for your help and if you offer your help, I'm probably going to be even annoyed that you even offered help. And like, I'll just do it myself. And one of the things that I've accepted as I've grown older is I actually am a crier, but I have associated this whatever is behind the tears as weakness. That's like the story that I've told myself is that it's weak and it's something to be ashamed of. And watching the most interesting part has been watching other people respond to me crying cause it's kind of like "Is she okay. Like what? Okay, I don't know what to do with her right now that she's crying." And I'm like, it might not, it might be joy. It might be sadness, it might be I was just embarrassed or it could be so many things, but it has been, like, interesting to be like, "I know what I'm doing and I'm comfortable. But watching your discomfort is interesting for lack of a better word," Mel: Right, right. Well, it's unfamiliar for others it sounds like to see you show emotion, like part of your vulnerability. They're not used to that. And so, I mean, that's what I'm hearing at least. Annie: Absolutely. No, absolutely. That's spot on. Mel: Are you okay? Versus somebody like me or Jen who maybe cries regularly because of the narratives that we've shared about ourselves to other people. But yeah, they will adjust to your kind of new expression of your emotion the more that you practice it. Jen: In my experience, resilient relationships do adjust, right? So I decided to go back to work after my first son and somehow during my maternity leave there, an assumption had been made by my partner that I wasn't going back to work without a discussion happening and his life got pretty good while I was on maternity leave. It was very Flintstones for lack of a better word. And I have no judgment to anybody who has a lifestyle that is more traditional of father works and mom stays home and does the household stuff that is, if that brings you joy, I'm so happy that you're in that role. But I wanted to go back to work and I remember when I told my partner that that would be happening and how our life would have to adjust his jaw just hit the floor. Like he was just, you know, in his head I could see the wheels turning. Jen: He doesn't, you know, get to go to the gym every day that, you know, all these things, supper on the table at six o'clock, all of these things, he realized it would cause him more work. It was just life would become more physically demanding. And, you know, and that was kind of the reality for me of going back to work was that my life was about to get better and everybody else's lives were going to get harder. And it was very difficult for me to step forward into that and say, "But I'm worth it. My happiness inside this family is worth it. I have made so many sacrifices for all of you. You will make sacrifices for me.” And coming to the realization that that's actually how healthy relationships go, right? There's a give and take. And I think myself and a lot of women feel that there's, after a time, as Brene Brown says, you can set boundaries or you can feel resentful. You can, or it's choose discomfort or choose resentment. It's one or the other. And over time, a lot of women become extremely resentful because they're not able to move into that discomfort and, and say, "Hey, what about me over here?" You know, and you're waiting for someone to do it for you. I think a lot of us also have kind of this white knight complex, like there's some kind of, someone's coming to save us, but there isn't, nobody is nobody's meeting our needs, right. Until we ask for them to be met. Mel: Right, right. Yeah. I see that a lot too. Again, going back to kind of this two dominant narratives, one is, you know, again, somebody's gonna come along and and save me or meet my needs. I see lots of women who are just crossing their fingers, hoping that someone's going to notice, like, what they need and just naturally meet it and that either leads again to like total neglect or resentment or that other narrative like that Annie had shared where I'm not going to be dependent on anybody to meet my needs. I'll just meet them all on my own and neither is a true picture of health. Part of our work is practicing curiosity again with like, "Where do I fall on that spectrum, right?" And so the work that each woman has has more to do with the personal narrative that she has about what it means to be a woman and what she's afraid of. Mel: So if she's afraid of asking for help, right, like being dependent or intimate with somebody, then her work is going to be more about the vulnerability of needing someone else to help meet a need. If her work has been, or I'm sorry, if her narrative, has been largely resting on this idea that I'm not supposed to have needs or allowed to have needs, then it's moving into a space of validation and ownership of them. Recognizing that either way brings about that, like, that discomfort and vulnerability and lack of familiarity. It will be disruptive on a personal and relational basis, but it's worth it. I guess I'm curious to hear from both of you, you know, like what you feel like you've gained through risking owning your need, sharing your needs, doing this work yourself, what's come out of it? Annie: Oh, this isn't how the interview works, Mel. You know, one of the things that has come up, and this is kind of in the grand scheme of things that maybe doesn't feel really big, but I have spent so many birthdays and holidays and Mother's Days praying that my husband will get the gift I want, treat me the way I want, like do the thing that I want. And it's not even necessarily what I want. Not even necessarily like this big extravagant like party or anything. It's just I just, like you said, I want him to read my mind. Right. And what I've done since kind of doing this emotional work in the last couple of years is just flat out said like, this is what I would like. Mel: Yeah. Annie: And he's happy to do that. Like he's happy to fill those needs, assuming that he can make it, whatever happened. And oftentimes it's usually like, I just want to control the day. I just want to come and go as I please lay in the hammock, take a nap, go get a workout, have lunch with my girlfriends, whatever. It's nothing usually extravagant, but that's so much easier for me to just say what I want and like hopefully help assist, implement that if needed. And instead of the alternative, which was this like pouty, like "He didn't get mother's Day right. Like, that's not even the book I wanted. Or like he thinks I like that color? Like what was he thinking?" Jen: It actually takes far more energy, I think to be that, to just ask for what you need then to have all these thoughts racing all the time and disappointments and resentments growing. Annie: But then there's this, and I don't, I don't know. What do you, what do you think of this? There's this like, you know, okay. Just say, like, flowers. Like he got me, I wanted flowers and I kept asking for flowers and now he got me flowers and he only got me flowers because I asked for flowers, so he didn't really want to get me flowers, you know? And then there's this, like, he just got them because I asked them for them. Does that, do you know what that is? Jen's giving me a look like "What are you talking about? " Mel: I do. I do. Annie: Because I want the flowers because it's an expression of your love and how much you care about me, not just because I asked you to get flowers. Does that make sense? Mel: Yes, it does. I relate actually to this very specific example of yours. So I remember years back, my husband would bring me flowers on our anniversary and maybe Valentine's Day. Great. Right? Like those are the two days of the year that we would expect it. And so it wasn't very special. And I know every relationship is different. Every, yeah. But just speaking from my, and then not only will he not bring flowers on those outside of those particular days, he would bring me ugly flowers. Jen: Carnations. Mel: Yes. It would be like flowers that I would be like, "Ugh! Again!" like Annie said, "Does he not know me? Like at all?" Right? Like I would personalize it and so they would be like flowers that just didn't meet my need, right? And so I had to start learning how to advocate for my need. And there is an element to this process that, again, takes some of the surprise out of it, right? Like, like you were saying, Annie, like, you want, you want them to intuit, right? You want to feel surprised or wooed or whatever it is by it, but the need didn't get met. So if I was just going to wait until he intuited I wanted flowers, or intuited which flowers I like versus, you know, don't like, and then I would feel like a total B, by the way, like, for being upset about the ugly flowers. In the back of my head, I hear that shame voice, that inner critic that said, "You should just be grateful that you got flowers. Do you know how many women would like to get flowers? You should just be grateful." Mel: And so that should voice would weigh in, which would be invalidating of the need that I had as well. And so I started just, like, taking pictures off of Pinterest and sending them to him. "These are the types of flowers that I like." Right? And now it's like when I notice that maybe I haven't had flowers in a while, I might say, "Hey babe, sometime in the next like three weeks, can you bring some flowers home? It would mean a lot." Right? And is it lacking maybe in that element of surprise I wish was there? Sure. But does my need get met? Yes. And they're really beautiful flowers, right? It's showing up for myself and then he gets to feel like a hero because he's able to support, maybe hero's the wrong word, but he's in alignment. Right. He's getting to show up for me as well because I've showed him how to appropriately-. Annie: Yeah. That's, yeah. That's a great example. I love that. Mel: Well, you know. Annie: What about you? How has it changed since you- Jen: Are you looking at me? Annie: Yeah. Since you started showing up for yourself? Jen: I would just say I feel more like I'm living a life I'm supposed to live. I'm the woman I'm supposed to be and I'm in alignment with myself. I'm living a life aligned with my values. I feel I've changed the trajectory of my children's future in their own relationships because I'm showing up as a woman who, I'm normalizing a woman who asks for her needs to be met. Actually, early on when it did feel very uncomfortable for me and I wanted to hide and not do it I would do it for my children. So I have three boys and my husband also grew up with three boys and there was a very traditional model in their household and that just became their normal and my husband's normal and he wanted that normal to continue. Jen: So, these are just, you know, bringing this awareness to my children, I think, that women have needs, women take up space, moms take up space. The other, this is so small but it felt profound for me. My children had all had breakfast and exited the breakfast area. I was sitting down with my toast and coffee and my oldest son came back in for second breakfast and asked me for my toast and I was like, "I have not even eaten yet this morning and you are asking me for my toast, like I get to eat. Now it is my turn to eat. And if you would like to feed yourself again, you are welcome to go make yourself some toast." And it was just, it was just a moment for me to go, "Um, no, like I'm setting a boundary here with my child to say like, I'm taking care of me right now and I get to meet my needs before I meet your second breakfast needs." Jen: And this was just stuff I couldn't do before. I really was just a "Yes, yes sir" kind of lady. And yeah, so it's kind of those small moments, but also the big moments, in fact that I, even when I first started this business, I thought, I felt so called to start it. And then I thought I could run this business between the hours of nap time and my husband at work. And I realized at one point I was trying to, I was trying to create not just a business, but a movement and a community that did not disrupt anyone else's lives. Do you know? And I was just run ragged because I was trying to do this without interrupting anybody. So, and now today it's like, "Hold on, I do need help at with, you know, running this country, it is going to disrupt people's lives. Just like everybody, you know, just like soccer disrupts our lives and my husband's career has disrupted our lives. So, those are big things for me. But I, they just feel so normal for me now. It feels so expected. Like of course, like, that was crazy that I would think like that. Like of course my needs need to be met. Mel: Right. Annie: Mel, if you had a couple of takeaways, one or two takeaways, because what I imagine is, women are listening to the three of us talk about like, "Oh yeah, like, maybe I want to do that too," or "I should do that" or "That's a great idea." Or "I know I need to ask for this Xyz." I imagine some of them are, maybe can have the courage to like have a conversation with their partner, a friend, a mom and dad, whoever they're expressing needs with and then almost like hiding under the covers. Like, "Oh my God, I can't, like, I can't believe I just did that." And like having this, like, "Okay, I asked for it, but then actually maybe I asked for a nap, but now I'm going to actually go take the nap. Or I asked for a night out with the girls, or a night off from cooking or whatever it is." But then actually following through on it, like there's a different, there's a difference between expressing it and then actually allowing yourself to- Mel: Yeah. Annie: do the thing. What would you, how do you recommend women navigate that discomfort of actually taking action on their needs? Mel: Right. I think that's a really wonderful and important question. So, again, the story that we tell ourselves about who we are and whether or not we're allowed to have needs and whether or not we're allowed to receive, not just give, but to truly receive. We get to change that story. And so if something feels, like, so uncomfortable, distressing, intolerable. I had a friend who, who could hardly lay on a massage table. She felt so guilty, right, for being there, right, for that whole hour. We have to change the story. And so starting to soothe that discomfort, that shame, we want to expose it. Again, like Jen was saying earlier, asking ourselves, "What are the messages I have for myself about taking up space or having this need or receiving without always giving and how do I change that message?" And so for me, in my own work and the work that I do with, you know, my clients, it really is continuing to deepen into the fact that I have nothing to prove. I have nothing to earn. I have nothing to lose, but I am allowed to be human, which means that I'm allowed to have needs and that's holy and it's good and that practice of receiving it and taking up space has everything to do with the story that I tell myself and then the behaviors that I practice. And so if we want to see the behaviors in our life change, we have to always be critical then of what is the story. Does that make sense? Annie: Yeah, I'm just, like, in a trance that's, like I think I'm going to need to put that little clip right there on some sort of mantra meditation that I listen to every morning. Yeah, that's just, that's a really beautiful message and I really hope that your words and your stories and our stories give women permission that they're, you know, maybe needing to express their needs with whoever in their life. Mel: I hope so too. I hope that this inspires people to take more risk and to lean into that discomfort and, to accept that disruption is a healthy, vital part of our growth. And like Jen and you and both spoken to, healthy relationships around us will adjust, they will adapt, they will want to affirm even in the discomfort of that new pattern. And it's part of what teaches us, again, who's healthy and safe around us because if people don't allow for that growth, like us being human, right? Like having needs. If there's not an allowance for that, then, again, that's an opportunity to to be critical or curious about the types of relationships and communities that we're part of. So yeah, I hope this does inspire people to be curious and self validating, take some more risk. Annie: Absolutely. It's beautiful. It's really inspiring. It's very encouraging and optimistic. Very optimistic message too. Mel: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on. Annie: Yeah. Thank you. Jen, anything to add before we wrap up? Jen: I just, I actually was, Mel, as you were talking, I wanted to, just on a very practical, baseline level, how we kind of have figured this out in my marriage is that, I think in some marriages you get in these patterns of, like, give, like, a "me, me, me" or it can feel like that in some ways. Like it's this person or this person rather than this person and this person. And, we, in our marriage we had a real scarcity issue around time, energy, money, and once we've been able to just flip our mindset to one of abundance, I'm sorry if this is getting too woowee here for everybody to understand that everyone's needs can be met. Jen: Like they can, we have the time, we have the energy and how we actually make that happen is we had a marriage counselor once that said, "Every family should have three things you need. You need time connecting with each other time connecting as a family and you need time connecting with yourself." And we now sit down with our calendars and as unsexy as this is, we schedule those in. Are we hitting those three things? And of course sometimes we go through seasons where it's more about the kids, like soccer season, for example, which is right now, but then we, we have to keep in mind too, we have to rotate priorities back to that balance of hitting those three things. And sometimes a season of our life might be more about connecting with self or connecting as a couple. But, it's just keeping those three things in mind all the time and actually doing the unsexy things of sitting down for the calendar and making sure that's getting scheduled in. And once we started doing that, we saw there is time, we can meet everyone's needs. It doesn't have to be this tug of war. It doesn't have to feel that way. And I think when partners initially approach that conversation, you know, based on different relationship patterns, they may have been in prior, it can feel like that. But I, you know, I think it's a family conversation and how, you know, how do we do this for everybody, right? Mel: Well, I would agree there is a real practical element to this as well, in terms of, I don't know, I don't know anybody whose needs are met 100% of the time, right?Like I don't every day like feel 100%. Jen: Right. Mel: And that takes intentionality and ongoing curiosity or evaluation for me to know what needs to prioritize on my own. So for instance, I may have a need to hang out with my girlfriends, to get some exercise, right. To have some alone time, to, you know, like, to do a project and so I'm regularly assessing with the time that I have, with the resources that are available, what need do I prioritize and meet the most today or this week or this month. Right. And so there are seasons where my alone time is the most precious need for me to protect. Mel: And so that may mean that I structure then my schedule around having alone time, which may mean that I exercise alone, right? Or that I, when I finally have time to go out, I go out alone versus other times where maybe I need to sleep more or I need time with my girls more, whatever it may be that that self awareness is key. And again, we're often discouraged as my men to be that self aware because we're so focused on our children or our careers or the other relationships we have in our life. So learning how to prioritize, again, just practical, it's a habit. . Nut it will make women, I really believe that it's going to make one and less fatigued, less resentful, less discouraged, less alone when they're able to be curious and attend to the needs that they have. So it's worth it. Jen: Yes, totally. It's worth it. Annie: Alright, Mel. We're going to wrap up. But we'd love to have you back some time. I know that there's other topics you specialize on that I just, I would love to pick your brain on. And, think you're just such- Jen: I think we've both tried to solicit you for therapy. Mel: No comment. Annie: This is how we get therapy, Jen. We just keep asking her on our podcast. Jen: I remember, I asked, I told Annie one time, I asked Mel to be my online therapist. Annie: I did too. Jen: Yeah. And then Annie was like, I did too. Mel: I had to turn you both down. Annie: Well there should be. Yeah, there you were very ethical in it. Mel: You guys are my friends, you know. Annie: Yeah, you know, there's boundaries and ethics and you know, state laws that we tried to disregard, but you honored your boundaries and you're like, "No, you need to go talk to someone about this." And we both did and it's both been great. So thank you for pointing our heads in the right direction. But, we would love to have you back, because I think there's even an element here about how, what you talked about earlier and how some of these needs can come out sideways, that I think we could dive in deeper and how this need for belonging and acceptance can come out as, you know, diet and exercise disordered behaviors even. So, thank you so much for your time. This was wonderful. Jen: Thank you, Mel. Annie: So great to talk to you. Alright, we'll talk soon. Jen: Bye. Annie: This episode is brought to you by the Balance365 program. If you're ready to say goodbye to quick fixes and false promises and yes to building healthy habits and a life year 100% in love with then checkout Balance365.co to learn more.
GUEST BIO: My guest on today’s show is a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud Platform. This gives her the opportunity to do silly things with lots of computers and to help developers build cool stuff on all sorts of platforms. Previously she has worked in a variety of software roles, from robotics with NASA to developer advocacy for Google Glass. She is also passionate about education, especially on the subjects of technology and science. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil’s guest on today episode of the IT Career Energizer podcast is Jen Tong. She is currently working as a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud Platform. But, she started her career working on software. She has worked for NASA in the robotics field before working on Google Glass. Today, Jen works as a security advocate for Google Jen is passionate about astronomy. She has spent time coding for Project PANOPTES. That community project enables anyone to build a low-cost robotic telescope. She also enjoys sharing her knowledge with others. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (1.12) – So Jen, just looking at your career history be very interesting to hear a little bit about the work you did with NASA with robotics and obviously more, more recently with Google Glass. Sadly, Jen was only with NASA for one summer. They were working on a robot that was to be part of the space station’s escape system. But, the project got canceled when NASA decided to take a different approach to the escape pod docking system. For the Google Glass project, Jen was mainly involved in building out the developer platforms. Her team’s aim was to make it as easy as possible for people to build applications for Glass. (2.32) – Can you give us a couple of examples? Some of the most interesting applications involved helping people with accessibility issues to find their way around the world. Developers with hearing and vision impairments were particularly active. They could see all sorts of possibilities for Google Glass. (3.04) - Do you feel that Google Glass has a bit of ahead of its time when it first came out? With emerging technology, it can take a while for it to find its place in the ecosystem. Jen is not involved in Google Glass, at the moment, but says that it appears to have found its place. (3.39) – Can you please share a unique career tip with the I.T. career audience? For years, Jen heard people saying that taking risks leads to great rewards and adventures. So she pushed herself and took risks. Sometimes things worked out well, other times, not so much. Initially, when things looked like they were moving in the wrong direction, Jen would hang in there. Now, she is not scared to quit. Her recommendation when going into something new is to review how things are going after a pre-set period of time. Then pause and ask yourself if the role really is for you. If it does not feel quite right, don’t be afraid to quit. Resist the temptation to give it one more month or another year. (6.03) – Can you tell us about your worst career moment? And what you learned from that experience. Jen’s first IT related job was working for a semiconductor company as a process engineer. Her role was to split out the data for serial memory chips into a sequence of events. The job was not exciting, but she was learning a lot. More importantly, she was working with a fantastic team of people. She was only about 20 at the time, so their support was particularly important for Jen. But, when NASA offered a job it was too much to resist. She took the job. Unfortunately, it turned out not to be the dream job she thought it would be. She was no longer happy in her work life. That situation taught her the importance of periodically pausing and evaluating her career choices. Now, if she is not happy she moves on quickly. (8.10) – What was your best career moment? Working on Developer Relations of Google Glass was something Jen really enjoyed. At one hackathon they investigated how the glasses could be used by a team member who was completely blind. They came up with all sorts of viable applications. For example, placing QR codes on objects to warn of hazards. The glasses could pick up those codes and use the bone conducting speaker to discreetly notify the wearer of the danger. The visually impaired colleague they were working with could already see (feel) a lot of things using his cane. But, would occasionally walk into a low sign or something similar, because he had no way of knowing the objects were at his head height. The QR codes solved that problem. (10.18) – Can you tell us what excites you about the future of the IT industry and careers? The fact that more people than ever before are learning to code is exciting. As people from different backgrounds get more involved in IT, a whole new ecosystem is opening up. (11.33) – What drew you to a career in IT? Jen got sucked into the world of IT partly because she wanted to be able to cheat on video games. A task that was not easy in the 80s and 90s. Without realizing it, her quest to complete more game levels lead to her reverse engineering the code. She did not have the source code but was able to make changes using the hex editor. (12.20) – What is the best career advice you have ever received? Jen says the best advice she has received cannot really be summed up in one line. You need to recognize the two main styles of IT career and decide which one is right for you. Some people are suited to digging deep into a subject and becoming a specialist. That approach usually turns out to be very lucrative. In particular when you become one of the go-to people for that technology. But, it is not for everyone. Luckily, the other approach the journalist route also works. It is easier to find more opportunities and working in that way is enriching. (12.59) – On the flip side, what is the worst career advice you've ever received? Again, Jen does not have a specific one-liner to share. But, comments that the idea that women are not good at tech is definitely not true. So, you should definitely not listen to that argument and let it hold you back. (13.30) – If you were to begin your IT career again, right now, what would you do? Jen would take an emerging platform and find, new and innovative ways to apply it to business. (13.54) - So you like the idea of using innovation for disruption? Jen likes the idea of using tech to do something new and unusual. Sometimes the emerging platform you choose will not become widely used. If that happens there is no need to be too concerned. Using new tech to solve real-life challenges is the best way to learn and make a difference. (14.40) – What are you currently focusing on in your career? Jen is pivoting towards working on making software safer and more secure. As software touches more areas of our lives security becomes an increasingly important issue. (15.30) – What is the number one non-technical skill that has helped you the most in your IT career? Learning to express her ideas clearly, is a skill that has proved to be invaluable for Jen. (15.54) - So communicating your ideas? How do you do that? Is it verbal, visual or a combination of all those things? Usually, it is a combination of the two. Jen is careful to empathize with the person or audience she is presenting or speaking to. This drives the format she uses. Sometimes a verbal presentation combined with a few slides will work best. Other times, designing a small game to demonstrate the issue and her solution works. It can be a good way to tease out more information about the problem from the customer or audience. (16.58) - What do you do to keep your own IT career energized? Jen finds teaching keeps her energized. She is lucky enough to be able to do this in both formal and informal settings. Jen particularly enjoys working with artists on installation art projects. They are always coming up with new ways to use technology. (17.39) - What do you do in your spare time away from technology? Jen is very aware of the fact that working in tech is hard on the body. So, she is careful to take time out to do something fun and physical. For Jen, at the moment, that means ice hockey and aerial silks. She also enjoys wandering around cities exploring. (18.12) – Phil asks Jen to share a final piece of career advice with the audience. Should you find yourself in a bad situation where you feel miserable change things. Don’t waste energy worrying about whose fault it is or how you got there. Instead, focus on getting out of that situation and learning from it. BEST MOMENTS: (4.29) JEN – "It is OK to quit." (10.18) JEN – "I always love it when people use tech in ways I didn't anticipate." (13.30) JEN – "Find an emerging platform and apply it to business areas that people aren't normally using it for." (15.47) JEN – "I can have the greatest ideas, but if I can't present them clearly they will stay stuck in my mind and not help anyone." (17.50) JEN – “I try to optimize my time away from technology by doing fun things that helped me stay fit." CONTACT JEN: Twitter: https://twitter.com/MimmingCodes LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mimming/ Website: https://mimming.com/
Could you be supervising your kids too much? Safety is important, but that doesn’t have to translate watching your child’s every move. Annie, Lauren and Jen are joined by parenting expert Allana Robinson to discuss outdoor unsupervised play, fostering independence and life skills and finding more balance as a parent. What you’ll hear in this episode: Societal pressures around supervision and engagement of parents with their kids The amount of time working moms spend with their kids vs stay at home moms in the 50s What science says about enrichment and play Motor skill development and play How motor skill development affects reading ability Facilitating outdoor unsupervised play through relationship building in your neighborhood The value of small risks in learning to prevent injuries How children's’ injuries have changed with the introduction of “safer” equipment How to introduce unsupervised outdoor play in an age-appropriate way Boundaries and consequences - how to use them Helping kids learn to entertain themselves Judgement and the mom on the phone in the park What happens when you interrupt or correct play Isolation and the need for community of parents and of kids Zooming out from our kids’ behavior and learning to see it in context Resources: Uncommon Sense Parenting Facebook Page Allana’s Facebook Group Ping GPS The Gift of Imperfect Parenting Your Kids Need to Play Outside Without You podcast episode (Allana Robinson) Marian Diamond Rat Enrichment Study No Child Left Alone study Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Welcome to Balance 365 life radio, a podcast that delivers honest conversations about food, fitness, weight and wellness. I'm your host Annie Brees along with Jennifer Campbell and Lauren Koski. We are personal trainers, nutritionists and founders of Balance365. Together we coach thousands of women each day and are on a mission to help them feel healthy, happy, and confident in their bodies on their own terms. Join us here every week as we discuss hot topics pertaining to our physical, mental and emotional wellbeing with amazing guests. Enjoy. We live in a culture where parents are expected to be with or entertain their kids all the time, but we also have other responsibilities inside the house that need taking care of too, and as a result, our kiddos' outdoor playtime often gets cut short, but today's guest has solutions. She understands the importance of outdoor play for kids and wait for it, she encourages unsupervised outdoor time. Yeah, you heard me right. Alanna Robinson is an early childhood educator and parenting coach for parents of toddlers and preschoolers. She helps parents understand why their children are misbehaving and what to do about it without yelling, shaming, or using timeouts. On today's episode, Alanna, Jen, Lauren and I discuss why your kids need to play outside without you and how to begin implementing that today so your kids can play outside and you can tackle your to do list inside or you can always just relax too. But before we dive in, it's important to note that we have a diverse audience, and even though we don't have immediate solutions for everyone, we want to acknowledge that inequalities do exist and people with different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds may have a different experience with outdoor play. But as always, we don't want anyone to feel left out of this conversation. And if you want to discuss any of these topics further, we invite you to join our free private Facebook group. Healthy Habits Happy Moms. Enjoy. Lauren and Jen, welcome to the show. We have a special guest. Lauren, are you so excited? Lauren: I am so pumped. I'm so excited to learn all the things. Annie: I know. Jen, I know you're excited cause this was a guest you found and you brought and you were like, "She needs to be on the show." Jen: Yeah, I'm part of Allana's, I'm in her parenting posse Facebook group. Actually, Allana, I found out about your Facebook group in our Facebook group. Allana: Oh yeah? Jen: You were, or did someone just recommend your Facebook group to me in our Facebook group to me in our Facebook group. So group to group. So I joined yours and you have said some things that have been so profound and have changed the way I parent and discipline, which is amazing. Allana: That makes me so happy. Jen: And even though you specialize in one to six year olds, I have, well, I've been in your group for quite a while, but my boys are transitioning out of those ages. So I have a five, seven and nine year old. I find your advice still works for my seven and nine year old. And so you just scale it to their level and yeah, it works. It's amazing. And it's taken so much stress out of parenting, right? Especially with discipline because you're always like, "Is this enough? Did he learn his lesson?" Annie: So in other words, welcome to the show, Allana. How are you? Allana: Thank you so much for having me. I'm great. Annie: Good. Allana: Making me so extremely happy because you never know if what you're putting out into the world is actually landing with people and it's just, it makes me so happy to hear when it does. Jen: I don't, I just read along. So I would say I'm a lurker in your group. I've posted once, but I read. And so it's actually a good reminder for me that in even our Facebook group, I'm sure there's tons of lurkers, so nothing you say is ever really wasted. And so I read whatever you write. So whatever you're doing in that group, I'm a step behind. Annie: And then she comes to me and she's like, "Hey, you need to check her out." And then I went to your website and listen to one of your podcasts. And it was about why your kids need to play outside without you. And I was like, "Freedom!" It was amazing. Jen: That was a huge moment for me and you're so open about your own parenting practices and you're not just telling people, "Hey, here's what to do." You're like, "Here's what what you should do. And I'm doing it. And this is what happens in our day to day life." And can I say the comment that blew my mind? It was just from a couple of weeks ago. Can I say that? Am I allowed? You told everybody, someone asked when they can let their toddler play in their backyard unattended. And then all these women were giving advice, right. And it was this huge thing and all of a sudden you swooped in and you said your youngest or you start them out one and a half years old playing independently outside by themselves at one and a half. And your son has been walking down the street to the park from four years old. Allana: Yup. Jen: On his own. And I was like, "Wow." And you said the world is safer today than it's ever been. There's this perception that it's more dangerous and we actually have more things in place to keep our kids safe even though it's safer. But that's killing us as parents. And actually what it's leading to is a lot more indoor time and screen time for kids because it's actually not realistic or sustainable to expect parents to be playing or even supervising their kids 24 seven and so kids aren't even getting the minimum amount of movement that they should be just because it's actually become impossible for families to provide that. Allana: It's an impossible standard. There's also a study that was done not that long ago about the difference in the amount of time working mothers today spend with their children versus stay at home mothers that spent with their children in the 1950s. Working mothers today spend more time on average with their children than stay at home mothers did in the 1950s so this concept that we have to constantly be in their face, we have to constantly be engaged with them. We have to constantly be enriching them. Jen: Right. Allana: Putting this impossible, impossible load on us. And you know where that came from? It came from another study. There was a woman named Marian Diamond who was in the 1960s, she was doing research on rats and how big their brains got when they played versus rats who weren't given the opportunity to play. Allana: And she was a woman scientist in the 1960s and she was playing with rats. So she got ridiculed socially by her male colleagues for being the girl who plays with rats. And in order to try and make her study, her papers more serious, have a bit more aplomb, she removed the word play and she changed it to enrichment. And nobody knows this woman. Nobody has ever heard of these studies before, but they have just trickled through our societal psyche to the point where we believe that we always have to be engaged with our kids or they're going to be stupid. And what that study should have said is the more time the children play, the smarter they get, the bigger their brains get. And that tiny little change in the way that we communicated that idea has had such a prolific impact on North American society. And now we're at the point where it's breaking us to meet those expectations. And we're so terrified that if we don't, that our kids are going to be stupid. And it's, yeah. So this fear that everybody has, and it's a deep seated subconscious fear that we have to be with them all the time or they're going to be taken or stupid. And it's just, it's not sustainable. You can't do it. Jen: Can I just, I'll just add another fear. That they're going to get hurt and someone's going to call child and family services on me and my kids are gonna get taken away because I wasn't there when they fell off their bike, broke an arm. Like, you know, it's just, I'm afraid of what my neighbours are gonna think of me. Not so much anymore because my kids are a bit older. But when my kids were younger, it was, we lived near a park, I wouldn't dare have sent, you know, in my head I'm like, "I'm sure they'll be fine." My Dad used to do some very questionable, like, I mean over the line questionable things. So you know I'd always have my dad be like telling me "It's fine!" Just, but you know, you, you actually worry about your neighbors. And actually I've been on social media for several years now and shared a lot of our family during that time. I think I started after my third was born and I have had many people message me and threatened they're going to call family services on me, like awful telling me I'm an awful mother. Like, if I'm trying to share like our mom life moments, you know, like, there's accidents- Allana: That hasn't happened to me yet quite frankly, because as you said, I'm very open about what I allow my kids to do. And there's more studies. There was this study that was done in 2016 about, it's actually called No Child Left Alone. And it was a study that was done by a small group of researchers and they basically asked a large, large group of people, they gave them scenarios in which a child was left alone and every single scenario was exactly the same except for the reason why the child was left alone. So they varied the reason, like, you know, mom went to go see her lover versus, you know, mom had an emergency at work and couldn't find a babysitter. And what they found was that people assessed a higher risk to the child based on what they morally felt the reason was for leaving the child, even though all the factors were exactly the same. And so what that means is that people don't just think things are dangerous and therefore, and moral, they think things are immoral and therefore dangerous. So, and when I say to people like "I let my five year old walk to the park," they're like, "Aren't you afraid CPS is going to get called on you? Aren't you afraid that somebody?" And I'm not because I know my neighbors. And that is how we combat that, because it's a lot easier to judge somebody on their morality when you don't know them, when you can't put a face to them, when you've never spoken to them. So, and it's awkward, super awkward. But when we moved here when my son was a year and a half old. And so he was just starting outdoor play and he was, he's tiny for his age, like he looks much younger than he is. And so I actually took his hand and we went around and we walked up and down our street and we knocked on everybody's door and we introduced ourselves. And I said, you know, "My name's Allana. This is my son Logan. You might see Logan around, he likes to play outside by himself. I'm okay with that." And people were kind of like, "Okay." And it was, it was awkward as hell. And you know, we have a bit more in depth conversations with our immediate neighbours who can actually see into our yard. But so no, nobody ever, I gave my phone number to everybody and said, "Hey, if you ever see him doing something questionable that you're not sure it's safe or appropriate, please send me a text message. Like I am always, I will deal with it." And what that people call CAS because they see a child doing something that they're not sure is totally on the up and up and they don't have a touch point. They don't have anybody to go to other than the police. So if you go to your neighbors and you say, "Hey, this is who I am, this is my child, this is my phone number, please call me if you know you ever need anything," it removes that ability to have such a quick moral judgment on you because they seen your face. They've spoken to you, they've had a conversation with you and that I think because we don't know our neighbors, in this day and age we move around a lot more. We live in much larger communities. Houses are much closer together. We don't, we don't know our neighbors the way that our parents did or grandparents did. So it takes a conscious effort on our part if we're going to be sending our kids out into the world by themselves that we know we've scoped out the world for them, right? Jen: Yeah. Go ahead, Allana. Allana: Oh, I was just going to say it like, he has, he's walked to the park before and I've had neighbors text me and be like, "Hey, so your kids at the park by himself?" And I'm like, "Yup." And they're like, "Oh, you're okay with that?" "Yup. Thanks for letting me know though." And they're like, "Okay, great." And that was the end of it. And they know him, he knows his boundaries, like, and there's a certain amount of teaching to this. You don't just send your kid out the door and be like, "Off you go." There's a lot of very conscious teaching that has to happen in, right. Annie: Allana, I would love to get into, like, how do you actually implement it in a little bit? Because I know like you can't just take a kid that, like, hasn't had any unsupervised play and be like, "Okay, see ya. Have fun." But I want to back up because you have quite a bit of information about, like, the benefits. Like why does this matter to the kids and why does this matter to parents? Allana: Well, because the outdoors is basically, like, nature's occupational therapy, right? Like the rate of children in occupational therapy has soared since the 1990s and it's because the kids aren't getting outside. When you go outside, first of all, the environment is perfectly sensorially balanced. It's made for us. It's not too loud. It's not too quiet. Depending on where you live is not too hot or too cold. But you can adjust it, you know, generally it's not too bright. There's, you know, very subtle sounds that help you orient yourself in space. Like just the sounds of birds tweeting and leaves rustling helps your brain figure out where you are in space. It has, there's so many sensory experiences, mud, grass, air, everything is a sensory. The heat from the sun even is a sensory experience that helps your brain integrate the input that it gets both indoors and out. It's not controlled and there's things that you have to adapt for which you wouldn't have to adapt for inside because everything is so controlled inside. So our kids aren't getting that stimulus that hopefully we got that our parents definitely got outdoors and the result is that there's a lot of kids in schools right now who have vestibular problems and it's affecting their ability to read. It's affecting their ability to sit down and concentrate. Spinning, spinning has been shown, if you spin for five minutes, it's been shown to increase your attention span for two hours. They've removed every single merry go round. Every single spinning toy. Kids aren't allowed to spin on swings anymore because it's "dangerous." They've shortened the height of swing sets. If you look at pictures of swing sets from like the 1960s, the set itself is super, super tall and the chains are super, super long, which means they got a lot larger range of motion. When everything got scaled down and we got super safety conscious. We literally scaled down the swing sets. The chains are much shorter. They're not getting as large a range of motion. They're not getting as much stimulation. So it's vital not just to, you know, their ability to entertain themselves. It's vital to their long term learning. If you don't have a body that can integrate all the information that you're getting, then it's going to crop up down the road in lots of different ways. Jen: Wow. You know what? We moved from Vancouver, a huge city in Canada to a very small city, in the interior British Columbia, 90,000 people. And then within that community we live in like this tiny little suburb that backs on to, like a provincial park. So just hiking trails and stuff. My children's life has changed. Being so close to nature and having other children on the block, like our doorbell is ringing constantly. These kids are outside all the time, way more than when we lived in Vancouver. When we were in Vancouver I felt like I had to facilitate everything because you're in this big city you like, it's just, yeah, it was, there was just, it was very, and it was very stressful and I don't even think I realized how stressed I was until I wasn't living there anymore. And I have so much more freedom. I, you know, we even live close enough to the school that, like, boys can walk to school and walk home. And then just my free time has gone way up. Like as far as, and the load of parenting has gone way down for me living in this neighborhood and in this smaller city and I just can't believe how the quality of our life has improved. It's crazy. Allana: Totally. And like I have a lot of parents were like, "Listen, I don't have an outdoor space for my kids. Like we live in an apartment building and I can't let them go downstairs and play in even in the public green space by themselves because there's, you know, 60 back balconies that face onto it and somebody is going to take issue with it" and I always say "Some is better than none." Jen: Yes. Allana: Taking your kids to a park and take them to a park where there's no equipment. Right. Don't take them to a park where there's all these plastic climbers and stuff. Take them to a park where there's no equipment, provincial park, national park somewhere that it's more of a natural space and let them play there rather than let them climb the trees, let them walk on the logs, let them go, you know, dig in the ravines and the ditches. That's much more high quality play than the kind of contrived play that happens on swing sets and stuff like that. Jen: Yeah, they, when my kids were young, we lived in New Zealand and they are extremely progressive as far as play there. And this is kind of when all this started coming to me, because I had never heard this kind of talk in Canada and they talked a lot about the benefits of decreasing supervision and increasing risk on playgrounds because for example, our school, our playground no longer meets safety codes anymore. And so our school is paying $100,000 this spring that we all had to fundraise for to put in a new, new safe playground. And I'm kind of sitting back while everyone's very excited, great, but I'm sitting back going like, this is a hundred grand on a new safe structure that- Allana: Is going to do them a disservice. Jen: Right? And so - Allana: Yeah, I know the feeling. My son's play, my son's school, he's in junior kindergarten here in Ontario and they don't even have a playground. They don't have any, like they have a fenced in yard and there's a play structure for the kids who are in grade four and up. But anybody under that isn't allowed to use it. And we're moving schools next year. And his first question was, is there going to be something that I can climb on Jen: Right. Allana: Yeah, dude, that's like one of my top priorities. Jen: Yeah. I see just as many kids in the field next to the school. It's all fenced and stuff than I do on the playgrounds. Right. So it's and then tell me this, I don't know if this evidence based or not, but I often wonder what happens on playgrounds when the kids are bored and there's no risk anymore. Like do they turn? Like is that why they're turning on each other at recess? Allana: When there's nothing to do, you're going to create something to do. And so the nice thing like, and people will often say to me like, "How do your kids play outside for hours on end? There's nothing in your backyard." And there isn't. We literally have a yard and a shed and, but there are things in my backyard. We have lots of loose parts. We have, when my husband built that shed, he took all the off cuts and just kind of sanded down the edges generally so that he wasn't getting any splinters. And so there's, there's a ton of lumber back there. There is sticks, there's mud, there's a sand pit, we have a water table that kind of turns into a pond during the summer because nobody cleans it out. It gets very disgusting but so they have all that stuff out there and they'll take like, you know, an action figure or a car or something, one little thing and they'll build this whole playscape off of it just because toys are built with a very specific purpose in mind and kids know that they're supposed to use them that way, right? You're supposed to use a tool the way the tool is supposed to be used. We're very, very clear about that with young children. So when you give them a toy and it's only able to be used one way, they're going to get bored with it really, really quickly. And then when there's nothing to do, they're going to start disturbing. Jen: Bleeping the child psychologist. Allana: I always have an explicit warning on my own podcast because when I get passionate I run my mouth. But yeah. So, but if you don't give them those things that are closed ended to begin with, if you give them open ended stuff and you expect them to create their own world, they'll do it and it will be so immersive for them that they won't have time to make, you know, trouble. They're going to be so engaged in it. And that's the other thing is toys generally can only be used by one or two people versus open ended materials. "Okay, you want to come play with me? Great. Go grab a stick. Right?" So that's, it's a lot easier for children to join play when there isn't set materials for them to use, when everything's very open ended because they can modify what they're doing to include more people very easily. And to come back to kind of what you were saying about the play structure, that's another problem, right? There's usually limits on how many kids can be on the play structure, especially in school environments where they're like, you know, there can only be five kids on the play structure at a time that just hamstrings them. It cuts them off at the knees and when there's children, you know, want to come in, they can't. So keeping things and it's just really, the science across the board just says "Back off! Back off and they'll figure it out. That's what their brains are designed to do." Jen: Right. And that's really what builds a resilient person. Right? They can figure it out in a moment. Right. The other thing that had been talked about in New Zealand I remember is as playgrounds were becoming more safe, they were not just less risky as in, "Ooh, am I going to fall? Or it was also, they were less physically risky in that it didn't require as much strength to go over these different spots in the park. So the upper body strength in children is coming down big time because they are taking out monkey bars. They're taking, you know, they're taking out all these upper body things." Allana: Exactly. Because you've got children in occupational therapy to build that up because they're not naturally getting it, they're not weight bearing. I have so many clients who their child is in kindergarten and first of all they're asking these kindergarten kids to read and write when that's not developmentally appropriate, but they also can't physically do it because they don't have the strength in their muscles to do it. Like fine motor skills starting in your shoulder and they work their way down. Jen: Right. Right. Allana: If you don't use your gross motor skills. You can't use your fine motor skills when you need to. So yeah. And the other thing about reducing risk is that they're reducing small injuries, but the injuries that do happen are much larger. Children are breaking bones more frequently. They're, you know, having huge concussions when they do, because their vestibular system is so underdeveloped, they don't know the limits of their body. And so when they go to try and do something new, they can't tell if they can actually do it or not. Jen: Right. Because they've had no lower level risk that warns them Allana: They weren't able to build up to it. Jen: Amen. Yeah. Allana: We've reduced, you know, cuts, scrapes, minor stitches and we've turned that into breaks and concussions and it's, ask any occupational therapist and they'll tell you that a lot of these things are very easily solved just by sending them outside to play. Jen: Right. That's so interesting to just reframing it, right? These things are good. Like this is good for your kids to make these mistakes, have these small falls. None of them are life threatening, but they're teaching them about their environment and saving them from future. An analogy to that, actually, I posted a insta story a year ago with my oldest son on a little mini quad at his grandparents' farm and he was doing donuts and it was all dusty and I got so many from women that were like, "I would never let my child do that." And he had an accident that summer. He bumped into the side of his uncle's truck and he flew and hit his chest on the handlebars and it really hurt him and it really scared him. I mean, he's wearing a helmet and we've got that safety stuff. And I was like, "Good." I could see the donuts were getting a little out of control. I could see that kid needed some kind of little bump to remind him that he is on a machine and it happened and it was good. And he is much more safe now. And I guess, I guess what, and also my dad's a farmer, so I grew up in, you know, "dangerous" environment of, like, just roaming around a farm and yeah. And it's like, I see now how good that is, but you know, and I moved to the city and I think of all these city kids getting licenses at 16 and like, you know, we're a little, when you grew up on a farm, you're just driving, you drive, right? Like you drive when your dad's lap or you, you're helping, you know, you're way too young. You're 12 years old and you're helping move trucks from one field to another. And then I think of all these city kids getting their licenses and it's like that's crazy that they have no driving experience. And you know what I mean? So it's like- Allana: I was reading something the other day about how it's taking longer. Like when I turned 16 almost all my friends got their license on the first try. And apparently there's some statistics now coming out that it's taking teenagers longer to learn to drive because they're having to develop vestibular and proprioceptive skills that they didn't as a child. And so they're not able to judge where their car is in space. Jen: Oh gosh, that's so interesting. Allana: So yeah, it's, this isn't just about mom getting some breathing time of being able to clean the kitchen without anybody crawling up their back and about the kids being able to entertain themselves. These skills that they develop, that looks like they're doing absolutely nothing are so important. And they will follow them for the rest of their lives. And it's just, it frustrates me so much. Jen: Lauren had a question, I think. Allana: Oh yeah, Lauren, did you have something? Lauren: Yes. Can I, can I? Hello? Annie: Hi. Welcome to the show. Lauren: Hi, I'm over here. I'm trying to get a word in next to Jen. Annie: Good luck. Jen: Classic little little sister moment. Lauren: So I love all of this. Can I ask some practical questions selfishly that hopefully will benefit all of our listeners? I have a five year old and a one year old and I'm wondering like, okay, my one and a half year old obviously is probably going to have different boundaries than a five year old, but the five year old, I mean, I let her play outside sometimes, but I'm usually watching her through like the window and whatever. Like so what are, how do I introduce this concept to both of them in age appropriate ways? Allana: So the five year old, as you said, it's going to have a much longer leash than the one and a half year old. If you have fenced space, it's, that's easiest because it's easiest for us to back off. But generally what I do with little kids is I start by being outside with them but not being engaged with them. So like blowing snow in the driveway. They can't participate in that, but they can be outside while we're doing it, weeding the garden, they might join in but they're going to get bored and they're going to go do something else. Doing things that need to be done anyways, but, and that we're around, but we're not focused on them. We're focused on something else. So that's like step one is generally just getting them used to the idea that you're not going to be watching them all the time. And then step two of that is starting that way and then being like, okay, I'm going to go in and go to the bathroom. I'm going to go in and make dinner. And just gradually lengthening the amount of time that you go in at the end of your play time so that they're not going from "I'm inside and supervised, to I'm outside and not supervised." There's a buildup to that and it's amazing how, like, children are very intuitive. So if we have concerns, if we're scared of them doing something, they're going to pick up on that very quickly. Their limbic system is very connected to ours and our inter brain is going to go, "You're not safe!" And so they're not going to feel safe. So it's a workup for us too, right? We need to feel confident and comfortable leaving our kids alone. So those are steps one and two generally for me is just being outside, not engaged with them but being outside with them. And then at the end of that starting to introduce, I can go inside and you don't have to come with me. And once you kind of work up to a good chunk of time, then you can start sending them out by themselves and lengthening that amount of time so that you're like, "Okay, well, you go out and I'll meet you there. Like I'm just going to go and put this in the oven and then I'll be outside." And starting to get them used to going outside without you following behind them. And then you can go out again, do something else, not be engaged with them, but be around and then go back inside. So you're kind of working it from either end rather than just sending them out on their own. And that's generally a nice good workup for kids. They don't feel scared because they know you're coming, you know that you're not having to like peek through the window to keep an eye on them either because they can sense that too. Windows don't block limbic resonance. Lauren: Do you have tips if your yard is not fenced in, like, do you give them ahead of time, like, boundaries? Allana: Absolutely. So my favorite tool for this is go to Home Depot or Lowe's and grab some of that neon paint that they mark gas lines with when you call and be like, "Hey, I'm going to dig in my yard." And then somebody comes by and like Mark's all your gas lines so you don't hit a gas line when you dig. Go and get that and spray your property line. And I do that every spring with my two, because I have a two and a half year old. And so last year he was a year and a half and he wants to play in the front yard with his big brother, but there's no barrier in the front. So he was getting really angry because my big can let himself in and out of the backyard and the little one can't and he'd be so mad when my big one would leave him in the backyard. So I did. I went and I got the orange paint and I sprayed, just a line right down our ditch and down either side of our front yard. It doesn't look great, but when you mow the grass goes away and he, and I was like, "Listen, you cannot cross the orange line without mummy or daddy." And we walked the orange line and I showed him, "Yes, no, you cannot go on this other side." And it did. We had to work up to it Again, starting with me being outside with them and keeping an eye on them, but not engaged with them, reminding him that he can't cross that line and just very gradually backing away from him and letting him have more ownership over that. Now we can go just about anywhere. Like we have a cottage with a waterfront that we go to in the summer and now I can like walk up and like spray that line along the waterfront and I'm like, you can't cross the dark line- Jen: Take it to your hotel. Annie: The restaurant. Jen: The restaurant play here, don't worry, you can mow it out. Allana: I've done it with orange electric. Try and pick a color and stick to it because kids tend to get that, like, color association. But I've done it with orange electrical tape, like, we were at, actually just this last week, my big one was hospitalized and we were in this waiting room, like, it was like an examination room with the door didn't close. It was kind of like just a triage kind of space. And my little one was kept trying to escape and I busted out my roll of orange electrical tape and put on a hard line on the doorway and I was like, you can't cross the orange line. And he was like, "Okay." Jen: That's so awesome. Annie: it is. Allana: At this point that he's like, "No, we don't cross orange lines," causes problems when they're like, "Here you can go!" Like where were we? We were at Wonderland or something like that last summer and there was, like, a line on the ground to mark where you can't cross to go before you go on a ride. And they were like "Come!" and he was like, "Uh uh, we don't cross orange lines." Annie: So I have a feisty two and a half year old and I'm picturing this like it, like I'm, this is not that I don't believe you, but I mean- Allana: It's not an overnight thing. Annie: Yeah. I'm picturing me, like, getting out, like, rope or a spray can and like her just laughing in my face like, "Yeah, okay, mom. Right." Allana: Right. Well and they do. But that's the thing where you have to very consistently redirect them back to the other side. And- Annie: What have you used as appropriate consequences? Like do you say, like, "Sorry, we can't play outside then if you-" Allana: Yeah, well if you can't, so I often say like "If I can't trust you to stay on this side of the orange line, then we're going to have to go inside. Or if I can't trust you to go stay on this side of the orange line, we're going to have to go in the backyard that's fenced" and, or "if I can't trust you to be playing up" like often when I was starting to do this with him, I would be washing my car because my husband's a car nut and so it makes him very happy when I wash my car frequently. So I was like, all right, this makes him happy. This makes me happy. We're going to wash the car while the kids play in the front yard. And like, I mean it's nice when you have an older child who gets to be the tattle tale, but it was like, "Mom, Owie's going into the road" and I would bring him back. "If you can't stay on this side of the orange line, then you're going to have to come and sit in the car." And he was like, "Uh un." And I was like, "Yeah." And it doesn't take very many times of, like, "Hey," as long as you tell them what is going to happen before it happens. Like you can't spring it on them and be like, "Nope, if can't stay on this side of the orange line I'm going to strap you into your car seat." And then they're like, "Well, I didn't know that was what was on the line." Jen: That's actually, this is another huge takeaway I've gotten from your group is the whole concept of natural consequences, like, life changing. We could do a whole other podcast on it and I'm sure people can find more about it on your podcast. But I, it's just like brought my chill level into a normal range around my kids. And, you know, even, it was in your group, it was something about, it was just like this, right? So it's like you lay out the boundary, you tell them what the consequence is and it's a natural consequence. So it's so it's not like disciplining anymore, right? Allana: Exactly. Annie: It's about getting them to connect to the consequences of their actions. Allana: and kids can tell when we're pulling a power trip, right? Timeouts all that stuff. They know when we're like, "No, I'm just doing this because I can." And so, like, things with, "Okay, if you can't stay on this side of the orange line," the best logical consequence for that would be, "Okay, well then you need to go into the gated area." Like that's, he doesn't want that because he knows his big brother's not in the gated area. He knows that, you know, he wants to be in the front with us. And so that creates a consciousness in him that he's like, "Okay, I need to think critically about this. I'm not going to," and they will test. Kids are scientists. They use the scientific method with much more accuracy than any adult. And they will have a theory and they will test every variable possible, which is why I say, like, try and keep the color consistent because like my son, we were at my mom's once and she didn't have any orange paint, so I busted out some pink. Pink apparently doesn't have the same staying power. It is not an orange line. Jen: Oh my kids would do that. Allana: Because right. Anytime you introduce a variable, they have to test it. They have to, they're so inquisitive. They are scientific little minds. So, and that's where you have extinction bursts where they're like, "Okay, this was the limit before and now it's, there's a new limit. How hard do I have to push until we go back to the old limit?" So staying consistent really is the key to the whole but yeah, keeping, I've lost my train of thought now. Jen: You're amazing. Like you, it's like you're in a child's brain and the way you explain things is so fantastic. I can't wait to send everybody to your podcast and you just, and then suddenly my anxiety in parenting is just gone when I listen to you because I know I'm doing the right thing and it will work out. Right. You sometimes feel like you're just trying whatever, just try it, see what works. But I just have this, like, reassurance from you that it's just consistency. Allana: it's so much easier to let go when you know what's going on under the hood and you know how their brains work. And that's, like, my whole philosophy is if you can understand how your child's brain works, then you can work with it instead of against it. And so many of the conventional parenting wisdom is working against their brain. Annie: Right? Right. Jen: Yeah. Allana: Dominant. It's trying to exert dominance. Jen: Then you get struggles and they feel, yeah, it's- Allana: They feel controlled and nobody likes to feel controlled. You push back and they feel like they're being manipulated and treated like subhuman. So when we just treat our kids like we would not how we would treat an adult, but when we are give them that kind of respect, it's amazing how quickly they come onside. It really is. Annie: And I think from like a parenting perspective, hearing you as an expert in this field, pun intended, it's almost permission giving to say like, "It's fine. Go inside, go to the bathroom, put a frozen pizza in the oven. I mean that's what I would do. Like make a phone call, whatever. There'll be okay. And they need it. It's not just for you." It's, like, it just helps me like do this guilt-free. Allana: Totally. And like I've had clients with 11 year olds who will still make their 11 year old come in from the backyard when they need to go pee. Like when you go to the bathroom. Jen: Like that thread in the group before you came in and laid it down with everybody. I was like, "Who are these people?" Like how long are you gonna be like basically- Allana: And the funny thing. It's like my babysitter, my main babysitter is 11 years old. And when I tell people that they're like, "What?" They're like, "But you don't her alone with them." And I'm like, "Oh yes I do. She can." My 11 year old babysitter can feed my children dinner, bath them and get them in bed and an hour and a half flat. I can't do that. Jen: That's the other thing is that eventually we're working up or my son turns 10 this summer and we've kind of given him the, when you are 10 we will start leaving you a home alone. Like if I'm popping out for groceries or whatever. And it's this thing he's looking forward to and that's kind of the law here. Just so everybody knows. I know the law's different in different areas. But that is, we are law abiding citizens anyways. And so if you can't leave your child, like it has to start happening at some point, right? On a gradual basis. You can't be micromanaging your kid. And then he turns 10 or 11 or 12 and then you go, "Okay, we're leaving you alone." Allana: We don't give children any ability to experience minor risk and then they turn 18 and we're like, "Go out and innovate." Jen: Yeah. Go live alone. Annie: This sounds like- Allana: And they're like, "I've never done this in my entire life. You can't start with, like, throwing them out the door. Jen: And then they struggle. Right. And mental health issues in freshmen university students are just skyrocketing. Allana: Of course, living with their parents for longer and longer because they just don't have- Jen: They're not self sufficient. Allana: Yeah, you don't know how to cope without somebody micromanaging you and telling you what to do all the time. And then when people are like, "Make good decisions," you're like, "I don't know what that means." Because you have no. Jen: Yeah. Allana: Litmus test for it. So it's, it really is, you know, when people say early childhood is so important, it is the foundation for your child's entire life. And if you can't start trusting them when they're four with little tiny responsibilities, how are you going to trust them when they're 16, 17- Jen: Right. Yeah. The other thing I learned from you Allana that I wanted to say was about this bored thing. Cause I think that's the next thing, right? So, okay, your kids are playing alone, but they come back and they're like, "I am bored." I learned this from you in your group. You said it is not your job to entertain your child. And I, so that's just what I say to them. Now they come to me and say they're bored. I'm saying "That's not my job to find something for you to do. Like you, go find something to do." Allana: You are not a clown. You are not the family cruise director. Jen: Right. Sometimes I'll say, "Here's your options. You know, you can get out the coloring stuff. You can go out and jump on the trampoline" or I'll give some options to "Go get your bikes, go down to your friend's house, see if he wants to play." But I tell them all the time that "I am not here to entertain you. That is not my job." And that's been such a revolutionary thing for me too, because I, you know, you feel the pressure around that. Allana: Well, exactly. And that comes again to that pressure of they need to be enriched 24 seven if we want them to be smart. And that the only person that's available to enrich them is me so I have to be constantly engaged with my child and it's just not true. In fact, it's damaging. Jen: Right, right. Lauren: So I have my one and a half year old, like, he'll go play by himself, like, no big deal. But my five year old has always been, she wants to play with somebody. Do you have any tips for like training that'd be like you can, like, she'll go play for a little bit but it's, it's just she's completely different than my one and a half year old and she seems to only want to play with me. Jen: Or what about an only child? Like people that have one child? Allana: Only children I find are actually the best at entertaining themselves because they have no expectation. Like, even my older son is super good. He's really good at playing by himself because he had to, he had nobody to play with. My younger one is not so good at playing by himself because he's always had big brother being his cruise director. I actually find only children are usually very good at playing by themselves. It's not usually such an issue with them. There are children who are just, they're extroverted. They take energy from being around other people. Whereas introverts, that's expending energy, right? So it's a difference in what we find stressful. And so for kids then that's typically how I find kids who are extroverts is when they're like, they always want to be with someone. I'm like, "That's because that refills their tank. That's actually calming. Jen: Interesting. Allana: Versus children who are spending energy. So for them it's actually more calming to have people around and to be engaged with people. And these are the people who when they're in their 20s want to live in those houses with like 40 other people and they're like, "This is fun." And you're like, "No, that's stress. Stress." Jen: Annie, sorry. Annie's been waiting. She's got a question. Annie: No, no, no, no. Jen: She'll try to shut us down, I know it. Annie: I'm giggling because I am an only child and like- Jen: Oh right. Annie: But also, but I'm also an extrovert, so I grew up in a house where, and this might've just been a reflection of my mother and father who both worked full time. And I know that they were just tired when they came home from work, but I always got to have friends over. But I grew up, this supports kind of what you're saying. I grew up in a neighborhood where my, you know, I had three or four best friends within a block of, and we would just skip through the yard to get to, cut through yard backyards to go to the other person's house. And it was like, you just come home when the street lights turned on. That was like our guide and I was, you know, that was probably fifth or sixth grade, but that was there, you know, get on your bikes and you just go, you, you, and, and as long as you're home, by the time the street lights come on, like, we're good. Jen: I'm at the point where I'm like, when my kids are hungry, they'll come home. Like I trust. I've come to trust it. And because you're building this relationship, right, you give them more boundaries and more boundaries and then you as a parent, you trust. You know, it's always a little, once you give them a little more, then it's another trust thing. But then, you know, I've built, like, in our neighborhood with my three kids, we just, there's a lot of trust there with my kids now. And maybe I do, maybe I have my kids have more free reign than some of my neighbors, but I have trust there and I know my kids will get hungry eventually and they will come home and we just, it just works. Allana: Totally. And even like people will say to me like, how can you let your five year old go down the street? Aren't you scared he's gonna get hurt and not be able to tell you or you know that somebody's going to snatch him? First of all, my child is usually low jacked with a GPS. So we do live in 2018, these devices exist. Jen: Oh, you actually have a gps on your son? Annie: I actually have a gps on my son. It's the size of about a quarter or a looney. Jen: What do you wear? Can you tell us about that? Where you put it, how you? Allana: Yeah, so it's just I have, you know, those, tags that they put on merchandise in stores so that when you walk out, if you don't pay for it, it'll beep and flash and all that stuff. So those have a pin that need to be removed with a magnet. Right. So I have just a little fabric pouch. GPS goes in the pouch and it gets pinned to his, he's usually wearing cargo shorts. So we put it inside the cargo pocket and we pin it in there so he can't lose it. Nobody can take it off of him unless they removed his pants. And- Jen: And that's connected to your phone? Allana: It's connected to my phone. It doesn't track him. It just tells me where he is, where the gps is in that moment when I go to look at it. So I can tell if he's, and it's accurate to about 20 meters, so I can tell if he's in the general area that I expect him to be in. It also has the ability to send an SOS. So he just pushes on it and it'll alert my phone that he needs help so then I can go find him. Jen: What brand is this? Could you share that with our- Allana: Yeah, it's called a Ping gps. Jen: Wow. I am getting three. Allana: It is awesome. I love it. There are about 80 bucks and then they cost about five bucks a month US to run. But you can't get a cell phone plan- Jen: Look at Lauren writing. Taking notes. Lauren: Ping GPS. Jen: Lauren lives on a beautiful acreage with a huge, that's why she was asking about the fencing and stuff for kids. She always posts on Instagram these beautiful pictures of her back- Lauren: Snow covered. Jen: Yeah, it's November, but it's gorgeous. So, these would be very handy for you, hey, for your- Allana: Yeah. Jen: Country kids. Allana: It also takes off a little bit of that, you know, CAS call pressure- Jen: What if? Allana: Everybody's so scared that somebody is going to go, "You don't know where your kid is" and you're going to go, "You're right. I don't." Whereas if somebody comes to me and says, "You don't know where your kid is," I can go "Actually, he's within 20 meters of-" Jen: Right, right. Allana: The whole like, and even, I was talking about this on my personal Facebook page where I was sharing that No Child Left Alone Study with just with my friends cause somebody had asked about it and my aunt was actually like, well, like she was the perfect example of where you're not judging something based on the actual risk factors. She was "Never be too careful and the world is a dangerous place." And I was like, but it's not based on the statistics, based on the information we have, it's not. Jen: Right. Allana: We were talking about it because as you said, you know, we always give them those incrementally larger responsibilities. My five year old has wanted to walk to the bus by himself in the morning for school, for months now. And the other day he said to me, "Mommy, please, can I have the responsibility to walk to the bus all by myself?" Well, I can see his bus stop from my front window. It's literally two doors down. Our neighbors all know him. My neighbor who lives beside me is on maternity leave so she's watching him out the front door. She's always texting in the morning like "Good morning," I'm being watched. So I know she's watching him too and she's one house closer to him and I was like, I really had no reason to say no to him other than people who don't know you might think you're too stupid because you're too young. That's not a good enough reason for me. So I let them walk to the bus by himself and one of my neighbors took offence and called the bus company and was like, "I don't think this is okay." And they called me and I was like, "That's their problem." Jen: Right? Totally. Good for you girl. Look at you go. Allana: He's, you say, and it's again, we're, I'm pretty sure the directives we get next year are going to be rewritten because their directive saying that children need to be supervised at the bus stop. I'm like, that literally means they need to be watched. And I was watching him. It doesn't say they need chaperones. So we need to start kind of advocating on the competence of our children too because so many people are so quick to say, "Well, they're five, they're stupid" and no, like you know what your child is capable of and even what they're incapable of and nobody knows your kid like you do. So if you genuinely don't feel like your child can handle walking to the park by themselves because they don't have the awareness of people around them. They're not able to walk on the side of the road. Like I didn't just send my five year old to the park, we walked to the park together for many, many times, almost the entire summer. You know, I would send him to the park and I would stand at the end of the driveway and watch him walk to the park and then I would follow him with his brother. And we would do the same in reverse and like, again, you work up to it so you have to know your child's competency level before you, you try and give them a responsibility, right? Annie: I find it really inspiring and encouraging to listen to you Allana. Like just own your choices even with some pushback from spectators or neighbors or family because I would have, I think that that's something that I get a little nervous about too is, like, my kids, my two oldest run the neighborhood and I really don't, like, I trust them. They've haven't violated my trust. Knock on wood, I have no reason to second guess them that they're going to come home and they're going to be where they are and, but I am always like, what do other people think? Do other people, like, know that like they're okay and that we've had these talks and like there's just this fear of judgment or fear of like getting criticized and then they- Jen: They think you're a bad mom. Allana: Or that I'm just lazy. Jen: It comes down to that in so many situations of decisions we're making and Annie and Lauren and I talk about this around nutrition all the time, right? So it's like you're scared. Do they think I'm a bad mom? Like it's just this constant thing. Allana: And it's that moral judgment again, right? Like do they think that I'm being, that they're doing this because I'm lazy? Does that make them think that they're at a greater risk than they actually are? Annie: I just want to sit on my couch sometimes, and like, don't move. Jen: I do.The thing is, and this, I mean you see it too, like, if you want to take your kids to a park and sit on your phone, I'm like, do it. And I see these posts on Facebook. They're like the mom who just sat on her phone or her kids had to play by themselves and the child was shouting, "Mom, watch me." And the mom didn't look up. I'm like, the child will live, like- Allana: Our parents didn't do that for us. Jen: No. And sometimes it's all the mom has in her day to just be chilled out. Like I had three kids in four years and we lived overseas. So no family and in New Zealand, a lovely thing about New Zealand too is that all their playgrounds are gated. So, and you can't get out. So I could literally go in and just sit and just Facebook or read or whatever, just ignore them. And that was the only time I had and I'm all the power to ya, girl if that's what I'm on. If I see a mom with- Allana: On her phone and I got in it last summer with the mom, cause I do the exact same thing. I bring my laptop generally and I will tether to my phone and like work at the park so that my oldest, my youngest kid run around and ours has a fence but it's not a closed off fence. So I mean if they want to, they can escape. I've walked the perimeter with the many times we've talked about what the boundaries are. If my little one, I've showed him there is a gate, it's open, but that means it's a doorway and you need to stay inside the park or we're going to have to go home and he wants to play. And every once in a while I'll just shout out like "Cubs, where are you?" because we call them the bears and they'll go, "Here, here!" And I'll go, "Great!" And I don't even look up as long as I can hear them I know that they're close. And this woman was like, "Excuse me, do you know what your son is doing?" And I looked up and he was climbing and I was like "On the play structure?" And she was like, "Yes." And I was like, "We're at a park." That's what he's supposed to be doing. And she's like, "But you didn't know that you had to look." And I was like, "That's generally how sighted people determine information. Yes." She was so angry because I didn't have my eyes glued to his butt the whole time. Jen: Oh this busy bodyness is just killing us. Annie: Yeah. Allana: Kids don't need us to be in their face 24 seven. They need the space to play. And in fact, if you're playing with your kid and you're not into it, it removes all benefit of play for them. Both, all the people who are playing something need to be in a place state in order for the play to be beneficial. One person or group that isn't enjoying the play removes all the benefits of play for every single person in that group. So if your kid is forcing you to play trucks with them and you're like, "Oh my God, when is it nap time, I don't want to be here." They're not actually getting the benefit of you playing with them. Jen: Yeah, that's so interesting. Allana: So it's better to find something that you actually enjoy doing with your child and do that so that you're both in a play state, it's a frame of mind. It's not an action. Jen: Brene Brown has in her parenting book The Gift of Imperfect Parenting. They sat down as a family and made a list of things that fill everybody's cups and found the common ones and then that's what they focus their family time around now. And I thought, I thought it was such a good idea, right? Like it's mind. So Brenay Brown said it's mind numbing to play board games for herself and so she's just done. She's not doing it anymore. I was like, "Wow, it's so nice to hear someone like you give me permission to not do these things that I don't like doing with my kids. And I don't, I don't do things I don't like with my kids anymore either." Allana: Like I swim with my kids. That's what I enjoy doing. So we go swimming once or twice a week and we get in our mommy and kid time and that's great. Other than that, I'm like, "Please go do something else." And they're like- Jen: Raise yourselves. Allana: "How are you running a business at home? Mostly by yourself. Two little boys at home." And I mean, my oldest is in JK but he only goes three days a week. And I'm like, because they play by themselves. They go, I feed them breakfast, then I'm like, "Okay, play time." And they go and play in the basement and I'd go work and then they come up when they get hungry and I feed them and the little one goes down for a nap and the big one goes downstairs and play some more and it just gives you so much more freedom. It's actually better for their brain. Jen: And you're happier as a parent, right, having some time. And I guess before we wrap this up, I want to, you know, I just, I guess it's to, it's nice to let parents know that there is detrimental effects to your child by over supervising them, right? So just saying like there's measurable detrimental effects to these kids. Allana: Children who are closely supervised during their play will hamstring their own play. They won't allow themselves to go into a full play state because they're anticipating being interrupted or corrected. Jen: Oh interesting. Allana: So if you are constantly supervising your child's play, they probably aren't getting the benefit of their own play either. Even if you're not playing with them because they're anticipating having you go, "You can't do that. Don't use that that way. That's a firetruck, not a helicopter." And they're not allowing themselves to go into that fully immersed play state where all those benefits of play, all the problem solving and executive functioning skills and all that really get used in that play state. They keep their play very, very surface level when they're being supervised closely. Lauren: That's interesting because I find myself, I can't not correct when they're in view. So I put them out of view. I'm like, "Go in the playroom and play because when you are doing this, I cannot help myself but say stop it." Jen: It's like when I bake with my kids. I, like, can't handle cooking or baking with my kids because I, I just am like, "Don't do that. That's wrong. You're going to break it!" Allana: My mom's a pastry chef and God bless her, she can and I'm like, "Okay, that is your thing, Nana." She is totally into the whole cooking thing. And you know he got all these little, like, real knives and stuff, but they're small so that he can handle them. And the other day we were making, just chopping up potatoes for like roasted potatoes for dinner and he was like making these, like, really, like, random sized chunks. And I was like, "Okay, you're too," Jen: You're like twitchy about it. Allana: One inch cubes, not two, you're holding a knife and you're doing well. You're not killing yourself. Annie: Oh, that's awesome. So a lot of this is, I mean, it's not just about retraining kids to do this. It could be about retraining yourself too, or both or both depending on what you're kind of used to and what your goals are. And, but either way, I mean, just to summarize, this is good for both sides. Both parties, both parents, caregivers and kids when they have unsupervised specifically outside, but unsupervised play. So- Allana: Absolutely. And so many parents, so many moms express that guilt to me cause they're like, "I feel bad making the play by themselves. I feel bad that I'm not engaged with them. I feel super guilty." And it's like, "This isn't about you. This is about them." And it's, yes, it benefits you as well and that's nice, but this really is about them. This is for them. And it takes that guilt away. You don't have to feel bad for making your kids play by themselves. It's good for them. Jen: I want to just kind of leave us with this vision. I'm going to tell you something that really struck me when my kids were younger and was an eye opener moment for me actually. And I was watching, I was in a hard place with motherhood, right? Like these three kids under five, oh my gosh, under four actually. And I was watching The Good Shepherd and it's an old movie that takes place in the fifties. It has Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie and there's this scene where Matt Damon, he's coming home at the end of the day and all, and he's walking up to the house. It was a well researched scene and this is not even what the scene was about. It's just something that I noticed. The moms were all grouped together chatting in one person's front yard and they were all smoking as they would be in the 50s and kids were running everywhere. And I like had this pain in my chest when I saw it because it reminded me of how lonely I was and how parenting must've been so differently back then. Different back then. And not just that, I think moms are more lonely now. It's that kids are more lonely now in a way too, right. Because we are very isolated inside the homes and yeah, I just quite, I really quite crave are return to that and I feel like we've kind of found it in our new neighborhood and like it's just easier and simpler and yeah. Allana: I think, I think once we realize that what children do naturally is, there's generally a reason behind it. We don't tend to trust kids in what they're doing. We want to, we think we know better, but children know what they need and they'll do what they need. And once you can start to trust your kids that way and realize that what they're doing, whether it's a behavior, even if it's a maladaptive behavior, even if it's like what they're playing, if it makes no sense to you, children are doing things for a reason. There is never a child that is doing something just because they feel like it. Like there's never not a reason behind something that a child does. And so when you can trust that and trust that your child is doing what they need, it's so freeing for us. And it does allow us to go back to that, you know, children are allowed to be rambunctious. They're allowed to get hurt, they're allowed to be unsupervised. And you know, people keep thinking, "Oh well, you know, lots of, you know, the good old days didn't exist." Well, no, but we can bring them back in a modern way that is safe and comfortable for everybody. It doesn't have to be the way it was in the fifties for it to be beneficial. Jen: Right. We have tape and our GPSes. Allana: Exactly. That was a hard thing for me because I was like, I have a Bluetooth tracker on every, on my keys and my wallet. Even on my car. I have ev
Do you ever feel like you would be more successful in your journey to better health if you had more willpower and motivation? Does it feel like everyone else has more willpower and motivation than you? Does it seem like all these changes are more difficult for you than other people? You’re going to want to tune in for this conversation with Annie and Jen for the truth about willpower, motivation and what action you can take to feel more successful. What you’ll hear in this episode: The definition of willpower How decision fatigue impacts the quality of choices we make What’s the difference between motivation and willpower? How preparation sets you up for success Meal planning - why it can be helpful What to do when you can’t rely on motivation and willpower How waiting for motivation gets in the way of change that matters to us The magic in boredom The Habit Hangover - what is it? What keeps successful people going What a study of soda and water in a hospital teaches us about habits How to curate your environment for success Resources: Atomic Habits by James Clear 53: Secrets From The Eating Lab: Dr. Traci Mann Secrets From The Eating Lab Arms Like Annie Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Welcome to Balance365 Life Radio, a podcast that delivers honest conversations about food, fitness, weight and wellness. I'm your host Annie Brees along with Jennifer Campbell and Lauren Koski. We are personal trainers, nutritionists and founders of Balance365. Together we coached thousands of women each day and are on a mission to help them feel healthy, happy and confident in their bodies, on their own terms. Join us here every week as we discuss hot topics pertaining to our physical, mental and emotional wellbeing with amazing guests. Enjoy. Welcome to Balance365 Life radio. Have you ever felt like if you just had more willpower, self control or motivation, you would finally be able to reach your goals? We get it. We hear this a lot and it's no wonder. The diet and fitness industry have led us to believe that willpower and control are characteristics of driven, successful, healthy individuals. And if we just had more, we wouldn't struggle. But is that all we need? Do we really just need more self control? And if so, how do I get it? Cause sign me up! On today's episode, Jen and I dive into the theories and the truth behind willpower, motivation and self control and offer tried and true practical strategies to help you stay on track with your goals even when you're just not feeling up to it. And by the way, if you want to continue this discussion on willpower, motivation, and self control, we invite you to join our free private Facebook group. Healthy Habits, Happy Moms. See you on the inside. Jen, how are you? Jen: Good, how are you? Annie: I'm great. We are talking about willpower and motivation today, which is something that comes up so frequently in our community. Like how do I get more motivation? How do I get more willpower? Right? We hear this a lot. Jen: Yeah and everywhere, right? Even the messages we get out of the fitness industry talks about getting motivated and having more willpower. And sometimes those phrases are used in a way that can feel really hurtful, right? Like you're doing something wrong and everybody else, everybody else around you seems to be very motivated and have a lot of willpower and you feel like it's something you lack. Annie: Right? And if you just had that, if you had willpower and determination and motivation and self discipline, then you could achieve anything. Jen: Right? And how many times have we heard, "I just have no willpower and that's my downfall. No willpower." Annie: Right? Yeah. And so we've done a fair amount of investigation into what really is behind willpower, what's behind motivation, what's behind self discipline? Do you really just need more of it? Because that is the message. Like you said, that we've been sold by the fitness industry that like, "Hey, if you just stick to this thing, if you can just have enough self discipline and motivation to stick to this plan, then you'll achieve your goals." And so then that becomes a way in which people feel like they're feeling like, "Oh, I did this." Like you said, "I'm wrong. I'm a failure. I'm lacking in this element of my life and everyone else is doing it. And I'm not." And is there any truth behind that? And I think what we're going to share today might surprise some people. Jen: Yes. Annie: Foreshadowing. Jen: Yes. Annie: And I want to say, like, you've done a lot of writing on this too because a lot of this is in the first phase of our Balance365 programming called Diet Deprogramming. Jen: Yes. Yeah. Annie: And that's the phase in which we kind of challenge, not kind of, we challenge some of the beliefs that you might hold sold to you by the diet and fitness industry, right? Jen: Yes. And the science around willpower and motivation is very heavy. And so I think today we're going to try talk about it in less scientific but more practical terms. Annie: Yeah. Jen: That make sense to everyone. And they can implement in their lives immediately. Annie: Well, yeah, I mean, we're not researchers! Jen: That's the goal! Annie: I mean, I like to think that I'm pretty smart, but definitely not researcher level. Okay. So let's start with the definition of willpower. Let's just get really clear on that. And the definition of willpower is the ability to exert control and resist impulses. And the truth is that we all have varying degrees of willpower. And on one end of the spectrum you'll have people with almost perfect willpower. And on the other end of the spectrum, you'll have people with almost no willpower. And the vast majority of us are- Jen: Somewhere in the middle. Annie: And like Jen said, there have been a lot of studies done on willpower and a lot of theories and it's kind of an ongoing process and you might find some that kind of disagree with each other. So like Jen said, we're just trying to give you more practical advice on how you can reach your goals without maybe relying on willpower and what is clear is that one of our mentors, Steven Michael Ledbetter, he is an expert in the science of human behavior. It's said that people reporting high levels of fatigue are the ones whose lives require high levels of mental energy expenditure. And do you want to give us that marriage example that you share in Diet deprogramming? Can you walk us through that and so we can see what Steven Michael Ledbetter says applies to real life. Jen: Okay. So yes. So, you had just talked about how people who have high levels of fatigue are the ones whose lives require high levels of mental energy expenditure. So this might include having to make many small decisions or choose between similar options all day long, and so what this, what we talk about in diet deprogramming as we compare two people. We've got a stay at home dad and a working mom and I put out this situation where a working mom, she gets up early kind of before anyone else is awake and she has some quiet time, has her breakfast and then she dashes out the door and on her way out she grabs her gym bag, which is packed and ready to go right by the door and she heads up the door for work. Her day is, you know, maybe not a super high stress job. She has some responsibility, but it's not super high stress. Her lunch breaks are always scheduled. She goes to the gym on her lunch breaks. It's a automatic habit and then she returned home around 5:30, six o'clock. Meanwhile, stay at home dad. This is my dream life. That's why I use this as an example. He wakes up tired because he's been up with maybe a toddler a couple of times in the night. He wakes up to lots of noise too, maybe a baby and a toddler crying "Breakfast!" And immediately he's going, "What am I going to feed these kids for breakfast?" And gulping back coffee and then trying to get those kids dressed because they have an appointment at 10 o'clock and then trying to get himself dressed. And it's just the crazy, right? I think we've all been there. Annie: That sounds familiar. Jen: Yes. And then just getting those kids out the door getting, and then one of them saying they got to poop. So then coming back in to change a diaper, like just like madness constantly. Right. And despite his best intentions to do a workout during nap time that afternoon, he is just so mentally fatigued from everything that happened between 8:00 AM and 1:00 PM that by the time the afternoon hits scrolling Facebook and the couch have won him over. And then of course the afternoon to get up from their naps. Similar stuff, making dinner, just that whole crazy and working wife gets home at 5:30 and dinner is almost ready and they sit down for a nice family dinner. They get the kids to bed that night. They go to unwind on the couch. They might share a bag of chips and working Susie goes to bed at a reasonable hour. But stay at home husband is just mentally fatigued, is so sick of being around kids. This is the only time he has in a day to not be with kids and he ends up staying up til midnight like he does every single night. Just hoarding those hours for himself and that might lead to more chips, maybe a beer, watching TV. Then he goes to bed around midnight and it starts again the next day. And so this example I think is typical of what might be happening in a lot of people's households is, you, I don't want to say typical. I'll say it was typical for me for a long time. I don't know if it was typical for you, Annie, but and I would say that even though my partner had taken on the responsibility of earning and that was an enormous responsibility, I felt like my life was chaos, very hard to find a routine when my kids were all little, little. I had three kids under four and it was just that I felt like my mental energy was just, just chipped away at all day long. Just all those little decisions you have to make dealing with unreasonable little kids all day. And it was very hard for me to get the physical or mental energy together. And then it's a downward cycle, right? Like then you have staying up late then broken sleep, can't get up in the morning, can't get going. And you know, we know that spiral, right? Making not so great food choices. Annie: Yeah. it's hard to make great choices when you're exhausted, when you're mentally and maybe even physically fatigued, you're kind of not in a prime position to make a good choice. And the mental fatigue that comes with a long day of decision making, whether it be you, Jen, when you were staying at home or the husband that we described in the last situation, the long day of decision making chips away at your energy and your willpower. So you have the contrast of the working mom who didn't have to make a lot of choices or maybe she made those choices ahead of time. So when she was fatigued- Jen: Right? So she packed her lunch, you know, she packs her lunch the night before, packs her gym bag. Doesn't have to think about those things. And maybe, you know, I think about my husband when he would go to work, there were lots of decisions that needed to be made and he did work in a high pressure environment, but he had assistants, receptionists, you know, like there was a lot of people pushing the ball forward with him, and yeah, so, and I don't want to like create this comparison game. I just might help with conversations between partners or just reflection, right? And so yeah, like, “Wow, how can I reduce the amount of decisions I have to make in a day?” Because what we know is all those decisions is actually contributing big time to your mental fatigue. Annie: Right? And so that's why we talk a lot about things like habits. So when you walk to the fridge, you have your, maybe your lunch for the week, you know, you've got all your power bowls. That's why our power bowl challenge was so successful and we loved it so much is because you don't have to then think at 12 o'clock when you're already starving and like, "Oh gosh, what am I gonna eat for lunch now? And do I want to cook something? Do I want to go grab something?" Because convenience wins. We know that over and over and over again, that whatever is most readily available will likely win out, which we'll talk about how your environment impacts your habits in just a little bit. But essentially what this boils down to in real life that this means, although it may appear that some people have higher levels of willpower than you do, it's probably they've just have just less mental energy expended during the day on large or small decisions. Jen: Right. So that may mean they have less decisions to make, or it may mean that they have habits in place so that they are not making those decisions, right? So you know, if you've listened to our podcast for a long time, you'll know exactly what that means. But if you're new to our podcast, it's sort of how when I open up my phone each time, I don't have to think about what my passcode is to get in, right? But when you go to change your password, you put in your old code, you're like, and then you have put it in again, and then you put it in again. And then all of a sudden you're like, "Oh yeah, I changed my passcode." So that's just an example of where energy is expended in one little way, right? Until that new habit is formed and then it takes no energy for you to do that. Or I was on another podcast, a couple months ago and a farm podcast actually. And, I said to the host, I was trying to explain habits and I said, "What happens when somebody moves the silverware drawer?" And the host, the a male host, Rob, his name was, he goes, "10 years later, you're still reaching to get it out of the old drawer." And that's the thing, right? So habits, having habits set up, like packing your gym bag before bed, if that becomes a part of your night routine and then you don't have to think about it in the morning, "Oh, where's my pants? Where's my shoes? Where's?" Do you know what I mean? And so it's looking at it, you know, case by case. You think, well, these aren't big decisions. Like who cares? But it's actually adding up all those things through the course of a day where you're just like, "Ugh, brain done." Annie: Yeah. Like, you know, the term that comes to mind is just this like exasperated. Like "I can't, I just can't. I can't, I can't." I think I've said that to my husband before like, "I can't make a choice right now. I just need you to do this for me. Like I don't even care." And then he picked somewhere to eat and I'm like "But not that place." Self control is similar. In that when scientists analyze people who appear to have great self control, similarly, it's largely because they're better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self control. And in short, they spend time, less time in tempting situations. And that was pulled from also one of our mentors, James Clear, his new book, Atomic Habits, which if you haven't checked out that book or his blog posts they're great. He's hopefully similar to us really applies information to your lives really easily. Jen: Yeah. But ps, he may not know he's a mentor of ours. We may just be like silent mentees Annie: It's not like we're buddies. Jen: Annie, you took his course a couple of years ago. Annie: Yeah, I did. Jen: Yeah. Anyways- Annie: Maybe admirers. Jen: Admirers of his work. Stalkers? Annie: Creepers. Jen: We're not quite at that level. But and we also talked about this in our podcast with doctor Tracey Mann. She's actually done a lot of research on willpower and she talked about it in that podcast and what she had said is nobody has good willpower. You think, you know, nobody does, in different survey she's done when she asks people to rate their own willpower. Everybody scores themselves low on willpower. So nobody thinks they have good willpower. And this is just an excerpt from her book Secrets From The Eating Lab, which is another book we recommend all the time. "Humans were simply not meant to willfully resist food. We evolved through famines, hunting and gathering, eating whatever we could get when we could get it. We evolve to keep fat on our bones by eating food we see, not by resisting it? So is that a good segway into- Annie: Well, I think the takeaway is there, like you can take some of the pressure off yourself for not having like iron man or whatever, like discipline and willpower like, the truth is no one is like that. That's what we're trying to say is that people that you think have really good willpower have most likely, again, created their lives, created routine, created habits that make other options less tempting. They've made the choices that they want to make the most readily available, the easiest to choose, and the most obvious choice in their lives. Jen: Right? So instead of putting all this energy into kind of shaming yourself and getting down on yourself for not having perfect willpower and motivation, put your energy into what we know matters, which is curating your environment and setting yourself up for success, which I do almost every night with my nighttime routine, I kind of start getting things ready for the next day. Annie: Yeah. And motivation is also something that kind of goes, seems to go hand in hand with willpower. And we've kind of been using these terms thus far interchangeably, but motivation is actually our willingness to do things. And the thing about motivation is at times it can feel abundant. Like you have all the motivation and like, "Yes, we're going to do all the things." And then at other times it's like "I'm just so unmotivated, I can't, I can't do anything at all." Jen: Right. Annie: You've felt like that- Jen: Totally. Annie: You've felt that burst of motivation and I think the myth is, again, it goes back to that people that are achieving their goals or they're going to the gym five, six days a week and they're meal planning and their meal prepping and they're eating the foods that the meal plan and plan and they seem so disciplined also have unlimited sources of motivation. And that is not the case either. No one, no one is riding this motivation high all the time, every day. Jen: Even people who, say, prep meals in advance, I prep some or portion of food I'm usually on the weekends and that sets us up for success during the week, but by no means am I cooking and preparing all of my food. You sometimes see on Instagram, you know, like, people who, like, have all these dishes and they line them up and they post meal prep Sunday Hashtag motivation. Annie: It makes for a great photo. Jen: Yes. And they have all their breakfast, all their lunches, all their snacks, all their suppers lined up for the week. Which, honestly, all the power to you. Some weeks I probably could use that. I just don't have time on the weekends to do in depth preps like that. But I do perhaps some and I do meal plan so I know what's coming. That's when meal planning can be great because it takes away the mental energy of deciding what you're going to eat. But what I will say is even the stuff I do prep, I'm not, I don't always feel motivated to eat it. I'm not like, "Oh, can't wait!" I'm like- Annie: Yes! Amen! Jen: And I think even the people who prep all those meals in advance, they might seem really motivated on Sunday cause they've got all these prep meals, but I bet you by Thursday they're eating the same lunch that they had all week and they're just like not thrilled. Or drowning in BBQ sauce. Annie: I can't tell you how many times I have and this is something I would have done back in my deep dieting years is, you know, this on again off again thing, I would like clean out the kitchen. I'd have this like motivation usually triggered, I mean, let's just revisit the diet cycle here. Triggered by shame. I'd see a photo of myself and like, "Ugh, got to lose 10 pounds!" Clean up the kitchen. I'd run to the grocery store, buy all this produce and lean meats and veggies and fruits and like I'm going to do this so well this week. And then, like, come Thursday I'm like, "Ugh!" Because you get this burst of motivation and then to, like, continue to the follow through is, like, that's much harder and when you rely on motivation to do the things that's bound to happen. That's exactly what we would expect from a human because again, no one is riding this high of motivation, seven days a week, 24, seven hours, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's unreliable and it's fleeting. It comes and it goes, it ebbs and flows. It rises throughout the month, throughout the day. And, like, I notice it, my motivation rises and falls throughout the day and even in particular to do certain things. If I wanted to have motivation to go work out I know that it needs to be mid to late morning. If I wait until 6:00 PM to work out, it's probably not going to happen. Maybe some days, but probably not. Vice versa, if I try to work late at night, I can't work late at night. It needs to be like three, four o'clock seems to be like a really productive hour for me. So if I have something important to do, like, you know, kind of stack your day to where the motivation fits that task. Jen: Which can work. For me, the only realistic time I have to work out is super early in the morning. So I get up at 5:30 and I work out from six till seven three days a week. And I am never, ever, ever hopping out of bed excited, like "I can't freaking wait." It's just become a habit and which can lead us into a discussion about values and goals. But ultimately for me,I made a commitment to do this to my future self. So when I get up in the morning, I just don't let myself question it. Obviously if I've had a rough sleep or a sick kid, I will not get up at that hour. You know, I have grace with myself and I'm realistic. But yeah, I'm never motivated to do it. It's just simply become a habit for me. And something that's very important to me. Annie: I think that's a common mistake people make is they're sitting around waiting for motivation to strike them like lightning from the sky and as a result they're at the mercy of motivation. So they can't take action until they're motivated. That's like this belief that they have in their head. But you can also flip it and action leads to motivation, which research has proven as well. And I think just anecdotally, you would probably say the same thing. I would say the same thing. Like you get that first set in, you get your workout clothes on, you get into the gym and you start the workout and it's like, "Okay, I can do this now." And then you'll do it, and then it snowballs and it's like, and then you retrain your habit loop in your brain, like, I get up, I do the thing. The reward is I feel good. I may be more productive during the day, in the long term I'm improving my health, I'm increasing my strength, I'm learning new skills and then that's how habits are formed. Jen: Yeah, absolutely. Annie: Without relying on motivation. Jen: Right. Yeah. Annie: Boom. Jen: And that's why a lot of people give up on workout routines, right? Like how many people start something new and within three weeks they're done because they just, they lose, they're super motivated at the beginning, everybody is, when I started this new lifting program, well, its Arms Like Annie, it's your program, Annie,, I was very motivated but that really it doesn't last. And then you, then it's boring because then you're just putting in reps. But that's actually where the magic starts happening, I think, is actually those boring stages when you don't want to, that's when you're starting to, you're not relying on motivation anymore and you are truly training in that habit cycle and you might feel yourself resisting and trying to go back to old habits. Right? When my old habit is to sleep till seven, not get up at 5:30. But that's truly when the magic starts happening. That's truly around even where the tipping point starts happening, right, into forming a habit. And so that's why it's important to push through but not push through in the way that push through and find more motivation. It's like just push through like you're there, like this is, this is where it's going to happen. Annie: So that's, inside Balance365, that's something we call the Habit Hangover often. Like, we see that it's pretty common. Like, because people- Jen: This isn't fun anymore. Annie: Yeah. When they're motivated and they're like, "Okay, now this is just hard work and I'm not near as excited as I was when I started three weeks ago. And the newness, the shininess has worn off. Jen: Yes, new and shiny is gone. Yes. Annie: And again, that's another vote that we've said it before on the podcast. We say it all the time in our community. That's why we start habits small because when that motivation falters and it will then you're not relying, you don't need like this Richard Simmons level of willpower and motivation to do the thing that you're supposed to be doing if you start a little bit smaller versus like doing all the things at once. Jen: Yeah. So actually because I had struggled with, we moved a couple of years ago, a year and a half ago, I guess, and since we moved, I really struggled with my workout habit. So it was kind of last fall sometime where I just epiphany, "Look, this isn't working. I'm not being consistent because I haven't been able to find a time in my day that this really works for me. It definitely does not work at night for me." And that's something I just kept trying to do, trying to do, trying to do and then finally I was like, "Look, you're not going to work out at night." And so that's when I started getting up in the mornings and I actually kind of had the epiphany that's really what time works best for me and I had to start going to bed earlier and I started with twice a week actually. I was doing Mondays and Wednesdays only and that felt very realistic for me. And when things did get hard, I would say, "You know what? It's just two mornings a week. Like you, you can do this. It is just two mornings a week." And then when I felt ready, which is about two months after I started, I added in Friday mornings and now that's going really good. And we're going to add in a cardio, just a cardio session. And yeah. So, and that's just, that's really how habits form, right? Like that's so boring. But you scale up as you solidify new skills and habits, then you can add in something else and something else. And then all of a sudden you're living it and you're going, "Oh, this is happening and I'm doing the thing." Annie: I'm doing the thing. Jen: Yeah. Annie: Or the things. So to recap thus far, willpower and motivation is not what keeps most "successful people" going. It's their habits. And the next kind of layer I want to add on to that, which we've already touched on, is that your habits are highly influenced by your environment. And I want to share this study, I think we've shared it before, but really quickly, this is again, something inspired from James Clear shared before, but they did this study of soda and water consumption in hospital. And what they did was they let people choose their soda and their water consumption for two weeks, three weeks, whatever. They collected the data on the sales of each. After three weeks they added, they didn't change anything about the soda. They added water to different locations, more convenient locations throughout the hospital cafeteria. So again, all they changed was made water more available. And as a result, water sales increased and soda sales decreased. And I think that's just such a simple example of how impactful your environment can be on your habits. They didn't say, they didn't promote or push the water or give any marketing about how soda was "bad or harmful" and water was better. They simply just offered it in more places. And people are like, "Oh, there's water. I'll take a water now." Jen: Totally. So in my house, Oh boy, we talk about this all the time. My veggie tray. Annie: Yes. Yes. Jen: So fruits and vegetables are often things that people struggle to get enough in. And you have to make them convenient and part of your environment. One way I do this is one, I buy bagged salads and I just kind of have no shame around that when my salads are pretty much prepped for me, I'm eating them and enjoy them, but I am just not going to start from scratch every single meal to create a salad. That's a lot of work. And or maybe, maybe it's not a lot, but it's too much for me. And a second is I make a veggie tray every, that's kind of part of my meal prep. On Sundays I make a Veggie tray. I've got like an old one of those old Tupperware ones. I make a Veggie tray and then I'm usually restocking it by Wednesday morning. And I bring that out for most meals, lunch and supper for me, my kids. And I also pull from it when I'm packing lunches for my kids school lunches. And I keep all our fruit, most of our fruit, if it doesn't have to be refrigerated, I have it on the counter in just a little fruit basket and we go through fruit like crazy around here. But I have made fruits and vegetables very, I have put my energy into making those two things very accessible and then I don't have to think about it during the week. It just happens naturally. And that's what we're trying to say here, right? Annie: Yeah. And I think the other aspect to that is visual cues are really, really important. So because when you open up your fridge, you see the Veggie tray and it's, like, there. Jen: It's there. It's right at eye level. It's not tucked, you know, it's not tucked away. It's not in the back. I don't have my vegetables tucked in the drawers and the bottom. It's like right there. Annie: Exactly. I even remember you talking about, which you've seen my Instagram videos, you know, my kitchen also houses my dumbbells and kettlebells. But, but you did the same thing too, you were like, look, I'm not getting in a lot of movement and I want to, and it would be simple to incorporate some kettlebell swings, but in order for me to actually do that, I need the kettle bell in my kitchen. So every time you walked by it, so you ended up doing, you know what, 10 swings a handful of times throughout the day. Jen: Yeah. So yeah, so I have a big round Moved Nat yoga mat off my kitchen island. There's kind of just a space off my kitchen that's just blank space. I know not everybody will be able to find a space, but there's other ways to do it. But anyway, sorry, I have this huge round Yoga Mat. The boys use it to sit and play cars on or they sit on it and read. But I also use it, like, it's just there. So if I feel like doing some movement, whether it's getting on the ground and doing some glute bridges or pushups or whatever, my mat is right there and I don't have to go on my gross floors. But, and then I also have just, you know, I have my garage gym,, but I have one kettlebell that I keep up in the kitchen and it's kind of on the lighter end, but I can do, you know, I can do lots of things with it in my kitchen and I, yeah, I see it and I'll do it right. Which I know it sounds silly, but if I'm waiting for water to boil on the stove, I'll go over and do a couple of kettlebell swings or a couple of pushups or, yeah. And I mean that just works well for me. I'm not saying it'll work for everybody, but it just works well for me. And other people might find benefit in having a yoga mat in their living room and some weights, you know, beside the TV. And so when they're watching TV, they might just feel like, yeah, I could get down on the floor, do some bridges, some presses, some, you know, some yoga stretches, anything, right? Because if it's, but it's just about looking at your environment and say, how does my environment support more of what I want in it? And then on the flip side of that, which we talked about with Traci Mann, is how can I put small barriers in place between me and things that I want less of in my life. So for me, I keep, like all our nuts and seeds and chocolates, like really high calorie, high energy foods. I keep a lot of those above my fridge in the cupboard and then I don't, I can't see them. There's no visual cue to eat them. I'm having them when I want them, right. When I think of them and want them and reach for them. Annie: Right. And then you know that if I want them it's because I actually want them, not just because I see them and then I want them, which is like marketing 101. We think that we're in control. We think we're like making the choice. But a lot of times it's like the power of suggestion. Like I've said it before, my kids don't want the Goldfish at Target until they see the Goldfish at Target, at the end cap. Jen: It's why grocery stores put all that stuff right at the checkout. Right? All the trashy magazines, all the indulgent foods, like the chocolate bars, they put it there because they know you're going to be standing there awhile, waiting at the checkout and you're just more likely to grab it the longer you're standing there. Annie: Right. And the other thing about habits too is that, habits and your environment is that we often have a set of habits per the location we're in. So if you think about the habits you have in your bedroom, the habits you have in your kitchen, the habits you have in your, in the gym, the habits you have in a grocery store, you probably grocery shop the same path every time. You have your routine, right? You like grab your produce, you move to meats or whatever it is. Same thing with the gym. You walk to the same space every time, you put your bag down, you go use the same equipment, you probably have a favorite treadmill or a favorite squat rack or whatever. The thing is important to know is that it can be easier to change habits in a new environment. So if possible, like I'm not saying go out and buy a new house, but could you rearrange your furniture so maybe, or take a TV out of your bedroom or rearrange your furniture so it's not facing the TV and it's more conducive to reading or whatever habit you're trying to change. Or put a kettle bell in your kitchen or go to a different grocery store. Like would your shopping- Jen: Rearrange up cupboards or, yeah. Annie: Yeah. You don't have to like completely like burn everything down and start from new. But can you think outside the box of how your environment shapes your habits? Like even, James Clear, and I'm guilty of this, was talking about your environment should have a purpose. So, you know, he was working at his kitchen island. But he also wants to eat in his kitchen. And then it's kind of like, there was no boundary. That's like, now I'm working, now I'm eating, I'm eating and I'm working. So he created a new small environment out of his bedroom for an office or whatever. And like that's his work. When he's working, when he's there, he's working. When he's in his kitchen, he's eating and you know, on and so forth. So- Jen: I just- Annie: Go ahead. Jen: I posted about this in Balance365 a couple of months ago. I totally had that epiphany in the wintertime when it was chilly out, I started working at my kitchen table near the fire instead of my office. And I started snacking more and more and more. And then one day I realized, it's because you're just staring at the kitchen all day. You're just staring at the cupboard, staring at the kitchen and you're just triggered to go grab something to eat. Right. And so I moved back down to my office and that problem is gone. I'm not snacking between breakfast and lunch anymore. Annie: Right. Jen: And it's crazy, right? You think, you know, you think this comes to motivation and willpower again, but you just can't believe how much your environment influences your choices. Right. And again, my goal is not perfection. My goal is balance. So I'm not like saying take all the treats out of your cupboards and all of that. I feel like I have an appropriate amount of treats in my house stored in a space that aligns with the goal I have of balance, right. Annie: Right, right. Yeah. And I think that it's, you know what all of this really boils down to for me and I'm assuming for you is that self control and willpower and motivation can work in the short term. They can be a great short term strategy. And I wouldn't want anyone listening to this to think I'm super motivated, but I somehow have to like contain that motivation or pull back from that motivation because I don't want to like misstep or whatever. Like, no, if you're motivated to do something, you can follow that. Like you can explore it. It's not that it's a bad thing, but the point is, is that a better, in our experience, a better long term strategy for reaching goals boils down to habits and environment. Jen: Right. I don't, sometimes I feel super motivated to go for an extra run or walk or I do an extra workout. But another thing I just want to note is you don't want to, when you're feeling motivated, that's not where you want to set your bar, right? Like you don't, you know, some weeks I have my baseline habits, say, like my three workouts a week and that's just kinda my minimum at this point. I miss the odd one. We just took two weeks off, actually, me and my workout partner and that's all good. We're right back to our three times a week. But the odd time when I feel like an extra run or I feel like an extra workout, I don't bring my bar up there. I don't say, okay, now I'm at five times. I just, you know what, I recognize it as a week, even a month sometimes where I had a burst of energy and I utilize that and that felt great, but I don't bring my bar up there. I just recognize. Annie: Yes. It was just a bonus. Jen: I just feel motivated. Yeah. It was just a bonus. Annie: Yeah. That's great. This is good. I hope that this helps clear up a lot of the questions that we get about willpower and also helps reduce some of the shame and guilt that people might be experiencing if they don't feel those emotions or if they don't feel like they have those traits or those characteristics innately, and then, because I think I, you know, just on a personal note, I think people think that I am motivated, for example, to go to the gym three, four times a week or five times a week. I'm not. Like Jen said, like, there's days where I'm like, "Eh, I don't know." Like I'll text my girlfriend, it's like, "I need you to talk me into this." Jen: Right. Annie: Or "This is workout really doesn't look fun. I don't think I can do this," but it falls back to habits. I dropped my kids off at school, I'd go to the gym and if I can just get my kids in the car, I know that that trigger loop or that habit loop has started with my trigger of getting kids to school. And I know the rest will just fall in naturally thanks to habits. Jen: Yes. And I do think it is really key too, I don't think a lot of people do this and I think it's such a great thing to do is to stop, pause, especially if you've gone through any life transition, like had a baby, changed jobs, moved and think about where you can decrease the decisions you're making in the day. So my nighttime routine consists of, you know, washing my face, brushing my teeth, getting my workout clothes out, putting them right beside the bathroom sink so that when I get up in the morning, the first thing I do is get dressed. I get my coffee pot out, the coffee out. So you know, so just in the mornings, I just, I don't have to think. I just get up and do, and then I head down to the gym. Annie: That's great. Awesome. If you want to continue the conversation on willpower and motivation, come to our free private Facebook group with our Healthy Habits Happy Moms on Facebook. Jen, Lauren and I are in there frequently along with some really, really rad community members that have been around for a while and have great contributions, so we hope to see in there. Jen: Yes. Annie: Alright, thanks, Jen. Jen: Bye, Annie. Annie: Bye. Bye. This episode is brought to you by the Balance365 program. If you're ready to say goodbye to quick fixes and false promises and yes to building healthy habits and a life you're 100% in love with, then checkout Balance365.co to learn more.
Parenting can be exhausting, especially if your kids aren’t sleeping well. How do you help your kids get the sleep they need? How do you get the sleep you need? Jen, Annie and Lauren discuss these important questions with Dr. Craig Canapari to get listeners and their kids on their way to better sleep. What you’ll hear in this episode: Misconceptions about sleep training The role of mom shame in the decision to sleep train or not Harnessing habits for better sleep in your kids Sleep as a buffer for toxic stress Sleep debt - what is it? All or something - the value of incremental gains in your sleep habit At what age should you sleep train? Social jetlag: what is it and what does it have to do with sleep? How to shift your sleep schedule Dividing sleep responsibilities Sleep routine in blended families or single parent households Screens in the bedroom - why you should unplug How limiting screen time can improve your sleep How to help your kid stay asleep or in bed longer How sleep impacts weight Resources: Atomic Habits by James Clear It's Never Too Late to Sleep Train: The Low Stress Way To High Quality Seep for Babies, Kids and Parents - Link when available Dr. Craig Canapari’s Blog Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Welcome to Balance365 Life radio, a podcast that delivers honest conversations about food, fitness, weight, and wellness. I'm your host Annie Brees along with Jennifer Campbell and Lauren Koski. We are personal trainers, nutritionists and founders of Balanced 365. Together we coach thousands of women each day and are on a mission to help them feel healthy, happy, and confident in their bodies on their own terms. Join us here every week as we discuss hot topics pertaining to our physical, mental, and emotional well-being with amazing guests. Enjoy. Annie: Welcome back to another episode of Balance365 Life radio. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to share with you a really sweet review left for us on iTunes. SPagan84 says, "I beg of you. This is what female need to hear. Annie, Jen and Lauren cover a lot of freaking rad topics. Women empowering one another, women evolving to be the best version of themselves and women learning to love themselves. This podcast is so much more than fitness and nutrition though they have a no bs approach to diet and fitness that applies to real life. I love, love, love the Balance365 life." Thank you so much to all of you who have taken the time to leave us a review on iTunes, we read every single one of them and they all mean so much to us. Alright, let me tell you about today's guest. Annie: Dr. Canapari is the director of the Yale Pediatric Sleep Center, father and author of his first book, It's Never Too Late to Sleep train. Shortly after becoming a father, Dr. Canapari realized that all of his years of 36 hour hospital shifts didn't come close to preparing him for the sleep deprivation that comes with parenthood. Inside his book, Dr. Canapari helps parents harness the power of habit to chart a clear path to high quality sleep for them and their children. Sound familiar? On today's episode, Lauren, Jen, Dr. Canapari and myself discussed the importance of quality sleep for not just your children, but why it's so important for parents and caregivers as well. Plus he shares a ton of great insight on to how to improve sleep for your whole family regardless of age. Enjoy! Annie: Welcome to the show. We have a special guest today. Jen, do you want to tell us how you met our special guest? Jen: Sure. So this is Dr. Craig Canapari. Hello. I found his blog, it would be over four years ago now because I had, my third son was a nightmare between the hours of 7:00 PM and 7:00 AM and I had never experienced this before. My first two were natural sleepers and I was going out of my mind by the time he was one. And so one night it was late and I was googling anything and I came across his blog and I got some answers to my questions and I've followed him ever since. Annie: Doctor, welcome to the show. Dr. Canapari: Thank you for having me. And that's very kind. I wish I could actually see what time of night people are reading my site relative to time zone because I suspect it's probably mostly in the middle of the night. Jen: It was probably 1130 for me and I was like crying and I just, yeah, so now I refer people to your site all the time as, like, an evidence based resource for um, parents whose children have sleep issues, which it's hard, you know, there's just so much. One thing that I will tell you that I appreciate and that I think a lot of our listeners might be able to listen to is that there's a lot of, I don't know if you want to call it pseudoscience or opinion based sleep recommendations online. And when I had my third, um, we lived in New Zealand and I, you know, they just, what I'll say is I was very wrapped up in the natural birthing community by the time I had my third and sleep training is just like "N-O" in that community. Like, your kid's going to get brain damage, they'll have neurological issues, attachment issues for life. Jen: And so I really thought if I tried to intervene in my child sleep that I was going to give my child brain damage. And what happened is I pretty much got brain damage from that year of trying to deal with him. And I mean I literally felt crazy where I, when he was one, I pretty much had a nervous breakdown and was in therapy and I was a mess. And it was, like, my marriage was falling apart, everything. And it was all because of, I wouldn't say all, you know, nothing happens in a vacuum, but in hindsight now we're four or five years later, I'm like, that year of sleep was like, it made me crazy, like crazy and this stuff is serious and people don't take sleep seriously enough. But like there are some women and men out there that are really, really suffering and they don't know where to turn. Dr. Canapari: Well, I think there's a, there's a lot of good points in what you're saying and the first thing is that I think that like sleep and bedtime are really personal things for people and, it's a totally separate issue, but you know, in our town, and you know, I've been involved locally, regionally, nationally with sleep issues for teenagers and trying to get more humane start times for teenagers. And there's something personal about bedtime and what happens in your house at night. So people aren't always open to advice. And I think there's also the thread of, it generates a lot of strong feelings for people and people have very strong opinions that aren't always grounded in facts. And I always laugh about the the idea that crying can damage your child's brain. I mean, my kids used to cry all the time over like the dumbest stuff. Dr. Canapari: Like in the book I talk about my kid was four and found an ant on his donut and he was crying. And I'm like, I don't think it damaged his brain, you know? But I think we're also a little bit more vulnerable when we're sleep deprived that things that are, you know, if you stop for a moment, you're like, you know, I think it's reasonable for me to expect that I get a decent night of sleep my child does. But you're more vulnerable to kind of this judgment that can kind of come in and, and you guys know all this as moms too, I think that the whole sort of mommy shaming thing is real. Jen: Yes. Yes. Dr. Canapari: You know, my boys were both born via c sections and the first one was cause he, you know, he couldn't be born any other way. And I remember my wife talking about, you know, some people would say things that almost made her feel like she hadn't, you know, delivered my son. Jen: Right. Like, are you mom enough? Dr. Canapari: Yeah, totally. Totally, totally. So I think that it's not that everyone has to sleep train their child. It's not that you have to use cry it out sleep training and it's also that sleep training has such a negative valence in our society. People are like, "Oh, it's just cry it out. And it's just this thing that a lot of people view very negatively." There are lots of things you can do that don't necessarily mean that your child is going to cry more. Jen: They are not talking about it publicly, but we're all googling it. It's one of those, like, it's become one of those secret underground things that we all want to do but we are afraid to admit it. I experienced this big time. I formula fed my first baby and um, that was horrific. I had a woman come up to me in the grocery store and ask me why he was drinking from a bottle. And it's just, yeah, like you, I've had three children and my youngest is now five and in hindsight I wish I could take all that pain away for new moms. Like I wish I could say, "Hey, it doesn't matter. Like, it really doesn't matter. Once they get up and going, you know, it's just, I can't tell the difference between my three kids who I sleep trained, who I didn't, who had formula, who had breast milk, who was born by epidural, who was born naturally. They're just, just choices that we make." Dr. Canapari: And especially with the first child, it's so fraught. I remember one of the biggest fights that my wife and I ever had was about what stroller we were going to get. Right. You know, and, and, and you know, I wanted of course this really stupid technological thing that she didn't want. And with the second kid, you're like, "I want the cheapest stroller that I can fit in my car really easily." It's just, you get a little bit more perspective, but I think you're totally right. Like as a parent, you kind of need to give yourself permission to be like, you know what, I'm going to do something a little bit different from some of my peers and it's okay. Jen: Yeah. In the end, you, you need to be okay. And I guess that was my greatest lesson from having postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, and like, basically a nervous breakdown as I just talked about. I was not okay. In my pursuit of trying to find what was "the best" way to raise a child, I personally was not okay. And now I just believe so wholeheartedly that children need their parents to be okay and we'll and to be okay we'll all kind of make different choices in that pursuit. Dr. Canapari: I think that things have kind of pendulumed away from self care for parents, especially moms. And, you know, when the term attachment parenting was coined, it was in the 60s, and back then people were like, "Oh, if your child's crying, you should ignore them because otherwise you're going to spoil them." And clearly that's not true, right? It's natural to comfort your child. And, you know, there was a, uh, a lot of pioneering work done by a woman named Mary Ainsworth that sort of showed that, well, that's not correct and it's okay to comfort your child and be emotionally available for your child. But when we think of attachment parenting now, we often think of, you know, Sears and everything that's kind of come out of Sears' work. And I agree with a lot of what Sears said is that like, you know, you should be close to your child and it's valuable to make time if you would like to breastfeed to make that a priority. But, you know, there's little room there for the needs of parents, especially moms in that conversation these days. And you know, I tell parents all the time, like, you know, it's okay to fix this for the reason that you're falling apart. Like, you're a better parent if you're not super sleep deprived and your child will benefit. You know, it's totally, you know, and that's kind of my job. They know it's the case, but they almost need someone to give them permission to make some changes. Jen: And there's not, and you know there's like zero to 60 and then there's like level one, level two. Do you know what I mean? Like not, and I think it's scary to go from zero to 60 but you don't have to necessarily go to 60. There's interventions that can start here where you're comfortable and then you can assess from there. Dr. Canapari: Totally. It's not a binary thing that like you're doing everything or nothing or they're perfect or it's terrible. It's usually somewhere in between. Jen: Right. Dr. Canapari: And we all know as parents, you figure some things out, you get your kids sleep the way they're going, and then all of a sudden another kids waking up at night or they get a cold or it's never going to be perfect. Jen: Right. I feel like managing my kids sleep is like this ongoing thing that, you know, there's always something. So anyways, yeah, as long as we're all sleeping good enough, I'm okay. Dr. Canapari: That's my goal. Have you heard the whole a good enough mother? Donald Winnicott was this psychiatrist and pediatrician in England in the 60s and he coined the term "being the good enough mother." And it's just the idea is like if you love your child and you do your best to take care of them, they're going to turn out fine. You just need to be good enough. Jen: Right. Dr. Canapari: And I, and I just love that idea. It's like, "Hey, look, it's not going to be perfect." And like so much of parenting now is, like, full contact and be like, I've got to get my two year old studying Mandarin or you know, they're not going to law school or something like that. And really it's just, you know, do your best. It's okay. Jen: Right. Annie: Doctor, before we get into some of the questions we have for you, can you tell our listeners a little bit about your book? I feel very special. Your team sent me, an unofficial an uncorrected proof that's not yet for sale. So I feel like VIP having this book here- Dr. Canapari: It's full of typos. Annie: You know what, that's great because I'm the world's worst proofreader. Lauren and Jen- Jen: It makes us feel good enough. Dr. Canapari: I just went through, I think the final proof and I still found a bunch of stuff and I'm like, "Oh," I'm like, I can barely read it anymore. I've read it like a thousand times. Oh, I'm sorry. Go. Annie: I thought it was great. It's called, It's Never Too Late to Sleep Train: The Low Stress Way To High Quality Seep for Babies, Kids and Parents. And what I loved about it is that you have this little dedication right in the front of the book there to your wife and kids and it says "You're the reason I get out of bed in the morning, in the case of Teddy, often, literally." It's like you've lived this, like, it's not like you're just some doctor- Dr. Canapari: I've been in the trenches. Annie: Yeah. Which I appreciate. So can you tell us a little bit about the book? Like, when will it be for sale? Where can they find it? What's in it? Just give a little overview. Dr. Canapari: So the book is coming out in May 9th and you know, just to backtrack a little bit, I started writing stuff for parents online, in 2012, back when I was over at Mass General in Boston with the idea of that, my background was in pulmonology. I trained in sleep medicine as well, but I used to do sleep apnea research and the behavior stuff was kinda new to me and I was like, you know, I'm going to start writing these articles for parents and it's going to be my way to master this material as well and to have resources if someone's in the office and I don't have time to go through everything and be like your go to my website, this is exactly what I think is important. And, you know, as going through this over time and kind of learning how to do this as a parent and as a doctor, I realized there's a lot of great sleep books out there, but I generally felt like a lot of them are pretty long. Dr. Canapari: You know, I think Ferber's book, which is great, it's about 600 pages long and it covers things like narcolepsy in teenagers. And you know, if your one year old can't sleep, you probably don't care that much about that. And I also think that there's been a lot of new research since Weiss, Bluth and Ferber wrote their books that kind of, perhaps demystified this a little bit. And specifically looking at the psychology of habits, which is, you know, habits are such a hot phrase nowadays, right? There was the Charles Duhigg book, James Clear just came up with Atomic Habits. But just the idea of there is an underlying psychology that underlines all these automatic behaviors we have all the time. Right? Those fights we have with our kids, every day, that's a habitual behavior, right? Dr. Canapari: So if you understand how that works, you can maybe tweak those behaviors to, for lack of a better word, to kind of use the power of these automatic behaviors to help rather than hinder you. So in the book we talk about if you want to change your own habit, and I bet you guys, in terms of what you do, talk a lot about habits with your client. Jen: It's all we talk about. Lauren: I have James Clear's book, like, literally right next to me. Annie: Same. Dr. Canapari: Yeah, no, I heard it's great. I haven't read it yet, but I've followed his stuff for a long time. Jen: Yeah, he's good. Annie: He's great. Dr. Canapari: The difference is if you want to change a habit, you're going to change the behavior. You know, if we talk about the habit loop, you have a cue that triggers a behavior and you have a downstream consequence. And it loops around and around. Your child is not going to raise their hand and say, "Hey, you know, mom, you're super tired and I'm just going to stop getting up at 4:30 in the morning." Right? That's the behavior you want to change. So you have to think about what are the upstream things you can change and how can you change your own behavior in the way that you respond to what your child's doing to help to shape their behavior to what you want. So anyway, this book is my summary of the things that I've learned in my journey as a sleep doctor and as a parent. And, my specific focus is in a population that I think people don't focus on as much. Like there's a lot written about infancy and I think infant sleep training is actually really simple. Dr. Canapari: It's not easy, but it's simple. And I cover that in the book. But also what do you do if your child's a little bit older? What do you do in a toddler or an early school age child where the, when we think about sleep training, we may think about cry it out. That's not going to work in a three or four year old. You know, it might work, but it would be horrible for parent and child. So what are other ways that you can change a child's behavior that really just aren't so unpleasant or scary for parents and kids? Jen: The reason I found your blog was because my youngest son, no, this wasn't why I found your blog. I found your blog because of sleep aids, my son had a sleep aid and it was me. And, the second time I revisited your blog in detail that was helpful to me was that my youngest son has night terrors. And your, one of your sons had night terrors. Dr. Canapari: Oh yeah. And now he sleepwalks too. We were just on a vacation with his cousins in the middle of the night, we found him just sitting on the toilet with his pants down, but not awake. And I'm like, his cousins found this pretty amusing as did we, yeah, he's 11. He found it less funny but- Jen: Right. So yeah, I mean you really have been in the trenches and there isn't a lot of information once you move past the infant years. And so yeah, that was the second time your blog was very helpful to me, was seeing you had, you're not just talking about this, you had experienced night terrors with one of your sons and just the science around it and what, how you guys ended up dealing with it, which is now how I deal with it. And yeah, I mean that stuff is scary and very stressful for parents. Dr. Canapari: Yeah. And I think that, in some of the things you guys have, with the topics today, just sort of talking about, sleep and sleep debt and I think of sleep as a, it's kind of a capstone skill for parents and families, right. If sleep is good, other things get easier. If sleep is bad, everything gets, everything gets worse. Jen: So would you call it a skill? Cause I noticed, you know, you're not calling it a habit, you're are calling it a skill. So would you say learning to sleep as a skill? Dr. Canapari: Well, I think yes. I think especially for, look, you said your two older children were good sleepers. Right? Jen: Fantastic. Dr. Canapari: And, it just kind of came naturally to them and we all have experienced this as parents. Like, you know, my older son is a great sleeper, but when he was little, he was a picky eater and every child is good at some things and bad at other things. So, like, I think some kids sleeping comes naturally to them. Like self soothing, sleeping through the night is very easy. Other children need to need to be taught. And the way we call, sleep training is the process, the term we use to describe teaching our children to sleep independently with our help, either falling asleep or staying asleep. And it's funny, some of the research, one of my colleagues is doing at Yale now, Monica Ordway is, we're looking at sleep as a buffer for toxic stress. Like, you know, stress is, we all know what stresses, right? A little bit of stress as good. You want to study for an exam, you need to be a little bit stressed to do it. But being chronically stressed is, it can really cause harm to health. Like when your son wasn't sleeping for a year- Jen: I ended up with a registered Dietitian who was amazing, but I had gone down the woo hole, which Lauren, my partner here pointed me out, with diet, but I mean I was breaking out so badly and I was like so inflamed and I thought it must be nutrition related. And there were a couple of people out there willing to tell me it was nutrition related. So it's cutting out all that stuff and it wasn't working. And I had, I did go see two GPs where one prescribed this cream that basically burned my face off. And the second one wanted to put me on the pill, which is fine, but I didn't think that I was like, "No, there's something, like this is not, this is very abnormal for me. I've never struggled with this." It's finally Lauren had said, you need to get to a registered dietitian. Jen: And she sat down with me, went through what's happening in my life and was like, you need to get some sleep. Like you are so inflamed because your body is so stressed. And that ended up being what it was. It ended up being that when I buckled down and we kind of dealt with these issues with my son and actually what happened was my husband took him away to his parents for five nights cause he just needed to be away from me I think. And within three weeks my, everything was calm. My face was calmed down, starting to heal. Like, I would just wake up and look puffy, like when I was so sleep deprived, I wake up and look puffy and almost feel hungover and that all just, once I fixed our sleep issues, that all went away. Dr. Canapari: I find that totally believable. And first of all, as a sidebar, how great to find a provider who looked at your whole set of issues and really like, there's no upside for a nutritionist to say "It's actually your sleep," right, financially. Jen: Right. Dr. Canapari: But I think I know, Annie, you work as a trainer, right? Annie: Yep. Dr. Canapari: So I bet if your clients aren't getting results, you're probably like, how much sleep are you getting at night, right? Like you can't, you're not gonna you're, you're going to struggle with your weight if you're sleep deprived. You are, I mean, I know you guys wanted to talk about sleep debt. Sleep debt certainly is a real phenomenon. It's hard to measure biologically. It's not like you can do a blood test and say, "Oh, you have, you know, your level of this neurotransmitter is high, that means you're in this amount of sleep debt." Dr. Canapari: But we know that it's a cumulative phenomenon and you can't really catch up on the weekends. Right. There was a study of teenagers, again, I know we're talking about moms and little kids here, but I think it's very interesting. This researcher named Dean Bebe had this fake summer school for kids that they were enrolled in as a research trial. And they'd have these classes that were kind of boring and they'd sleep deprive the kids for like six hours of sleep a night for two weeks. And they let them sleeping on the weekends. And what they found was every day their performance was getting worse. And if they did, in terms of how they were retaining material, in terms of their vigilance, et cetera, and if they got catch up sleep on the weekends, they got a little bit better, but they didn't get back to their baseline. Dr. Canapari: So the next week they started off worse than they had in the beginning. So it just is going to keep snowballing. And the classic example is of a parent. I mean I think that there was a research trial published a couple years ago that said single moms are the most sleep deprived people in the United States, hands down, which I find totally believable, right? Jen: Absolutely. Dr. Canapari: If you're working outside of the home, you're a single parent, you know, you are getting your kids to bed and then you have all the work of the household to do. It's just, it's nuts. And it's not like with airline pilots or bus drivers or something like that where we actually have rules saying, well, you have to sleep x amount to do your job. Nobody's, you know, nobody's looking over your shoulder as a parent and saying, "Hey, you know what, it's 10 o'clock, you know, I'll take it from here." Right. Annie: Wouldn't that be nice? Dr. Canapari: Yeah, it would be pretty cool. Annie: That's actually, quite in line. You and I have talked over the phone before this podcast that we address sleep in Balance365 as one of, kind of the habit foundations or habit accelerators because we know, as people in the health and wellness industry that when you're tired, everything just seems harder. Annie: So in terms of sleep debt, if you have a sleep deprived kid or adult, how can you get out of it? Like how- Jen: I don't think we defined sleep debt either before we started talking about, so sleep debt Is what accumulates right? Once you go without sleep, you accumulate, you owe sleep debt. Dr. Canapari: Yes. Essentially. Essentially if you are consistently sleeping less than the amount of sleep you need, and we know for adults it's anywhere between seven and nine hours of sleep at night. Your sleep requirements might be a little bit different than mine. If you think back to before you had kids and you imagined f you went to bed at a certain time and you could wake up spontaneously without an alarm, that's about how much sleep you need. If you do that consistently over a couple of weeks, of course, none of us with children ever experience that. But it's if you are constantly getting less sleep than you need or your sleep is interrupted frequently as it is if we have a child that's sleeping poorly at home, you're developing sleep debt, which is just the biological imbalance. Dr. Canapari: When you think about sleep it's sort of like breathing, eating healthy food, breathing clean air, drinking enough water. We know if we eat poorly, we feel worse. If we we're having too many calories, the wrong kinds of calories, but it's the same. It's the same deal with sleep and sleep is, it's very easy to shortchange sleep, right? You can't manufacture extra hours in the day. It's easy to stay up a little bit later and you know, either catch up on work, do your email, fold laundry or even just get caught in that cycle of say, binge watching or something like that. Because we're surrounded by these addictive technologies that want to, you know, have our eyeballs instead of having us go to sleep. Jen: And, and just to that point, I mean we do, we're human beings are amazingly resilient. So anyone can tolerate a couple nights of bad sleep or a couple of nights of not great eating habits. It's really what we're doing day in and day out, week to month to yearly, right? Dr. Canapari: Right you can catch up to a degree on weekends, but again, most parents don't have that luxury. I think that the real key is, look, some people have weeks, months, years of sleep debt, the key is just going forward. How are you going to change your life to allow you to start getting caught up on that? And I think even if it's just allowing yourself to get an amount of sleep so you feel rested in the morning. In my clinic, we look at an incremental gains, right? Like if someone's going to sleep at midnight every night, again, I deal with a lot of teenagers who are sleep deprived. I don't want immediately go and be like, well, you should go to bed at eight o'clock night. We sort of start seeing, well, what, what can we do to get you to sleep at 1130 or 11? Like getting those small incremental gains are going to make someone feel better and be more successful even if it's not perfect. And it's likewise if you're working on your child's sleep issues, again, like little kids usually aren't that sleep deprived, right? Because they're going to make it up during the day. They're going to make it up in the car. They may have naps at preschool. They may nap great a preschool even if they refuse to now for you, which is a really frustrating phenomenon, right. Lauren: That's happening to us right now. Dr. Canapari: Yeah. And they're going to catch up but as parents we don't have that luxury, right? We can't take a nap. We need to be attentive when we're driving in the car, giving presentations at work or anything like that. When you get into older children, think later elementary school, middle school, high school, that's when those kids are going to have more difficulty catching up. The biggest reason to fix the problems in young children is to me, it's the benefit for the parents. Jen: Right, right. Annie: That's actually something you also addressed in your book, which I so appreciate as you have a section about what sleep training will do for you. You know, it's like it allows, it's like the snowball effect. As I said, everything's just seems harder when you're tired and all of a sudden when you're getting more rest, maybe you have more energy to get in a workout or have some extra time to go do Xyz or you're more productive at work or you're more efficient in the home or what, you know, whatever. It just seems to carry over and spill over into so many areas outside of the bed. Jen: What happened with my youngest son, and if you think this is way off, Dr. Canapari, you can tell me to shut up. I had three kids in four years and then my last one was this terrible sleeper and then I ended up, you know with the doctor or with that dietitian telling me you need to get some sleep. Even though my acne started clearing up after three weeks of consistent sleep, I noticed that I didn't wake up feeling refreshed for about a year. Like it took like a year for me to feel like I was recovered from those years with the kids. Dr. Canapari: So I think there's probably a lot of factors there, right. You know, working off a sleep debt is not something that happens easily, right. If perhaps your husband had said, I'm actually going to take all three of the kids for a month. Jen: Right. Dr. Canapari: You could've gotten caught up. But also, and excuse me for presuming you mentioned you were also struggling, struggling with some postpartum depression and that probably also could be factored into this as well. Jen: And starting this business and you know, there is stress definitely in my life. And also let's go over that year, the kids would get sick and you know, it's not like I had a year of perfect sleep before I felt recovered, but I just remember at that one year mark going like suddenly realizing, "Oh my gosh, I'm waking up in the morning and I'm feeling, like, refreshed." Like, yeah. So it was just, I was just very tired for quite a while after even getting the sleep training and not that, you know, not that things didn't improve for me, right, just by getting better, right? We talk in Balance365, we have this saying called all or something and it's like, when will it ever be perfect? But you can always, you know, there's usually a better choice available to you. It doesn't have to be all or nothing and- Dr. Canapari: Totally right. Jen: So and we have a lot of women who talk about, you know, they're just so fried from work and parenting that the evenings feel like the only time they have for themselves, like get the kids in bed at, you know, say 7:30, 8 o'clock and then they stay up til midnight because it's the only time they have for themselves in their week. And they just, they're just like selfish with it. They just crave that alone time so badly. But, and I, we all deserve that. Like, I get it and we all deserve that. But just even saying, okay, well instead of four hours for yourself, can you take three, go to bed at 11 instead of midnight. That gives you something. Right. Dr. Canapari: Well also, I mean, I think that if you can convince someone to get an extra hour of sleep at night, they're going to be like, "Oh, that is for me. Right?" Like getting that extra sleep is actually a really powerful tool I have to make my life better. Jen: Right. Dr. Canapari: And, you know, I certainly, you know, Annie and I were talking like, you know, to have finally developed an early morning exercise practice and now I just go to bed earlier cause I feel tired at like 10 o'clock at night and wow. You know, I used to stay up til like 1130 or 12 and I'm like, "Wow, I actually feel *inaudible*" and I'm like a sleep doctor, I should know this, right? It was very easy to stay up and like, you know, watch another show on TV or just kinda, you know, the time gets away from you when you're tired, right? You can just sort of be scrolling through Instagram or watching Netflix and all of a sudden you're like, "Holy crap, it's like 1145." Right. And I see parents where their young child is going to sleep at 11 or 12. It's more common than you'd think. Annie: Wow. Dr. Canapari: And I'm always saying to people, I'm like, "Look, I love my kids, but I am so done with them by like 8:30 at night. You know, like, they need to go to their place and be on their own so I can, you know, my wife and I can unwind." Jen: Right, right. Is there any truth to this fact that getting every hour of sleep you get before midnight is like two hours of sleep that you're getting after midnight? Is there any truth to that? Dr. Canapari: I think that's probably, I haven't heard that. I would say that when it comes down to is, the fit of when you're sleeping versus when your body wants you to sleep. Jen: Oh, okay. Dr. Canapari: I don't know if you guys have ever heard the phrase social jetlag. It's something we think about a lot in teenagers, but it can happen a lot in I think mostly not parents cause we get up early on the weekends. But if you think back, I can think back to before I had kids, I had a weekday bedtime and wake time and a weekend wake time and bedtime and wake time, right. Jen: So your weekends are maybe 2:00 AM to 10:00 AM. Dr. Canapari: Exactly. Jen: Yeah. Okay. Dr. Canapari: So I'm sort of like, on the weekends I was living on California time and the weekdays, I was living in Boston time. Jen: Right. Dr. Canapari: And we know it's not just the duration of sleep, it's the quality of fit to what your natural body clock schedule is that has a lot to do with it. Like, we know that shift workers, even if they get adequate sleep, are more vulnerable to certain types of cancer, certain types of chronic disease because they're not sleeping at a time where their body really wants them to do it and, we know, you know, you probably know, we all know, are we more of a night owl or a morning lark? A lot of us as parents, we become morning larks because we have to, and there's actually, if you look up online, you can look up a morning-ness, this evening-ness questionnaire that will actually tell you where you fall on this continuum. Dr. Canapari: You know, teenagers are, you know, kids are naturally kind of morning larks. Like most kids before puberty, they tend to want to go to sleep earlier. They want to get up earlier on average though there are exceptions. When they hit puberty, their sleep schedules shifts two or three hours later. So that is our, you know, in the, and that's when all of a sudden your kid that was going to sleep at eight o'clock, can't fall asleep till 11 o'clock at night and it's not just cause they're on snapchat or their smartphones and doing homework on the Chromebook. It's also just their natural biology. So I think that thing you're referring to is probably, you know, get to the idea of are people just not sleeping at a time when their body wants them to do it? That being said, most people are naturally, you know, I'd say if they go to bed between 10 or 11, get up between six or seven. Again, this sounds like a pipe dream for a lot of parents, right? But around there we'll probably feel pretty good. Jen: Can you shift that too, so if you found yourself to be, I mean it may mean some of us are forced to because of our morning lark children, but I recently, I would have considered myself a night person but starting in November I started getting up at 5:30 in the morning just because it feels like the only I can exercise or on days I'm not working out. I can get some work done before my kids are up. I'm less distracted in the mornings that I am in the evenings for whatever reason. And I feel myself shifting where I'm like- Dr. Canapari: It absolutely is something that you can shift. So generally, the levers you have to pull are, the most powerful one is light exposure. So light exposure in the evenings will tend to shift your body clock later and these are slow changes although it is always easier to stay up later, than go to bed earlier. Right. Jen: Right, right. Dr. Canapari: If you want to shift your sleep period earlier, you could probably go 10 or 15 minutes a night. If you wanted to shift your sleep later. Again, it's not usually what I'm trying to do in the clinic or what most parents are like, "Boy, I'd like to stay up three hours later and get up three hours later." Jen: Right. Dr. Canapari: But it's easier to go in that direction. So light exposure in the evenings is going to push your clock later and think about, well what's the light emitting device that we hold about 12 inches from our face? Jen: Smartphone. Right. Dr. Canapari: So smartphones will tend to push people's sleep schedules later. Evening exercise will also push it later. Jen: Oh, okay. Dr. Canapari: Conversely, exercising in the morning light exposures, the best is natural light exposure will move things earlier. So someone wants to get in the, you know, like you said, getting up earlier, exercise in the morning. If you can't exercise outside, that's great. Probably in Canada or Connecticut, we're not exercising with natural light in the morning at 5:30 in the morning cause it's still dark out and it's below freezing but those are really helpful things. In our clinic too, we use a lot of Melatonin. Melatonin in the early evenings will help shift people shift their schedules earlier as well. Certainly that's something someone wants to talk about with the doctor. Jen: Right. If melatonin is right for them. Dr. Canapari: Right. Jen: Okay. So back to sleep training kids. I know we don't want to talk too much about infants cause that's not even, we just don't want to spend too much time there because actually our audience has a wide range of age of children. But when I think one of the most controversial things is when to start sleep training a baby. Dr. Canapari: Sure. And I think that, you know, it's funny, there was a couple of years ago, there was an article in New York Times about a group in Tribeca, which is a very trendy neighborhood in Manhattan, was recommending the people sleep, train their kids at two months of age. And you know, they didn't publish anything on this, but they said they were getting good results. But I think that's a little bit too early. If you look at your average baby between four to six months of age, that's when they're going to start going for longer stretches of sleep at night. They're going to start to be able to fall asleep without being soothed by their parents at bedtime. So that implies to me that naturally speaking, they're evolving the capacity for longer periods of sleeping night. Jen: Okay. Dr. Canapari: I would say for most parents, between four to six months is probably the sweet spot. Jen: Okay. Dr. Canapari: But before then, you really, you know, the best thing to do is to soothe your baby to sleep, rock them, nurse them, give them a bottle, lay them down in a bed when they're asleep. Then around four to five months, that's when you can start trying to put your baby down drowsy but awake. And, if they fuss a little bit, that's okay. If they're screaming and yelling, maybe they're not quite ready from a biological standpoint. Right. It's, you know, the funny thing about when I had my second son is I'm like, "Oh, he's not exactly like the first one," which if you asked me intellectually I would've said, "Oh, of course they'll be different," but you expect your child to be this kind of the same. And, you know, and I say, parents just try putting them down drowsy but awake and see how it goes. If your child's hysterical, then wait a week or two and try again. Jen: Right. Okay. Dr. Canapari: If your child's sleeping through the night and you know, no matter what you do, you don't have to sleep train. Right. You know, it's not something you have to do. The reason you do it is so your child can fall asleep independently and stay asleep for the night so that we can get a good night of sleep. Annie: So two and a half is maybe a little too old to be coddling to bed. Is that what you're saying? Dr. Canapari: I mean, I think that it's fine if your child sleeps well at night, right? Like, you know, I always say like, if what you're doing is working, great, you don't have to change a thing. There's nothing, you know, sometimes I lay down with my kids at night at bedtime. My younger ones, like, will kick you out in five minutes. It was like, "That's great dad. You can go." As his words are, "I want to go to sleep in my own time." He doesn't even want me to see him setup his blankets and the older one wants me to stay a little bit longer. And I'm like, "Well, this is precious. He's 11. Pretty soon he's going to want nothing to do with me." So I'm happy to lie there. And I don't think there's anything wrong with it if your child is sleeping great and you're happy with how your child's sleeping, however, if you're not happy with how your child's sleeping, if you have to spend three of those precious hours in the evening laying with them to get them to fall asleep, if they need you multiple times during the night, then you may want to make a change. Dr. Canapari: Right? But you don't have to change anything if you're happy with the arrangement. The same thing with bed sharing. If you have a family bed and it's going great, provided that you're observing safe sleep practices with an infant, more power to you, that's wonderful. But if you're not happy and if someone's not sleeping well, then you may need to make a change. Annie: I want to keep the cuddles at bedtime and let her fall asleep on me. I don't want her waking up at night. Jen: Yeah, that's what I like. Annie: I want the best of both worlds. Jen: But I think that's quite common. It's, so there's getting the child to sleep, you know, baby, toddler, child, what, how do you keep a child sleeping? Dr. Canapari: Now that's the trick, right? So you know, I think it was actually, it was Richard Ferber, which came up with this idea of sleep onset associations. The idea that your child falls asleep under a certain set of circumstances, and then naturally, as he or she goes through the night, she wakes up at night. We've all experienced that. We may wake up at two or three in the morning, adjust our pillow rollover and go back to sleep. You may not even remember it if you're up for five minutes, but you know, as Ferber talks about in his book, if you woke up in another bedroom, you might be like, "What the Hell is going on?" And you might go investigate. So, it's hard to know what babies are thinking. But if your child falls asleep with you present and then goes through a natural awakening at night, she might need you to go back to sleep. Dr. Canapari: That's why working on independent sleep at bedtime tends to make those nighttime awakenings go away. Because once your child is able to put herself to sleep, she can go back to sleep with a natural awakening. And this dovetails nicely with a phenomenon we've all seen. Your child will have three hours of the deepest sleep of the night, stage three sleep, slow wave sleep at the beginning of the night. So that's like if you're driving back from somewhere, your kid falls asleep. You can pick your kid up, change the diaper, put them in a bed, they don't wake up and that's about two or three hours of sleep. But then, say you put your child to sleep at eight o'clock, you're getting to bed 11, all of a sudden you hear your kid calling for you, right. Because that's when they come out of that stage of sleep and they go through a period of REM sleep, REM sleep, or dream sleep clusters in the second half of the night. And it happens every two to three hours after 11 o'clock, that's when your child is going to wake up and request your presence. Jen: That's exactly what's going on in my house. It starts around 11. Dr. Canapari: Yeah, exactly. Just when you're getting the bad and you're lying- Jen: Yes. Dr. Canapari: Maybe tonight's going to be different, right? Lauren: Right. I remember that sense of dread. 11 o'clock. Jen: And that's actually when my sons, my boys go to bed at about 7:30, between 7:30 and 8 and they go to bed really well independently. But when my son was having really intense night terrors, I could almost set my watch to it. It was around 10 30 or 11 when he would start screaming. But now he's not having his night terrors s just getting up and coming to find me. And you know, parents are too tired, you're too tired to take them back to the bed. So he crawls in bed with us and I'm not happy with that, but it just seems like our best option right now. And I think what I found, cause I had mentioned earlier, I found on your website to talk about sleep aids and I think I'm my son's sleep aid. Like it's me. It's actually, and when he goes to his grandparents' house, he does not wake up through the night. He sleeps all night. It doesn't go looking for anybody. Dr. Canapari: Is it frustrating? Jen: It's so frustrating. Dr. Canapari: I guess you're doing it wrong. You know, I always like my parents applying like the finest seventies parenting techniques. No, when my kids are over there and I'm like, you know, I just, you know, give them like Coca Cola, like all the stuff that I'm like, I would never permit in my household and, you know, it's fine. But that is one of those things. And that's why I think one of the things in your outline, is I think is, I just want to get to is, is dividing sleep responsibilities in the household. If there's a two parent household, it's very important that both parents participate at bedtime. And, I can't tell you often I hear the story of you know, someone and it's, let's be real here, if it's a mom and a dad in the household, it's usually the mom coming in and saying, "Well, he'll only go asleep for me." Dr. Canapari: And the dad may say, you know how dads are, "I can't do this. You know, you have to do it." And, you know, I think that best practice is at an early age, get both parents involved at bedtime. But if, you know, sometimes, as you said, sometimes mom needs to go out of town. Right? Like if you can't, if you leave town for a couple of days, guess what? The dad's gonna figure it out and your kid will figure out it as well. It's not like if you, you know, if you had to go away on a work trip, your child would not sleep for five days. Right? Like, that's just not how it works. And I think it's really important that any one of the household who is a caregiver helps. Dr. Canapari: And, you know, I even give parents a script. I mean, I to say, you know, "I know we're both concerned about our son's sleep. I really need your help. You know, like, the doctor says you need to help at bedtime and I'm going to go out." You know, it's likewise in blended households, if parents are separated, like single parents, et cetera, it's very important that kids have the same set of rules and have consistency at both homes if there are sleep difficulties. This is the struggle for a lot of families. I mean, you know, many, you know, every parent wants the child to sleep well, but say they're at mom's house on the weekdays and on the weekends the Dad may let the kids stay up later, and just lie with them to go to sleep and that you know, that it's fine if things are going great but if things aren't going well it's really important that everyone who cares for the child get on the same page. Jen: Right. And with the same routines. Dr. Canapari: I mean it's not going to be the same in both households but as close to possible in terms of the timing, in terms of what you do and specifically in terms of is a parent there when the child falls asleep or not? Annie: Right, right. Okay. Do you have any, I know you have a whole chapter in your book dedicated to sleep environment and location and I think there's probably a lot information in that chapter that could apply to adults in addition to kids. Do you have any, are there any like non negotiables are things that you would really encourage people to consider in their sleep environment? Dr. Canapari: Oh man. I'd say getting the screens out of the bedroom and, I think there is, when I started working as a sleep doctor, when I finished my training in 2007, the big argument was does your kid have a TV in the bedroom or not? Right. That was what, you know, that was often the conversation. That's often the conversation I was having with families would be like, "You need to remove the television from your child's room because they're sleeping poorly." Nowadays it's not a conversation about television in the bedroom, it's about tablets, smartphones, et cetera. And we know these devices are corrosive to sleep, you know, as we were talking about earlier, the bright light can actually shift your biological clock later. We also know that these devices are profoundly addictive, right? Like Instagram doesn't make money if you're not looking at Instagram. Jen: There's a lot of research put in to how to keep people there. Dr. Canapari: The smartest psychologists in the world are in Silicon Valley trying to addict you to these services. Jen: Right. Dr. Canapari: Yeah. And, I encourage people to keep them out of their bedroom and really to be pretty strict. I love now on, what's the feature called on the iPhone? It's screen time. Lauren: Screen time. Yeah. Dr. Canapari: It's generally been a positive with my kids, except when I'm at work on a snow day, say, and they keep sending me messages to give them more screen time, but I think they kind of get it. And I also liked in my phone says at 10 o'clock being like, you know, it basically kind of shuts it down and I can bypass it. But taking that step being like, "Do I really need to keep scrolling through this right now?" You just need that little check and really ideally keeping the devices out of the home because, you know, I'm very careful about shutting off alarms on my phone. My wife has all these alerts on her phone. So if like something on the Guardian website, the UK goes off a news alert goes in the middle of the night, she gets an alarm and I'd be like, do we must we know what, what the queen said in the middle of the night? Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night and I turn off her phone. Jen: So just getting all those alerts off notifications, like just- Dr. Canapari: Yeah, if you can keep out of the room and if your kids are little, setting this example now will pay dividends when they get older. Right. Jen: Yeah. My son, I did this as an incentive for them to get their butts going and get ready for school in the mornings. They are allowed to watch TV or play video games once they are ready for, ready to go for school. So that just got them go hustling. Right. So they could watch some TV before school and when it started they would, that meant 10 of TV before we had to leave for school. But I have found over the last year that it has increased because they're getting up earlier and I am not sure. I'm wondering if that's because there's some kind of habit or something built in where they're there, maybe start rousing a bit in the morning, but then all of a sudden it's like "TV, I can watch TV." And so it's, I didn't mean to, so there's, it's like they're sleeping less and I don't know if there's any science behind that, but I swear if I cut out TV in the morning, they'd sleep longer in the mornings. Dr. Canapari: Well, I mean, how badly do you want to do that, right? Jen: I don't know, I don't know if it's negotiable or not. Dr. Canapari: In general, I like incentives for behaviors that are desirable and really getting kids ready in the morning are one of those situations where you have so little leverage, right? Jen: Right. Dr. Canapari: Like if your child, if your child is difficult in the morning, what is the outcome for them? You have to drive them to school. Like they know that they have you over a barrel. I think that maybe putting a limit on being like, well you know, here's the maximum amount of screen time you could get. But it is one of those things like as you go through the night, your sleep gets lighter and lighter. Right? That's why it's so much harder to get kids to stay asleep. Especially to do early morning awakenings than it is to get them to fall asleep. Both in terms of behavioral techniques and even, cause I see kids with sleep problems bad enough I write for prescriptions. Dr. Canapari: Any medicine that can last long enough to keep a kid asleep in the morning is going to last too long. You just can't calibrate it that way. So I think that if your children are functioning well in the morning and going to sleep at a reasonable hour, they're getting enough sleep. I wouldn't worry too much about it unless it's disruptive. But if you feel like they're really struggling during the day, like if the teachers are giving you feedback or they're falling asleep on short car trips during the day, then maybe you want to think about a different incentive to get them going. Annie: Right. Right. Jen: Right. Lauren: I'll say, Jen, something that we did with Elliot this year is she would wake up at like 4:00 AM and come in my room and wake me up. "Is it morning time yet?" Cause it's dark, you know, when she would wake up I'd be like, "No, go back to sleep." She'd come in at five. "Is it morning time yet?" So we got this little alarm clock thing that lights up green when it's morning. Dr. Canapari: The "Is It Ok To Wake?" clock? Lauren: Yes. Dr. Canapari: Yeah. No, I think, I think that works really well. And, you know, it's, I think Andy alluded at the beginning, my younger son was, for a while, was a real early riser. I mean, I remember going to Disney World when he was like seven and taking him for walks so my older kid and wife could sleep until 6:30 in the morning, you know, like, I like the okay to wake clock and an older child to who can get it, you can be like, look, "You can get up and play in your room and read books." Lauren: Yeah. She's five, so she's old enough to understand, you know. Dr. Canapari: Yeah. I mean a two or three old is just going to roam, right. You know, but and that's the important thing too, you know, in terms of the sleep training conversation, it is very clear that sleep training, even cry it out sleep training is effective and it's safe. But the best study, looking at the safety of it, they were looking at things like that always gets trumpeted as side effects of sleep training, elevated cortisol levels at all, et cetera. It all was fine at the time where kids were age five and it really seemed like most kids were sleeping pretty well by age five, no matter what you do. There are exceptions to this, right. You know, I've explained this in my home, in my clinic certainly, but I think the message to parents is positive. Like address the problems you need to address for your sanity. If you're doing things that you know aren't quite best practices like lying with your two and a half year old until they fall asleep and they sometimes crawl in your bed at night but you can live with that, that's okay. Your child is going to be fine. If you are okay, if you can live with it, right? It's like parenting is an exercise in compromises. You can't potty train your kid and sleep train your kid and like you can't fix everything at once. So it's okay, pick a problem you want to work on and work on that. Let the other stuff slide you're going to be okay. Annie: I think that's a wonderful message to wrap up on because it's like, it's very much in line with our program as well. Like, find what works for you and it's good enough. That's all the is really important. Even if it's not best practice, you know, the ideal or whatever it is. Dr. Canapari: Well. Yeah, and I think that if, correct me if I'm wrong, I believe one of the focuses that you guys talk about with, is clients the right term? Annie: Members, yeah. Dr. Canapari: Your members is weight control, right? And I just want to leave with you with, I think that's something that's so important is we know that sleep curtailment is associated with increased appetite and increased weight gain. And, I just saw a great research talk showing that the hormonal reasons for this were different for in men and women. But the outcome is kind of the same, that if we sleep poorly, we accumulate more adipose tissue, more fat. We have more hedonic eating, craving for salty, sugary foods. So I think, and of course I'm biased, but for people that are struggling with their weight, improving their sleep is such a important thing to do. And if the way you do that as improving your child's sleep, think about that as another goal why this is worth your effort, right? If, we'd all like to, most of us, you know, want to maintain a healthy weight, and working on sleep is going to help people do that. So I think that's an important message even if your members don't have kids, working on their own sleep is going to be a really high yield thing for them to do in terms of their health. Jen: Right, right. So like regular sleep will lead to more regulated eating, which leads to a stable regulated weight. Dr. Canapari: Absolutely. Annie: There's not much that more sleep wouldn't do good for people. I can't think of any, too many negative outcomes for more sleep. Dr. Canapari: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that most of us professionals, grownups, we're working on sleep debt, we need to chip away at it because it's going to help us be healthier, feel better, and you know, to kind of be the people we want to be. Annie: Yeah. Thank you so much doctor. There's so much good information here. I can't, I think our listeners are just going to really, really appreciate this. And we will send links to go find your book because I'm sure by the time we release it will be out. So congrats on the book and thank you for joining us. We appreciate your time. Dr. Canapari: Thanks guys. It was fun. And yeah, I'm sorry we didn't answer all the questions you sent me in advance, but I'd be happy to come talk to you guys again some time. Annie: Yes. We'll have to have you back for sure. Okay. Dr. Canapari: Take care. Jen: Thank you. Lauren: Bye. Dr. Canapari: Bye guys. Annie: This episode is brought to you by the Balance365 program. If you're ready to say goodbye to quick fixes and false promises and yes to building healthy habits and a life you're 100% in love with, then checkout Balance365.co to learn more.
Jen, Annie and Lauren are joined by Renae Regehr of Free To Be Talks to discuss how to support our middle school kids in developing media literacy and better body image. Teaching kids to navigate social media and the messages about their bodies is so important. Learn what to say when you don’t know what to say and enjoy this stimulating conversation. What you’ll hear in this episode: How Free To Be Talks was born Which age groups responded best to the curriculum Embodied media literacy: what does it mean? Head knowledge vs lived experiences The blind spots we have about the impact of media messaging Helping our kids cultivate self-compassion Do you really need to have all the answers as a parent? Being vulnerable with our kids in an age appropriate way Role modelling for our kids Appearance-based compliments and the need to balance them Being mindful of the language we use to describe our children’s bodies Body acceptance: accepting our own bodies and those of our kids The subtext of unattainable beauty ideals Equipping our kids to separate their value as people from their social media metrics Finding validation from within Being mindful of how much of our identity is rooted in our appearance Healing body image issues in context, with the help of others Body diversity on social media, feeling seen and represented Maintaining perspective about the importance of our appearances Being judicious about how much mental energy we devote to our appearance Resources: Free To Be Talks Hillary McBride podcast mothers daughters body image Sisters podcast Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Discount code: Free2bbalanced Transcript Annie: Welcome to Balance365 Life radio, a podcast that delivers honest conversations about food, fitness, weight, and wellness. I'm your host Annie Brees along with Jennifer Campbell and Lauren Koski. We are personal trainers, nutritionists and founders of Balance365. Together we coach thousands of women each day and are on a mission to help them feel healthy, happy, and confident in their bodies on their own terms. Join us here every week as we discuss hot topics pertaining to our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing with amazing guests. Enjoy. Annie: Welcome to Balance365 Life radio. This is your host Annie Brees and today we are talking about middle schoolers and media. Media is reaching our youth younger and younger by the day. In fact, the average kid spends eight hours a day consuming media and it's one of the primary reasons as to why 40% of six to 12 year olds don't like who they are because of how they look. Negative body image, depression, anxiety, and eating disorders are on the rise, but thankfully women like Renae Regehr are taking action against that. Renae founded Free To Be Talks, a nonprofit organization that promotes positive body image which gives tools to youth, parents and educators to help them filter through media and develop their individual strengths. Through her MA of Counseling Psychology, Renae developed and tested a research based curriculum inside Free To Be and to date over 2,500 boys and girls have gone through the program. Renae is a registered clinical counselor and also contributing blogger for the Huffington Post and her work has been featured in Time, Darling, Good Men Project, Everyday Feminism and many more. On today's episode, Renae, Jen and I discuss three important points in helping middle school age children develop positive body image and if you listen to the very end, Renae shares a really special gift and opportunity with our listeners. I know you're going to love this episode. Enjoy Annie: Ladies, we have a full house today. Again, we have a special guest. Renee, welcome. How are you? Renae: I'm good. Thank you so much for having me. Annie: I am so excited to have you here because Jen has just raved about everything that you're doing. Can you tell, how did you and Jen meet? Renae: We met, I believe, through mutual connections. Jen: Yeah. Through Hillary Mcbride who we've had on our podcast twice. And Hillary, I expressed to Hillary that I, you know, I do all this work and we have this worldwide audience, but I still feel my ultimate vision for my life is that I'm actually making an impact in my community where my children are growing up. And she said, "You have to meet Renae. She runs a nonprofit called Free To Be Talks. So I started following you on Instagram and then as soon, the next time you offered a training, I signed up. Renae: Yes. And there's been some changes since then and I can't wait to talk about them. Annie: Renae, you are a registered clinical counselor. How did you get into this Free To Be Talks, like, how did that come about? Renae: Oh, I feel like it's been like my life work, really. But when I was going through my master's, I developed a curriculum for a group class that I was running. And at the time I had a friend that was in the school system in my hometown and she said, you know, I want to run this program. And I said, "Okay, well I've developed this rudimentary curriculum, why don't we run this body image program together?" And so these grades six and seven girls volunteered on their lunch hour to be a part of this group. And it was so eye opening because not only did the same struggles that I had gone through when I was a teen, those things were coming up again for the girls but I would say there even more pressures that the girls were facing with the rise of social media and just different factors that were impacting them. Renae: And so I went to my research supervisor at the time and I said, "This is what I'm doing. I'm running the program. Can I create this for my master's thesis?" And he said, "Well, if there's a problem in the literature, then yeah, go for it." So I said, "Okay, challenge accepted. And I dove deep into the research literature and I wanted to know, like, what had been done, what still needed to be done, what was helpful, what wasn't maybe so helpful. And then from there I emerged and with this new vision of okay, this is what's been helpful, this is what we need to do. And really from that, a couple of things. One was that we needed to move more from a pathology perspective. So not just focusing on what are problems with body image, but what do we do now that we know what these problems are like, what the "So what?" to this problem here? Renae: Where do we go from? And really utilizing them like a strengths perspective so we can deconstruct something but then we need to be able to build it back up again. And then the second thing with that is we need to include boys in this conversation and although boys have been included in this conversation, more so in the last five to 10 years, I would say, historically and previously body image has primarily been thought of as a girls issue. And so from that I approached my supervisor and I said, "Hey, this is what I found. There is definitely a need in healthy body image programs. And so I started to create Free To Be, and I actually ran with grade tens as my first group and did the analyses with them. And although the research showed that it was effective, just my clinical intuition and when I was running the program, it felt like I was doing a lot more intervention with the kids. Renae: And even though they were receptive and you know, we had good conversations, we then ran it with grade six and sevens. And that was really where we hit the sweet spot because these issues were becoming so relevant to them. Their bodies were starting to change, their bodies were on their mind a lot more and they were really engaging with the material. And so from there it started to just take off and I realized, you know, I can't just keep this to myself. And that always had been my vision that I wanted to expand it beyond me. Years ago I actually had a blog and it was called Bigger Than My Voice because I wanted it to be bigger than me. And so from there after, as I was developing free to be, I realized I can make this bigger than me and I've had so many incredible women come around that have either identified with my story or have had kids that have impacted or they've had body image struggles when they were younger and they wanted to take it, run with it and teach the curriculum around North America now. So it's kind of like the short version of everything. Annie: I love it because- Jen: I had my own goosebump moment. It's amazing. Like I would say grade six is when I started becoming aware of my body. Like everything happened a lot for me in grade six. It was like all of a sudden boys became very, like, a thing in my life and my body started changing and a lot of, and even other girls, their bodies were changing at a more rapid rate than mine. And I was like, "What's wrong with my body?" And you just, yeah, it's grade six was, yeah, a big year for me, personally. Renae: Yeah. Grade six, grade six, grade seven. And because girls, you know, we develop earlier than boys, you know, there's a wide range of like when we're developing and our bodies are just so much more on our minds then. And so it makes sense that to be able to be armed with tools about, you know, what's going on around us, how is this impacting us? Could be, is so helpful to be like, "I'm not weird. I'm normal, this is normal. This is normal. What we're all going through." Jen: Yeah, absolutely. The other thing, Renae, is why I was so excited to find you is because we work with women and I like, I love working with them. I'm sure many of them are listening. I love working with them, but sometimes I start to feel like, "Oh," like I just, I feel like we're on the reactive side of, you know, building communities and treating, you know, this issue where I want it to be on the preventative. And I also wanted to be involved on the preventative side because I don't want to keep raising generations of women that just need treatment, right. Lauren: Yeah. And I'll add to that too, like, because we work with women, we have them coming to us say, "Okay, how can I prevent this for my child? What can I do to be that preventative role model for them?" Renae: And there's so much that parents can do. That is something that I've, that I always, when I went on, whenever we run the Free To Be program, there is a pamphlet that we hand out in the beginning and we always stress to teachers, to parents, to whoever's running the program, hand these out because these conversations that we are starting at school are so much more impactful if they can be continued at home and deepened at home and expanded at home because that's where so much learning occurs. Annie: Absolutely. And something that I think we hear often in our community too is that women want to have these conversations or parents are obviously, we work pretty exclusively with women. They want to have these conversations with their girlfriends, with their kids, but they're so worried about if they're saying the right thing or not that they just don't say anything at all. Like, you know, "Okay, my daughter comes home and is asking about calories or someone called her fat or you know, she's being bullied or she's being picked on or she wants to lose weight or she wants to get a fitbit. I mean it's just these daily conversations that they're almost like, I'm so worried I'm going to say the wrong thing and they're gonna like permanently feel that type of way forever and ever. So it's really great to have you on here because I actually, I said, "Can you just give us the main talking points and kind of do's and don'ts about how we can help promote positive body image for middle schoolers?" Which is like your jam, right? Renae: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And even when you sent me that request in that talk, I was like, well, you know, we could just talk about it and where it goes because we literally could talk about this for hours and hours and hours. Annie: Absolutely. Renae: But that can just be overwhelming. So- Annie: Yes. So you came back with three, which I appreciate. These are the three, like the, really, I'm guessing kind of the big rocks that you feel are really important. If you want a place to start, these would be three good areas to spend some effort or give some attention to, yeah? Renae: Yes. And even the way I structured those three, they are, we could talk about them in depth for a lot, a long time. And so do you want to go through them one by one? Or do you want me to sort of list them off? Annie: Yeah, well here, the first one that you listed off was develop embodied media literacy. Not just head knowledge, but experiences that help them know and experienced their bodies as good and powerful. Can you tell me what that means? Renae: Okay. This has become a big one for me recently because I cannot tell you enough. I go do these talks. I do these presentations in addition to running Free To Be, and I will talk to kids or I'll talk to teenagers and they're so smart. They are very smart, they're savvy, they know what's going on. And so we'll talk about Photoshop, we'll talk about appearance pressures, we'll talk about things that are impacting about social media, how it can be used as a tool for good or as a tool that can, you know, be a portal into isolation or anxiety or this comparison trap that you get stuck in and they can be so articulate and their responses and yet then they'll tell me, "Yeah, this can really impact some people, but it doesn't impact me." Renae: And that's just not how our brains work. What we are exposed to is going to impact us. Like, my brain isn't locked in some special fortress where I'm not impacted by the messages and ideas around me. And, so they can be critical of these messages or ideas and and yet they embody them at the same time. It was, I was struck so much by this realization a couple of months ago when I was chatting with a particular group of girls and this girl was telling me about all of these things, and here she was with fake eyelashes and embodying all the appearance ideals and on her phone on Instagram scrolling through things. And it's not that wanting to invest in your appearance or following beauty trends is bad or wrong or anything like that. It's the fact that there's this disconnect that we think that things impact other people but not us. Jen: 100% we see this all the time. I know exactly what you, they like, they know but they can't embody. There is just a total and I have been there so I get it like it's- Renae: Yes and I get it because there's so many factors that are involved in creating our body image that go into our body image. And so I really started to stress this embodied media literacy because it's not just head knowledge. We can have head knowledge until we are blue in the face with, like, understanding something. But if we don't experience our bodies as good, as agents of power, as a place to connect with others, as something that is powerful, then a lot of the message is lost because our minds and our bodies are so connected and we need to be able to experience our bodies as good. Renae: And so in presentations I never just talk and so much of Free to Be isn't just talking. It's experiencing your body as something that is good and moreover we're so much in relationship with others. So we need others. We need to have that experience where others experience us and we feel experienced. We receive the experience of being seen as good enough for who we are. And so there's so many things that we can do to get that embodied media literacy. But that's that embodied piece. And then the media literacy media literacy piece is really just helping them critically digest and understand like what is going on in the media around us and not just the media, like in our friends and in our family. Because all of these fears are so important because we ended up internalizing these messages ourselves and they become our narrative and the way we live our life. And so it's not just the media literacy, the critical digestion, it's also the embodiment piece that we need those two together so much. Jen: So would you say, Hillary McBride talked about this in her first podcast with us because Hillary McBride experienced an eating disorder and actually she ended up in inpatient care and she talked about how she said her mom would tell her to eat her lunch at school, but she would come home and her mom's lunch would be uneaten in the fridge. And is that kind of what you're saying? Like it has to, we have to embody this message. Renae: Yes. I'm just trying to think about the best way to say this because it's, we can tell our kids that they are, you know, they're beautiful, they're wonderful til like tell it to the moon and back. We can say that to them over and over and over again. But if they don't see us also embodying the message, if they see us, you know, talking disparagingly to ourselves. If they see us, cook a delicious meal and then we serve them this wonderful food and then we're off in the corner just eating her salad and like restricting ourselves in what we're eating. Those, they're developing an inconsistent message about what they're about, messages about food, about their bodies. But they're learning also simultaneously that some things are good, some things are bad. And our parents model that behavior to us from such a young age. You know that from the comments that we make about, you know, "Oh, you're so beautiful," to what we eat, to how our clothes fit and we don't, I've got to stop right there for a second. We can, like, we can talk about each one those specifically- Jen: For ever and ever and ever and ever. Renae: Exactly but there is, our parents are so influential in how, in embodying and delivering this message and living and living this message. Yeah. Jen: Brene Brown talks about this quite a bit. She has a book called imperfect parenting that it is the only parenting book I will ever recommend to anybody. But she talks about what do you, you know, it is far more impactful to be self compassionate than to tell your kids they should be self compassionate. Renae: Yes, because that outer voice becomes their voice. Jen: Absolutely. Renae: When they are, when you mess up as a parent and when I mess up as a parent because oh my goodness, I do mess up and I make mistakes or even simple things like I'm driving and I take the wrong turn, instead of being like, "Oh my goodness, I'm such an idiot" being like "Ah! Mistakes happen" and, or I mess up at home or I mess up doing something else. And you know, being able to repair and model that repairing and being able to model being disappointed, even with the actions that I've made. And doing that in a healthy way isn't a sign of weakness. I think it's a sign of being able to model a way of being because our emotions are, we all have emotions and they're fundamental to the way we live and experience life. Renae: And so if I can give my children the gift of, you know, this is how, these are healthy ways that you can experience sadness or anger or like those tough emotions that don't feel comfortable, then we are, I think that's a big gift to be able to give them. Jen: Totally. Renae: And so many body image issues, are tied to insecurities, feeling anxious, feeling not enough, feeling embarrassed, feeling shame. And nobody likes sitting with those. They're not, they're uncomfortable. And so learning to be able to sit with those as parents and model that, oh, it's such a gift and it's hard. Oh it's so hard. Jen: It's so hard. And I also, I was talking with one of our Balance365ers about this last week. She struggles with caring for herself, you know, being self caring and self compassionate. And I think that it's important to understand that, well, not understand, but just to note, it might not feel natural for us, especially if we were raised by somebody who was, you know, very hard on herself or hard on us. And I think that was pretty typical that our parents came from a place of shaming, right, to discipline. And Brene Brown talks in her book about how if you're a parent who, you know, didn't shame your kids, it's like you would be shamed for not shaming them. So it was just so that's how everybody parented. And so now we have this, these generations of people who really struggle with shame and there's an element that comes in as far as being self compassionate and self loving and more, having a positive body image things, a dialogue, I guess I should say. Jen: There's such a thing as faking it til you make it right. Like, it might not feel natural, but, it's like, I just feel so strongly on the days when I just, I don't want to be self compassionate. I feel responsibility to be self compassionate for my children because I know they're watching and I never want them to question it or it to feel unnatural. I don't want them to struggle with the same things I did. And so I just sometimes don't have the energy to be kind to myself. It's just, it's in my nature to be really hard on myself. And I think, but I always have the energy for my kids and I just, I, yeah. So even when embodiment doesn't feel natural for me I feel like I feel this sense that I have to, you know, I have to for my children. And so yeah, I think a lot of people wait to take action on them. We hear this all the time in a self love sense, but they're waiting to be kind to themselves because they're waiting to learn to love themselves, but- Renae: They need feel that right. before they act on it, right, yeah, Jen: Right. But it comes from actions of self care. Renae: And it's the same thing that you would, we would tell a client that's struggling with depression. You don't wait to go for a walk. You don't wait to feel better til you go for a walk. You go for a walk and then you'll feel better. And it's the same thing with these acts of self compassion and it does feel foreign and we can validate that even in ourselves and be like, "Yeah, this feels really weird and uncomfortable but I'm still going to try it and I'm going to do it anyways because I know it's the right thing to do even if it is uncomfortable." And even as parents, you know, we want to be, we want to have shoulders that are big enough for our kids to know that, you know, they can come to us with their big emotions and our shoulders are big enough to handle and to help them to support them. Renae: So I think there's, you know, I like what you're articulating that with our kids we want to be able to model that and you know, being aware of who is the adult and who's the child. And yet at the same time being vulnerable to model what it's like to be disappointed or to be uncomfortable with yourself. I think that, I think that it's a tension that we have to, we have to grapple with and we have to, we may not always get that right perfectly, but it's something that there's no one way or the other way that we can go in order to have a healthy relationship, we need to be able to say, "Okay, you know, this is a hard day for me. I'm having a hard day. I don't have a lot of patience right now. And then whether we tell them the details, whether that's age appropriate or not is something else to consider that we need to be mindful of, you know, depending how old they are because we don't want to put them in a parental role. But at the same time, you know, if they're older than we, even when they're younger telling them, you know, "Mommy's having a hard day or I'm having a hard day. But I'm a big girl." My daughter's two. Jen: I'm a big girl. Renae: I'm a big girl and I can handle it. But just, you know, teaching that, that it's okay that even as adults we have hard days too. Annie: Yeah. Jen: Yeah. Annie: I think that's beautiful. It's not, so what I hear you saying Renae is that it's not that you need to, like, be perfect all the time. It's that, like, there's power in expressing, like, "Hey, I'm struggling too or this is hard for me or this is difficult or I'm overwhelmed or I'm angry about this, but this is how I'm going to handle it or this is what I'm going to do about it, or this is my choice." And I think that's great because you know, I think there is pressure to feel like, especially when it comes in terms of body image, like I said at the beginning to say all the right things all the right time and like, to have all the answers and it's like, maybe you don't know, you know, like I don't, I don't know. How do you feel about that? What do you think? Jen: Yeah, what do you think? Annie: -can be a great answer. Just have a discussion. Like you don't have to like have this perfect like Brene Brown answer, Renae: Or even "Let's go find the answer together." Jen: Yeah. Annie: Yeah. Renae: Right. And, that being committed to finding an answer and to finding a solution, wanting to do that together in a way that's healthy and productive not only teaches that, you know, you don't have to have all the answers, but also how to problem solve and how to, find some answers and then to be, to, to be stuck is, we all get stuck sometimes and it sucks being stuck, stuck, stuck. And, and as a parent, you know, we really want to be able to provide that roadmap. Something that has been so helpful to me, even just not even as a therapist but as like a because I have three children and they're all very different in my son's eight months old. I have two year old daughter and an eight year old son and I have this idea of, you know, how I want my kids to be and I don't want them to struggle and I don't want them to have big problems in their life, like any parent. Renae: And yet then sometimes when I parent, I think of myself as a construction worker who, like, takes a two by four and I'm hammering together this house that I am creating. But that's totally not the way parenting works. Parenting is more like tending to a garden and it's a plot of land that has its own type of soil. Each soil is a bit different. Even when you move down the road, you know, slugs get in, there's different types of, there's amount of rain, like you have to tend to the garden and be attentive to the garden, but at the same time, the garden's going to grow the way the garden is going to grow. There's so many things that are out of your control as the gardener and as a parent. And so learning to work with that, it also, I think that can be so freeing as well too because we can have such good intentions and we can be, we can be so invested in our kids, but there is, like, there's so many things that, just our kids' genetics, the experiences that our kids are having in school, there's so many factors that are involved in developing their body image and just even developing who they are that we can't put all the weight solely on us as parents, as directing the course of, like, this is the way they're going to be because well, A, it's going to fail because they have free will and they're going to do it and they're going to, and they're going to do things that we don't like sometimes. Renae: But they're also going to have their own minds and learning to cultivate that in the sense of thinking of ourselves as gardeners. To me, it's such a freeing way of thinking, freeing but also a huge element of responsibilities still in parenting and you know, realizing we don't have to be perfect parents but we have to be attentive and attuned and that's so much more, I think, gracious comes to my mind. Like we can be gracious with ourselves and we can even start that self compassion talk with ourselves too. Because sometimes our kids do things that we just, we just don't like. And it's, it's, we can, yeah, we can learn to be still present and attuned and still tend to the garden of our children. Jen: I think too, when you put, you know, when you have, you're trying to will your child to be a certain way and bringing it back to body image, what we have talked about in a previous podcast is sometimes the biggest hurdle for mothers and fathers as far as letting go and doing the things that we kind of know need to be done to help your child develop a healthy relationship with food comes down to accepting your child's body for what it is sometimes, you know, and that can be really a big hurdle for men and women and they come, you know, men, we all come with our own experiences. So for a woman who grew up being teased about her weight on the playground and that that becomes a wound and that wound goes festering her whole life. And then she has a daughter and starts from a very young age trying to control her daughter's food intake because she's so afraid of her daughter being fat and having that same experience that is such a hard thing to deal with. Jen: But ultimately you have to, you know, our own body acceptance is one thing. But as a parent you have to accept your child's body as well for what it is. And it can just, it can be so tempting and some people just do it unconsciously trying to kind of control their child's body size. But ultimately I don't think you're doing your child any favors, you know, by trying to, will them into a certain body size so they don't get teased. You need to work on developing that resiliency at home and that positive body image and- Renae: and a lot of that comes down to language as well, too. And learning to talk about our bodies in a way of like what is your body capable of doing and exercise is so important. Not even, like there's so many health benefits that you are all aware of for exercise from, you know, depression and anxiety and just in addition to just bodily health benefits and you know, for mental health benefits as well too. And but reframing exercise and reframing moving our bodies in a way not to reduce our shape or to change our weight, but rather to promote health because then we're moving from a place of not lack. We don't, we want to move to a place of fullness and not where we're changing our bodies to become smaller, to become, to reduce in size but rather to become more fully alive and more fully who we are. Renae: And I think a lot of that even, so that's one thing that we can do just when we come to exercise. But then the other thing with exercise, because it is so important, and I also, I have parents talked to me about this as well, is that, you know, do things together and make it fun and make it a time of like bonding and where you're experiencing your body in new ways together. And I mean, and it doesn't have to be something like going for a hike or going for a swim, you can do some simple things like dancing or my kids are really little so even like wrestling. Jen: Right. Renae: Lots of things that we can do where we can, like, move our bodies in just, like, daily ways that are fun and active. Right? Jen: Right. Yeah. Annie: It looks a lot more like play, you know, than, which I think trips a lot of people up, a lot of parents up when they think about, you know, getting active as a family. It's like I don't, when we get asked to have a family, it's not like we're doing an aerobics youtube class, we're, like, we're running and we're playing, we're jumping, we're, you know- Renae: Playing hockey, climbing trees. Like there's lots that you can do and it's about lifestyle, though. It's learning to experience your body in a way as like a lifestyle that is a vessel to adventure and voyage in the world. Annie: Yeah. Kind of on that same note, you were on the tip of the iceberg there, Renae is, your second point is to be mindful of your language by cultivating all of who they are and you know that we focus on what we value. So we need to value and grow all parts of our kids, which I don't know where you are exactly where you were headed but what comes to mind is my dad has the best of intentions, but all the time "What a pretty girl, what a pretty-" like to my daughter, "What a strong boy. What a handsome boy." It's just all very appearance space. And there's definitely, you know, the stereotypical little boy, little girl comments that he always gives. And I'm like, "But we're more than that." Is that, is that what you meant? Renae: Exactly. And it makes sense that, you know, in first impressions that we do focus on appearance because we necessarily know somebody and we can see the outward physical experience of who they are. So we, you know, it's easy to make why we would focus on that, but especially little girls from such a young age and even a little boys, you know, they're so cute or they're so adorable. If that's what we hear growing up time and time again, that is what we are going to value. You know, you think about the news, the news broadcasts, what's valuable, like, what's going on in the world, right? And so you hear it on every single news station and if every single news station is for our kids is highlighting their appearance, it's beautiful, it's wonderful, that's what they need to focus on. Renae: That's what the is going to become at the forefront of their attention and what they're going to need to invest in, what they're gonna need to pay attention to. And so I really become so mindful even more now having kids and especially like my friend's kids or kids that I meet just focusing on just finding anything that I can compliment that focuses on the intention of cultivating their entire personhood. So if my kids are playing Lego, "Oh my goodness, that's so creative in what you've made that took a lot of hard work" or "Wow, you're so, you're so smart in how you figured out this problem" and really trying to help them expand their awareness about all the things that they are capable of doing and to help them just expand their awareness but then just place value on that and speak into that into their life to know this is good. Renae: There's so many qualities about you that are so good as well. And that can be hard to do in the beginning. Especially when you see somebody that you know, just meeting your friends' little daughter that you've just met for the first time or just haven't seen her in a long time and she's wearing a really cute dress that she got a really cute haircut and you're like, "Oh you're so cute." And I don't think it's bad. And I really don't think it's bad to say, "Oh, you're adorable." But I would say, like, for every one comment that you give that is appearance-focused, try to find a five to seven comments that are not appearance focused because we live in a highly appearance-focused culture from just the fact that we live on our screens so often. And so it's natural that our attention goes to that. Renae: So being able to cultivate all those other qualities, that's kind of where I'm going with being mindful of our language because again, that external voice that we hear, we internalize that voice. I was just talking to my debt to my husband yesterday about language growing up and about our bodies and experiencing our bodies. And I said, when I was younger my dad always used to pat me on the back really firm, and then say "solid as a horse." I loved horses and it was such a compliment to me because it meant I was strong and I was capable and I, and that and that always stuck with me. And so there's fun ways that you can do that as well. But yeah, that's just something that kind of like stood up for me and these voices become our voices as we get older. Renae: I grew up, we covered this in one of our podcasts where Annie interviewed me and my sister and, we grew up with very different body types and so, Annie interviewed us on our experience of this and I grew up with people commenting on my body my whole life, like how thin I was, and I just, it was always there, which really speaks more to the women around me, what was going through their heads, right, than anything to do with me. But I would say that contributed greatly to how I ended up developing my values as a woman, right, of what was important. And so I agree with you. I don't think there's anything wrong with commenting on someone's appearance or complimenting their experience, you know, but in context, like I love how you said, just really think about it in context of the world we live in. Like there's nothing wrong with telling a little girl she's pretty, or for me to tell Annie she looks beautiful today, but when you, yeah, when you put it in context of the world we live in, that's all we're acknowledging about women. And now we have a society full of women who are, you know, they're making themselves sick, trying to pursue appearance ideals that just aren't even healthy, right. Renae: And it makes sense though, why we are pursuing this because it's so much more than our appearance. So we live in this world where we have these images of these idealized beauty standards where women are, tend to be thin. You know, they have flawless skin, they have this, there's so many factors that are unattainable and that continues to shift, you know, depending on kind of what decade that we are in, but there's still ideals of the case. So this is what a woman looks like right now that, you know, she's considered the beauty standard, but it's not just that, it's this beauty standard. It's the subtext to that. It's this pairing of a beautiful ideal now, like an impossible ideal thanks to, you know, Facetune, Modiface or Perfect365 or any one of those apps or just Photoshop in general. So you have this impossible beauty ideal. But then you also have this, this pairing with love, acceptance, opportunities, mattering. All of these, these images are so closely tied to these deeper fundamental qualities that we all want as humans. We all want to matter. Jen: Yes. Success. Lovable. Connection. Renae: Exactly. And so we're automatically lured in when we see an image like this or we see, we see something that, you know, even on social media, there's a reason that those numbers are there. Like Instagram didn't, or Snapchat didn't make these platforms and think, I wonder if someone's going to use these platforms. It was like, of course not. They know there's a reason why these likes these views, these metrics are there. Because we conflate that with value and we, equate that to mattering to being seen and we all want to be seen. Like that's, as humans, we're wired to be in connection with each other and so we need to acknowledge that it's complex and it makes sense why some of us, why a lot of us, why we strive to have this beauty ideal, but that's where it goes back to that media literacy and teaching kids about the subtext, about the deeper messages, about the deeper ideas of what's actually being depicted, about what actually is being shown here so that we can help them not only critically digest it but then invite experiences into their lives that are going to allow them to live a holistic life where they're not only thinking about their appearance or they're not only thinking about their, you know, their account following on whatever social media platform they're using because it's, it's a complicated issue and we need to, but they're smart and they can grapple with it from a young age and so we need to equip them from a young age because they're using these platforms from such a young age. Annie: Which I think is a great segue into your third point, Renae, that you encourage parents to be mindful of how many reminders kids have of their appearance and clothing mirrors, cameras social media and how that shapes our value system. And I actually had that experience just the other day. I was thinking, like, I was just having a rough body image day, which, as it happens- Renae: It does happen, yeah. Annie: And it was just like, it just seemed like I wanted to capture these photos, or these selfies with my kids, but like, I just couldn't, like, it was just there. It was just right in front of my face all the time. Like every time I opened up Instagram it was like, you know, do an insta story, but I didn't want to be in the photo, but I wanted the photo and it was just like, you know, and then, and even how seeing other people's appearance reminded me of my own as well. Renae: Yes. Annie: Like it had nothing to do with it, but it was like, I mean, I used to do this, I used to struggle a lot with this when I really, really struggled with body image, probably about five, 10 years ago. It was really hard for me to see other beautiful women because it was just a reminder of all the ways I was feeling. I couldn't just separate the two. I couldn't just admire her attributes or features or traits or whatever, or even see her for more than just a physical thing. I just really struggled to get beyond that and it was somehow I made it into a reflection of all the ways I was lacking. And I would imagine that young girls and boys are dealing with that just as much, if not more with the rise of social media. Renae: Yeah. And I think just to even springboard off what you're saying there, something that isn't necessarily the most popular opinion, but I think it's something that we do need to acknowledge and grapple with is that beauty is,, there are objective standards of kind of like what is a beautiful person? And I mean it's hourglass shape for women. It's hourglass shape, it's clear skin, it's like bright hair, it's white eyes. These are kind of universal standards of what a beautiful person is. And there's been a big push within the body positivity community and I think has been really well intentioned. But at the same time it's actually been perpetuating this obsession and this focus on our bodies because not people are not going to, like I said, it's been, not everybody is, you know, drop dead beautiful. They're just not. Because if we're all beautiful, then we're actually all average. Beauty is above average. Renae: And the problem with that though is that with hearing that is thinking that "Well, then I'm of lesser value." And that's not at all what I'm saying, and I'm not even talking about inner beauty, we all have inner beauty and because inner beauty is defined by a wide, wide range of like of attributes and characteristics and it's way more important. But this obsession with, you know, liking our bodies for everything that they are, you know, liking all our cellulite, liking every wrinkle, every stray hair, every whatever it is that perpetuates this value system where our focus stays on our bodies. And when we are scrolling on social media, unless you are following like dogs and panda bears or kitty cats, you're being focused on the body, that's just inevitably what's going on. And, so even as like for me as a body image researcher, I have to be so mindful of that. Jen: And then even like living in Vancouver, I don't live in Vancouver but that's the closest big city that is where I live, Vancouver is world renowned for its architecture on glass, for example. And when what happens when you walk past a glass, like, a mirror, you see your reflection, you, like, check yourself out a little bit. That's just, it's natural. You don't want to feel, you don't need to feel bad about that. But what we do. But then again, it's just that it's that energy that goes back to our appearance. And I think something that we really, really have to be mindful of is that we have a finite amount of mental energy. We have an absolute finite amount of mental energy. And if that is being devoted to our appearance, whether that is good or bad, that is energy that is going elsewhere that cannot be focused on cultivating all aspects of who we are. And so I've really started to take that to heart in my own life. And even just the way even I manage Free To Be and I manage the social media and I manage just the experiences that I invite into my life because it impacts us. It just does. Jen: The other thing is that we have this as one of our questions in our Balance365 Self Love Journal. So if you take who you are and break it down into a pie chart and if you are kind and funny and a really good friend, a very supportive partner, you know, if you just break it down and if each of those takes up 10% of who you are, who you are, who you consider yourself to be, and appearance is in there, because appearance is part of who we are. If that is 10% of who you are, then when you wake up in the morning with a huge zit or whatever, it doesn't destroy you. It's just a little bit of who you are and you can still function and move along. Or maybe you aren't considered the standard of beauty in our society, but it's just a little piece of who you are, your appearance. Jen: But the problem is I feel like we have a society of women who were taught that their appearance is 80% of who they are. Renae: Oh yeah. Jen: And so when they wake up in the morning with a zit, it just, it destroys them or whatever else is bothering them about their appearance. It destroys them and they can barely function in life because their body image is just so, so negative. Or if you have a bad body image day and knowing that your appearance is just a part of who you are, it can allow you to have a bad body image but still function where some people can't get out of bed in the morning when they're having a bad body image day and so really looking at all of who you are, which comes back to what were, you know you had said we need to start teaching our kids and complimenting them for the whole person that they are. Because when we are just complimenting on appearance or just talking about appearance or just scrolling social media and looking at other people's appearances we're starting to build this idea that women are their appearance and then it's just so, so, so then it just becomes, then of course if your parents are 75% of who you are, then 75% of your mental energy is going to go into trying to improve your appearance. But women are just, they are just so much more. Renae: We're so much more than that and yet we're that, that focus on it from such a young age goes to our appearances. So it makes sense that it's so hard to break out of those, like, corseted ideals that we, that we bind ourselves to because that is how we're reinforced and we can't be naive, like, we are, we are rewarded when, when we ascribe or when we try to follow them and let me qualify that, some of us are rewarded and, but we have to be very aware that, that, that power that we get from that that's super short lived. Because it's not true power if, you know, it's going to expire when you're 30 or when your appearance is going to change or if something happens to you. Like that's, we need to, we need to be grounded and centred for deeper things. But it makes sense why we would feel that way and yet we can also work towards then living life differently as well too. Annie: I've found too, unapologetically, about going to therapy, but one of the things I'm learning is that like my true power comes from within. Like, it's not, I don't get my power from compliments or praise or affirmation or validation from, I don't, I don't get to like outsource my power. And I've tried that for many, many years. Like if they like me then I like me. If they think I'm pretty, then I'm pretty. If they like my work then it's valuable and that feels good in the short term. But it's ultimately not sustain. Like it doesn't fulfill me. And so turning inward, like, do I like me? Who am I? What do I value has been like way more worth my energy than like trying to look a certain way or do a certain thing so other people like me. Renae: And at the same time, that's like, that's hard to do to put, like, our own beliefs and to put that under a microscope because that can be super uncomfortable to kind of shift away from the thinking that we have had because it does feel good. And then when you think about social media, just going to say one more thing about social media here, you then we are rewarded with those short term signals of those likes, thumbs up and all those things and those things do feel good. You do get, you know the dopamine, a neurotransmitter like dopamine, you get a little rushed and that feels good, but the problem is then we, that's what we ended up seeking more and more and more of that, those short term, the short term validations. And we don't end up doing that deeper work of like, who am I? Renae: What do I stand for? What do I like? And at the same time living in that tension about acknowledging that our body image concerns don't develop in a vacuum. They develop in context with other people. And so it's going to be so important that we realize that our healing is also going to develop in context with other people where we're going to have to have experiences where people teach us that we are enough, that we are good just the way we are, that we don't have to change, that we aren't too much or too little of something. That healing also is going to have to occur in relationship because we are, we are so wired for relationship. And so it's a, although we want to have, you know, that internal locus of control, we also are dependent on others to be able to have that and also to be seen. Renae: Cause we need to be seen, we need to matter. And that all happens in context with others. And so it's, I think sometimes I get frustrated when I walk on, when I scroll on social media and I see all these self love inspo quotes and it's, we're shortchanging ourselves because developing these issues didn't develop in isolation. And so healing these concerns isn't also gonna occur in isolation. I just don't, I think that you can find healing through groups on social media, but I'm always so wary of the system, you know, again, because we are rewarded for these likes and these comments and it pulls us and it's so, so powerful. So being able to have conversations like we're having right now where I can see your faces and I can see your expressions. I can see the way you're moving. It's so much more telling than, you know, just liking a post that you put online and it's way more healing and even embodying to be able to do this. And it takes, it's more holistic. It's part of, like, a whole personhood. And again, that goes back to the healing of who we are. Jen: I wonder what your opinion is on, like, a lot body acceptance slash self love bloggers, influencers, whatever you want to call them. They post photos of themselves, their bodies, you know, in bikini or underwear and supposedly exposing these flaws, right? These "flaws." And people love it and I've heard there's larger organizations like Beauty Redefined talking about how, look if we're trying to acknowledge women as a whole person, we have to move past this constant, you know, barrage of women's bodies. Like if, you know, if you want to love the whole person then we have to look at the whole person. We just can't keep seeing women in bikinis or their underwear showing stretch marks and, I understand what they're saying, but I have to say that personally when I saw that shift start on social media, this is before we founded this company and everything, that was extremely healing for me to see other women's bodies that looked like mine. Like I remember the first time feeling like wanting to sob. Like there's other people out there that look like me. Renae: Yes, absolutely and I do struggle with this because it's something that it's very, it's very healing to be, when you see yourself represented, you see, you see that as valuable. I think it is important that we do have a wide range of bodies that are out there. And my body has changed drastically after giving birth and being able to see other women's bodies out there, see stretch marks, see saggy boobs, see different things is normalizing and it and that speaks to that deeper issue of wanting to connect and be seen. Right? And we can feel shame when we carry these fears in isolation and we think that we're the only ones and there's just healing by feeling known. And so I think with those photos and that, those, this wider representation of bodies shown is helping a lot of us being known, be accepted. And that in and of itself is healing. And yet at the same time, I also hold the same viewpoint that we do need to move past. We do need to move past just focusing on women's bodies. But they're both incredibly important steps, I think you could say. Or just things that we need to acknowledge intentions that we need to work with. We just can't, we can't dismiss the one and say that it's not healing. Jen: It's almost like a phase, you know, I had a phase where I was following any woman I could find who was showing her body because I just, I knew I wanted more and more and more of it because it was just so validating for me. Like I just, I felt a release. I felt this just, "Oh my gosh. There's other people out there that look like me" and, but now I feel like I'm in a different phase where I've sort of like, "Okay, yes, there are many other bodies that look like mine and bodies come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and I don't need that in my life as much anymore." Now it's like there's like a phase, I think. Like I feel like I'm on phase two at this point where I- Annie: I personally feel like, cause I feel the same, Jen, but I still post those photos because from time to time, because I do acknowledge that, like, I can acknowledge, like, I know that there's bodies come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but I also know that there's still so many women like you and me and Lauren, you know, five years ago that needed that photo. Jen: Right. And I see it, I see when you do post pictures of your stomach, Annie, I see when when your stomach is visible in a post, you know, women appreciate it so much. They see this woman who is happy, who is powerful, who loves her body, and has, you know, positive body image and also, is unashamed of these parts of her body that our society- Annie: My humanness. Jen: Humanness has told us is wrong. It's something that should be hidden. Something we should be trying to fix, something we should be deeply ashamed of. And so I still see it. I still see it because there's always new mothers coming. You know, sometimes we get disconnected almost from what a new mom experiences. And I look back and think, my goodness, the change in me from when I had my first 10 years ago to now like, I mean I thought my body was ruined. I thought I was an abomination after I had my first baby and I can't and I have to, I have to constantly remind myself that there are women who are feeling like that every single day because it's, you know, things have shifted for me. But I think we live in a world where there's more talk of body image today than there ever has been. Like 10 years ago, I feel like it wasn't even an option to love your postpartum body. It wasn't. Where now it's an option, but we still have to make women aware of it. Renae: I think that the tricky line or the line that we want to be aware of, especially from when I think about the research standpoint behind this is the objectification. So when I think sometimes of when I scroll through social media and I see photos of someone posing in a very objectifying pose and then they have this like liberating quote underneath, if you took away the quote and you just were to see the image for what it was, it can reinforce women as being objectified. And again, that's something that, and because we have limited mental energy when we are, when we objectify ourselves, we can internalize that voice. And we then we view our bodies as objects to be consumed, as objects that are, like, viewing pleasure for somebody else. And again, it's so subtle that because we just, we are inundated with diet culture. Renae: We're inundated where women are still seeing so often, in an objectified sense. And so it's something that I just, I really am very mindful of with myself, with even like, even just the research and what I encourage people to do as well too, thinking about, you know, like I do think it's so good to post to how photos of diverse ranges of bodies, but there's a big difference between posting a body that is, you know, having fun or happy or like doing something versus a body and like, and then let's say, you know, I've got stretch marks or I'm, or I've got the, you know, my body's changing. I want to be able to show this is what a body can look like. And this is an aging body and this is a good, and I'm still having fun and I'm having, and this is great, but there's a difference between posting a photo like that versus spending, you know, a long time like A, photoshopping my photo, taking a hundred selfies and then wanting to post only the right photo and then doing it in a way that's, like, very objectifying. Renae: I think we really have to think about like our intentions behind why we are posting those photos. And again, that's not like the most popular opinion to hold. But then when you again, when you look at the research and when you look at how much time and energy we invest into our bodies, I think it's just, we only, we only get one life to live. And I think that's like the driving force behind why I'm so passionate about this message is we get one life to live. And when, I was just at a funeral on the weekend and prior to the funeral I had felt like I had nothing to wear. And then when I was in, when I was sitting in my chair and I was listening in the church to what was being said. And it was, she was an absolutely amazing lady. Renae: I was like, it would just, it just puts everything into perspective for me again about my goodness, I get one life to live. I want to live my life. I don't want to worry about these additional pressures that I invite into my life. And so tying that all back to the initial conversation about like, about the images that we're seeing out there, I think it's healing. We just need to be mindful of how much energy we're investing into it. Cause when you're dying, we're not going to think, "Oh, I wish I posted more photos of, you know, of my body doing this." And yet at the same time we want to be like, I feel comfortable because I did see women in their bodies, right? So- Jen: Yeah. Right. That's a perfect response. Annie: I want to be mindful of our listeners times here. And I know I have, I'm looking at the outline and I have questions that I still wanted to ask you. So what I would love to do is invite you back next month. How's that sound? Renae: Great. Annie: Like we said at the beginning, we could talk about this forever and ever. But before we pop off, I know that you have a special gift for our listeners. Do you want to tell them about that? Renae: Yes, I would if I, for anybody that's listening, if you would like to be trained in Free to Be our research based curriculum, it helps, it's for youth in grades five, six, seven and eight. It helps develop media literacy, cultivate their individual and their group strengths. It really helps with developing gratitude and just a whole, it's a six session program and I want to be able to offer any listener that's out there 30% off the curriculum so you can use the discount code. I believe it's FreeToBeBalanced and I don't know if you're going to link to that in the show notes or anything like that. And so that we can take this conversation outside of, you know, this wonderful podcast and you can actually start to have these conversations with your kids and you can even potentially have your, if you're a teacher you can be trained to run it in your school. And so that we can continue to spread this impact wider because I do just think that there's such a powerful shift that's happening now with the conversations that we are happening and people are wanting and especially kids, they want to have these conversations. And so you are welcome to use a discount code FreeToBeBalanced and to get 30% off the curriculum. Annie: That's so awesome. Thank you so much. Jen: Yeah! Annie: So excited. We're changing the world. Renae: Yes we are. Annie: Okay. Well thank you so much for joining us. We have to come. I want you to come back because I know Jen in particular to had a great question about addressing all of these topics with boys and if there's any differences that we need to be mindful of in our approach and our discussion and our topics. And, because you do work with boys and girls, which I think is really great that this, your program is not just for females. So, we'd love to have you back. We'll set up a time and continue this talk. Okay? Renae: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Jen: Thanks Renae. Bye. Annie: This episode is brought to you by the Balance365 program. If you're ready to say goodbye to quick fixes and false promises and yes to building healthy habits and a life you're 100% in love with, then checkout Balance365.co to learn more.
Emotional eating can be a real challenge in finding balance. Sometimes there is a sense of helplessness to it. In today’s podcast, Josh Hillis shares his emotional eating coaching strategy to help our listeners find new ways to cope with stress that doesn’t always revolve around food. What you’ll hear in this episode: How effective are cravings control strategies when you have emotional eating issues? Is the answer to emotional eating more control? The emotional release effect when you emotionally eat after tight control The role of acceptance in emotional eating Normalizing the existence of uncomfortable emotions. Diffusing uncomfortable emotions - what does that mean? Gaining perspective around the perceived urgency of feelings The role of mindfulness in managing negative emotions Defining emotional or disinhibited eating Learning to let the monsters ride the bus Being in the driver's seat of how you deal with feelings Introducing a waiting period to delay emotional eating The value of taking time to identify feelings Ways to scale and create distance between you and your feelings Three ways to feel comfortable with your feelings without using food Managing expectations of emotional eating - moving past all or nothing Psychological flexibility as a goal, defined. Identifying and being aware of your “monsters” Thought suppression and the health and wellness industry sales tactics Frequency and emotional eating Rules vs Self-Loving Guidelines Tracking progress - things you can track Resources: Josh’s Blog Fat Loss Happens On Monday Everything You Know About Emotional Eating is Wrong - blog post Annie quotes Mothers, Daughters and Body Image - Hillary McBride’s book Getting Older: Hillary Mcbride On Women And Aging Episode 13: How Your Body Image Impacts Your Children With Hillary Mcbride Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Welcome to Balance365 Life Radio, a podcast that delivers honest conversations about food, fitness, weight, and wellness. I'm your host Annie Brees along with Jennifer Campbell and Lauren Koski. We are personal trainers, nutritionists and founders of Balance365. Together we have coached thousands of women each day and are on a mission to help them feel healthy, happy, and confident in their bodies on their own terms. Join us here every week as we discuss hot topics pertaining to our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing with amazing guests. Enjoy. Annie: Welcome to Balance365 Life Radio. I am so excited for today's guest because today's incredibly smart and talented guest goes way back with Balance365, so far back in fact that he knew Lauren, Jen and I before we were even a business. Josh Hillis has been a longtime friend and mentor to the three of us and I'm so excited for you to hear his wisdom on today's episode. Josh helps people beat emotional eating using a skill-based not diet-based approach that allows people to create a new relationship with their bodies and food and get results that have previously never been possible. Josh is the author of Fat Loss Happens on Monday and the upcoming lean and strong and yet untitled emotional eating book coming out in 2020. Josh has been writing for his blog losestubbornfat.com since 2004 and he currently attends MSU Denver and is doing his thesis on contextual behavioral science and emotional eating. He's the perfect guest for this topic. The current standard answer to emotional eating and the health and fitness industry encourages individuals to just have more control, more control over their diet, over their thoughts, over their emotions, more control over your cravings. But on today's episode, Josh shares why that advice usually doesn't work. For those who struggle with emotional eating and provides multiple practical tools to help you overcome it, I think you're going to love it and joy. Annie: Josh, welcome to Balance365 Life Radio. We're so happy to have you. You go way back with our team like way, way back. How are you? Josh: I'm good. How are you guys? It's so cool to see you guys again. Annie: I know, like, we're still, like, we're still together. The last time we were Facetiming was under a little bit different context. We were Healthy Habits Happy Moms then and we were, you've kind of helped us mentor us as far as like habits and skills and philosophies and you're just a really great coach. Just flat out really great. Josh: Thank you. From you guys, that's awesome. Annie: So we're so happy to have you and Jen and Lauren are here too. How are you guys? Jen: Hi- Lauren: Good. Josh goes way back to like before we were even a thing. Jen: We met Josh the same time we met each other. Lauren: Yeah. Josh: Wow. Jen: Years ago. Annie: Yeah. Josh: Oh Wow. That's awesome. That's amazing. Annie: So you're kind of a big deal to us, are we making you uncomfortable yet? Josh: That's awesome. Jen: When our book comes out we're going to have a page for acknowledgements and I was just telling the girls last week, like Josh Hillis is going to be my number one acknowledgement. Josh: Are you serious? Jen: Yeah, just like all your work and your blog, like it's been so insanely helpful to me. And even just watching you in conversation with people, like, as creepy as that sounds, but just how you handle people, how it's just and you're just so objective and, and really what we try to embody at Balance365 as far as there's no right one right way for every single person and just being open to tools and helping people build a, just a more varied toolbox and they currently have for their health and wellness. Jen: And also the other big thing that we come up against is that, because we're all about self acceptance and embracing oneself, we also often get lumped into a segment of this industry that we all know about, which is basically the anti weight loss movement, which is like weight loss is so bad. Why? Like nobody better talk about this. And a lot of dietitians are on that train as well as psychologists. And so it's just, it's like frightening for me at times. And I found myself questioning, you know, cause you go to the, you see these other professionals and you're like, "Oh man, like, she makes a good point, like what's?" And you've question your own values and what, but ultimately we have risen as like, look, we're just, we're just trying to take a messy middle approach. And there is really nothing inherently wrong with weight loss, changing your behaviors. Jen: And I so appreciate that and you, because I see you as a real leader and professional, not just in the health and wellness industry. Well the health and fitness industry I should say, but you are now a part of the psychology industry. Lauren: Say, "Hey, this is okay. Come on" Annie: And you're not a jerk. Like you're not, like you're not out there shaming people and you're like still able to like help them achieve the goals that they have in a really like compassionate, positive way, which is awesome. Jen: Yeah. And you've got a couple of clients I was reading yesterday on your page that you have a couple of clients that have lost over a hundred pounds. That's like, that's a, that's a life changing, values altering like those clients, like you've totally changed their lives. Josh: Yeah. Yeah. Annie: So now are you uncomfortable? Josh: No, this is like the coolest, most thoughtful, most wonderful compliments I could ever get because you guys are acknowledging me for the things that I've worked the hardest at and that mean the most to me, like in the world. So I totally appreciate it. I totally, totally, totally appreciate it. Annie: Yay. Well, we're like, we can just be your ultimate hype women when you're having a bad day. You can give us a call. Okay. Josh: Can you guys introduce me on every podcast? Annie: We can. But peaking of podcasts, we should probably talk about the topic that I, that you actually wanted to talk about because we've been trying to get you on the show for a while and you're a busy guy. So, when I said, are there any topics that you wanted to jam on and you were like emotional eating, like top on your list. So what is it about emotional eating that you love so much? Josh: I think, so a couple of different things, on like the bigger, like zoomed out level, I think it's access to making the kind of difference that I want to make with people. If they can get, what's really neat is if someone really struggles with emotional eating and they can get that under control it tends to spiral out into other areas of their lives and they have like better relationships and do better at work. I mean like it's, it's really like I don't coach any of that stuff and that kind of thing shows up. The other thing that I like about it is I think it's a place where people feel so out of control and they feel like they can't be this kind of person that they want to be and like they're like, they're being driven by this other thing. And so I like it cause I want to put them back in the driver's seat. and then also the framework that I study, which is contextual behavioral science is just really good for that. And so that's- Annie: I think it's great because I, you have, you have an incredible blog. One of the blog posts you shared with me, you noted that the typical response in the fitness industry to emotional eating is like control, like just control more things and then like, you'll be fine. And,in order to control emotional eating, individuals just they need to control their diet, then control their thoughts, their emotions, their cravings, and you think that that's pretty much crap. Josh: Yeah. Annie: So tell us why, why do you think it's crap? Tell us more. I mean, we agree. Josh: Yeah. So, one thing I just want to preface this with, because it's the most surprising cause I do think it's totally crap and I've gone that way for a while, but I was really surprised this year that I found some studies where they separated out people that had a high degree of emotional eating and cravings, eating and external eating, which is like, you see food and you want it versus people that scored really low on that. And for the people that scored really low on that control was actually fine. Control actually totally worked just just fine. But that's not the clients that I get, you know, they don't hear me. So, the flip side is that control, if you do have issues with cravings or emotional eating, tired eating or and you're procrastinating or any of those things, then control will have an opposite effect. If it works, it always rebounds and the rebound is always, pretty un-fun. Like people really feel like a really, really bad loss of loss of control and they feel kind of gross and they don't feel good about themselves. Jen: So it's sort of that the more tightly wound you are, the faster, harder you'll spin out. And applied to eating, I think people get that release, like they're so tightly wound around food trying to control everything then getting out of control, they just, I mean in the moment it's like a release, right? Josh: Yeah. So you bring up these two really big points. Oh man, it's so cool. So on one hand you've got this like rule based way of living and the problem with having a totally rule based way of living is you break the rule and you're like, I'm off. I'm like explode. Like do it all because this is the last time ever. So, there's that huge like explosion release thing there. And then the other side is that, like, food really does work temporarily for numbing emotions. So, those two things kind of spiral together where people, like, break the rule and they're like, "Oh no, I'm, I'm off my diet and I'm going to go into all the things." And then they start to feel guilty about it. And then they actually are eating to numb the guilty feelings they have about breaking the rules. It's like- Jen: layer one and layer two. Lauren: Wow. The plot thickens. Josh: Totally. Annie: So I understand if you have emotional eating issues or cravings control strategies backfire, like they aren't helpful. What does work? Josh: Great question. So, it kind of all fits in the world of like acceptance based strategies and I get, I like, I have some clients to kind of freak out when I say, like, "acceptance", you know, cause they're like, "I don't want to accept." But that's just kind of like a family of strategies. And what kind of falls inside of that is, the first thing is actually normalizing. It's just recognizing every single time that you have uncomfortable thoughts and uncomfortable emotions, that it's normal to have uncomfortable thoughts, uncomfortable emotions and, like, the foundation is people, like, believe that that's not okay. You know, cause they've heard so much about, like, positive thinking or controlling their thoughts or all of these things or they were, maybe it wasn't cool growing up for them to have emotions or whatever. Josh: But for whatever reason, they think they're supposed to be a shiny, happy person. And just recognizing it's normal to feel sad sometimes. And the number of coaching calls I get on where something really bad happens to someone and I have to say like, "It's okay. It's okay to feel to feel bad. It's okay to feel sad. It's okay. It's okay to have all these feelings." So recognize that it's okay and normal and healthy. Sometimes we can even pair with, well, that's jumping to the next thing. So the next thing is getting a little bit of distance from uncomfortable thoughts and emotions, in act and acceptance commitment training they call it diffusion or fusion. So if you're fused with your thoughts, you feel like they're coming from you, you feel like they're true or true or false, and you feel like there are a command, you feel like there like something that like urgently needs to be fixed. Josh: Diffusion is getting enough enough distance from your thoughts. You can see that like these thoughts might have come from my parents or the media or magazines or whatever. But like, my automatic thoughts aren't me. Right. They aren't true or not true. They're just thoughts. They aren't an urgent problem that needs to be fixed, right? It's normal to have these thoughts and feeling and so diffusion is a matter of, if people have done any kind of like meditation or mindfulness and like, noticing your thoughts and like not so that's where people get caught up. A lot of people have done, I've tried to meditate or do mindfulness in such a way that they were trying to change their thoughts and not have thoughts. So, it's not that, but it's like being able to notice like, "Oh, here are these thoughts and these emotions." Josh: And it could be as simple as saying, "I notice I'm having the thought that blank" versus just treating the thought like it's true. Or probably a little later we'll get to, there's a metaphor for all this called, let the monsters ride the bus and it will kind of pull this together, but, basically get it, get enough distance from those thoughts that you can be with them and that they're not driving and then the third thing is you've got to drive. Like you're the bus driver, but like you can have these thoughts and still take actions that fit your values in your life. And then the last thing is that requires having actually, like, clarified your values. Jen: Right? Right. Annie: This is like my therapy. This is what I discuss with my therapist. Josh: Do you have an acts therapist? Annie: I don't know. But there's, it does feel very similar into that, like just acknowledging like, these are my thoughts. These are my emotions. What is this? Where did this come from? I don't have to act on them. I can just acknowledge them and, and then sitting with them, not like trying to numb them, not trying to run away from them or like avoid them. Yeah. Lauren: I've realized recently that my, I'm very prone to, what did you say? Fusion? Josh: Yeah. Lauren: Where I'm like, this is my thought and I have to fix it right now. Josh: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Jen: We know that about you. Annie: We could've told you that, Lauren. Jen: She's doing that thing again. Lauren: Well, I recently found this about myself. Jen: This is like my inner Spock. Like when my inner Spock is like, "Halt." You know what I mean? When we have to, "Let's analyze this." Yeah. Annie: So, okay, so Josh, what does this, what does this look like? So people have stress, they have an emotion. They have like, I mean, it could be emotional eating, it can be a wide continuum of emotions. It could be happy. It could be- Jen: We didn't define emotional eating either at the beginning. Annie: Yeah. Do you have a definition, Josh, that you, or a way to define emotional eating? Josh: So most of what I'm looking at is disinhibited eating. So that's, like, a feeling of loss of control with food related to strong emotions, good or bad? Good, good or bad. Wanted or unwanted would probably be more accurate, external, like, seeing things and cravings and so it'd be eating in response to any of those things. With my clients I also lump in, to me it's all the same thing. I also lump in procrastination eating, tiredness eating. Those are the other two. Yeah. Annie: Tiredness eating being that you eat when you're tired. Josh: Yeah. Annie: That's me. Annie: I do that I think. Yeah. Okay, so you experience these emotions, any of them. And then you have a behavior around food. Is that- Josh: Yeah. Annie: Any behavior or it could be a wider range of behaviors? Josh: Oh, it's typically like feeling some degree of loss of control. Like you're not, you don't feel like you're choosing to eat the Brownie, like, I woke up and there was brownies everywhere. Jen: It would be different than happy eating cause we had someone in Balance365. I feel like her emotional eating was out of control. She ate when she was sad, but she also ate when she was happy. But it's more of a loss of control aspect to it. Not a, "Oh, I'm so happy. Let's grab a cake. Celebrate." It's right. Josh: Yeah. It's not, "Let's have a bottle of wine at on date night." It's not, "It's my grandma's hundredth birthday. I'm going to have a chocolate cake." It's not that at all. Should I get into stuff like what, what we do about it? Annie: Yeah. Go for it. Jen: If you want to. Josh: So the simplest thing to do is to put in a waiting period. Right. Could be waiting. 10 minutes, could be waiting a minute. Does it matter? All we're trying to do is they've got this really, really ingrained pattern of have an emotion, eat and if we can separate that, we're good. So that means, like, if I've got clients with pretty legit emotional eating problems, we'll start off with, they have an emotion. They wait 10 minutes, they eat the thing anyway, almost every time. That's fine. We can totally start there. Jen: Progress being the waiting period. Josh: Yeah. Yeah. So, the progress is it's not automatic, they might have to like struggle with it for that 10 minutes or they might have to think about it for that 10 minutes, but at some point, but they've got enough time, they get to choose in that case where they're having it all the time, they don't, they don't have a lot of choice. But it's at least we're breaking that pattern where it's automatic, where they might not even know what they're feeling. They might not even know what they're thinking. Which is actually really common, which is really, which is why, another really, so things you can put in that 10 minutes, you can put it in like looking at a feelings wheel and being able to just like pick out this is what I'm feeling, which actually creates some diffusion that creates some separation. And there's something really magical about people being able to figure out like going from, "I feel bad" to "Oh, I'm sad. I'm sad because this the, you know, my boss yelled at me and that sucks." Right? Maybe it's normal to feel sad when my boss yells at me or whatever. Jen: I do this with my kids like they, but Brene Brown talks about how she has some research that shows, she's done research on college age students and they can only, they only identify three emotions and that's like- Josh: Really? which ones? Jen: Happy, mad and sad. And so she talks about how, you know, in order to be in touch with our emotions, we need to be able to identify emotions and we just aren't taught how to identify. I do this with my kids and we, like, talk about all these different range of emotions outside of mad, sad and happy because you can feel so many different things. But it's so interesting for you to talk about this because I also see so much child psychology stuff that actually applies to two grown ass adults as well. Like we need, you know what I mean, because we weren't taught in childhood. So it, yeah. So it needs to be brought in. Josh: All of the emotion regulation stuff for kids I use with adults. It's awesome. Annie: There's Josh Hillis' coaching secret. Kid psychology. Jen: Go grab your feelings wheel. Annie: Where are you on the spectrum? Jen: Next time Lauren has a meltdown I'm going to say "Go grab your feelings wheel." Annie: All of our slack community, our corporate communication is now going to be, "I feel because" statements, so Josh, you, so you create some distance, you identify some feelings or what your feelings, you get really clear on what that is and then you can eat the thing if you want to still, right? Josh: Yeah. And so they're sort of like these, like, kind of guideline-y things, like waiting 10 minutes. Another like guideline-y thing that I'll start off with, like, either don't do it, do whatever you want. If someone is eating the thing every time then we'll add in like a 50% guideline where 50% of the time they'll eat the thing and 50% of the time they'll find something else. And again, that's just sort of like some training wheels to have to like think about it and choose and be like, you know what, I ate the thing three days in a row. Maybe today I should try going for a walk. Jen: Right, right. Annie: And the point is to really just disrupt the autopilot, right? Josh: Yeah, yeah. Jen: Yes. Right. And also sounds like scaling a little bit. Josh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jen: Rather than, again, what we see big, big, big problem is people try to go from zero to 60 and it never works. It never works. And Lauren had a really good idea for bridging the emotional eating gap. She said if eating a piece of cake is your coping mechanism, try pair it with a bath, go eat your cake in the bath, and then eventually your association can be more, can become about the bath and then remove the cake and then have it be about the bath, right? It's about scaling that towards a healthier coping mechanism. Josh: That's awesome. Jen: Yes. Go Lauren. Annie: Are there, Josh, do you have any other ways to create distance or to even just feel comfortable feeling your feelings without food? Josh: Yeah. So there's always going to be three different things that you can do, three different effective things. One is you can create distance and just sit with it. Like, just accept this is normal. Right? And a lot of times that's really cool. If you're in a situation where you can't do something else, right, Like maybe you're at work and you've got to keep working, and so what you do is you notice those feelings and you come back to being present with your work or your family or whatever's going on around you. Like, you actually get present with that. The other thing would be to have a menu of different self care things that you can do. And so you notice you have those feelings and then you take a walk or do some deep breathing or take a bath or read a book or whatever. At this point I think I've got a list of like 70 different things in like 15 categories. Jen: I want to just say one thing for the moms who listen and the dads, when I find myself emotionally eating, my kids are often a trigger and alternative forms of self care are not available to me. Right? Like I can't go take, I can't check out of parenting and go take a bath or even go meditate or whatever. And so sometimes I'm just freaking eat a bowl of chips. One thing I would say is that I've scaled it from diving headfirst into a bag of chips to like getting out a little bowl and putting some chips in there and then just eating them and going, "Yeah." So I would say like, I mean my emotional eating skills are not, but they have greatly improved over the years. Josh: Well look at that. So there's a couple of great things about what you just said, right. Number one, parenting is a great context for, like, being able to just, like, accept it and be there. Also, you, you did look at, like, separating out the chips and, like, having a certain amount versus just, like, grabbing from the bag, which works for all kinds of treats all across the board. And then the third thing that that brings up is, it's actually, and this is another thing that's such an important thing. It's normal to eat to chill out your emotions sometimes. Jen: I totally agree. I don't think the goal is like 0% emotional eating. It's like, really, how often are you doing it and how, what is the loss of control there, right? Rather than- Josh: Yeah. Jen: Like emotional eating isn't all bad and it's like, really? Is it? Josh: Yeah. Jen: A couple of chips when my kids are losing it? Is that so bad. Annie: Is it problematic for you? Josh: Oh, and it's one those things where like, like the goal is psychological flexibility. So psychological flexibility is the ability to make different choices. Right. It's just an ability to make different choices. Jen: Right. Right. Josh: Like, never emotionally eating is rigid. Jen: Totally. Josh: Always having to, like, where most of my clients had is they've got like a rule, they don't, they don't say it as a rule, but like they've got a rule that if they have emotions they eat, totally rigid. Jen: Right. Josh: If we can get in the middle we're rocking. Jen: Totally. Yes. Annie: That sounds so familiar, Jen. Jen: The messy middle, yes. That's where we like to hang. Josh: I loved that so much. That is like the best phrase in the world. Jen: Brene Brown, I've brought her up a few times now. You can see I really like her. Josh: I like her too. Annie: But- Jen: Yeah, she talks about being in the messy middle, but when you're in the messy middle you get arrows from both sides, which we have also experienced as well. Being in the messy middle between hardcore health and fitness and hardcore body positive anti weight loss. Hanging out in the middle is can be quite lonely and you can get arrows from both sides. But- Josh: I get that. Annie: Okay. So say you're finding yourself, like, face deep in, like, cake or chips or whatever it is and you're, like, you have this, like, moment of, like, "Whoa, what am I doing?" Josh: Yeah. Annie: Like you're like in this middle, like an emotional eating extravaganza. Josh: Yeah. Annie: What do you do? Do the same thing, like, create some distance still or are there different rules? Josh: Oh no, that's, you nailed it already. It's the exact same rules. So, you notice you're in the middle, you separate yourself from it geographically. You give yourself some time to think about it. You do some sort of diffusion exercise. Whether that's, well, where I talked about, like, a feelings wheel, but also I've got some clients that will journal, they'll write out everything that they're feeling and just writing it out gives them a lot of distance. The biggest thing my clients use actually a metaphor called "let the monsters ride the bus" so we might as well dive into that now. So, it's a really, really common act metaphor and the metaphor is, you're a driving a bus and sometimes you get really cool passengers that get on the bus and they're like, "hey, you're great and we love you and high five!" Like that. Josh: And they get on and off when they want. And sometimes they get monsters, they get on the bus, they're like, "Hey, you're ugly and stupid and you always do it wrong" and they get on and off when they want. And your job as the bus driver is to drive the bus and you could always make a left turn towards, like, numbing and controlling, or you can make a right turn towards your valued actions. And what this allows people to do is allows people to realize like, "Hey, I've got these monsters that will get on, will ride along with me and I can still take a right turn towards my values. Even with the monsters on the bus. Like, my job isn't to get rid of the monsters. It's not to not have monsters. It's to let the monsters ride the bus." Josh: And my clients have identified, they almost always have identified, like, what their most common monsters are. And my clients get to a point where they have identified the monsters that they have in the middle of emotional eating. I've got a lot of clients that have a monster that's like, "One more will be fine, one more will be fine, one more will be fine." Or they might have a monster that's like, "You've already ruined it. Might as well go for broke. Let's start again Monday." And so when they have those feelings, again, they don't treat them as true. They don't treat them as, like, them. They're like, "Oh, there's that monster again. And that guy can ride along the bus. And I know that when I'm in, when I catch myself in the middle, my monsters are super loud." Annie: Are you familiar with Pema Chodron's work? She's a Buddhist nun. Josh: No. Annie: This is feels very similar because you have in that blog post, and I think, I think I pulled this quote from your blog posts it said, "The irony is that when people accept cravings as being normal" or I'm assuming these uncomfortable emotions, "they have an increased capacity to tolerate cravings" and that's just very similar to her work. That's like you actually, by just acknowledging the feelings and emotions you suffer less, like, and that's, like, instead of trying to avoid it or like do all these things like this contortionists, like, "I'm going to avoid it in any way possible. I'm going to do all these things so I don't have to feel the thing that I'm trying to avoid feeling." If you just like feel it and like acknowledge it, like, "I see you, monster, you're on the bus, I hear you, but I'm not going to listen or I'm not, you know, whatever." Josh: Yeah. Annie: It's like you can still take action as you notice, what did you, how did you say, that aligns with your values? Josh: Yeah. Annie: Yeah. Even though you hear them, even though they're on the bus- Josh: You nail. Yeah. Yes. The same. And that's a really, really, really big. So, here's the paradox there. You're 1000% right. The paradox is that when you allow the monsters to be there, it is a lot less painful and it's a lot less intense. The paradox is that you don't want to approach it as, "I'm going to allow the monsters" to like force it to be less intense because then it doesn't work. And so that's not actually doing it. But what you're talking about, which is really cool, it's really, really cool, is that there's two kinds of pain. There is normal human pain, which is like the feelings and an uncomfortable thoughts that we all have. And then there's like the added pain that comes from trying to, like, control and fore and not, you know, and so, you do get to avoid all of the added pain and you're not the first person to be, like, you know, there's this Buddhist that kind of sounds a lot like these acceptance and commitment training people. Annie: Well I think it's, I think it's, I don't know if it's just the universe, like, I've been doing kind of this emotional work to like make these messages become really clear to me. But it seems like I've been trying to, and I've talked about this on other podcasts, outsource feeling good or feeling great all the time. Like you said, like we get this message that like, "Maybe I shouldn't be feeling these things" or like "Everyone else feels great all the time and they never have bad days" or "They never have self-doubt" or they never have body image issues. And it's like, "That's actually just not the case. Like, just acknowledging that like you get to feel all the things and you still live, we're going to be okay," like that. It's like, that feels really powerful to me. But I like that you say like, I love that analogy of let the monsters ride the bus. I could see that becoming a big phrase in our community. Can't you Jen? Jen: Yeah, I was already picturing it as a hashtag soon. Josh: That's awesome. Jen: The other thing is I think when I was hearing you say, Josh, is because we have this other guests, she's been on twice now. Her name is Hillary McBride. We have to, we're going to call her Doctor Hillary McBride soon cause she's almost done her Phd and she is also psychologist and she works in body image and she has a book called Mothers, Daughters and Body Image. And so she has sort of encouraged the same process as far as thoughts about your body, like kind of stepping outside of it. But, and then I think her version of monsters on the bus is to acknowledge the monsters on the bus. But to say, is this really true? Just that simple question, is this really true? And I just sort of have this vision of being a driver on a bus hearing all the monsters in the back, but being able to say, "Is that true? Like, do I have to do that? Am I, you know, am I helpless to this? Is that true?" And you know, the answer is often, like, "No, it's not actually true." And then you can kind of just, yeah. Keep doing what you were doing. Josh: Yeah. Jen: Yeah. Josh: Just to, like, it's, like, notice. Jen: Yeah, just notice. Yeah. Josh: Like it's, it doesn't, yeah. Cause we, it is so normal for us to treat it like it's true. Like it's, like, it's so true. Jen: Right. It feels true. Right? Josh: That's awesome. Annie: Okay. So Josh, we discussed, being aware, creating distance, normalizing the experiencing of different emotions. Is there anything else that comes to mind when I'm addressing emotional eating? And again, I do want to recap that this is like as you, as you said at the beginning, that those are tools that work for people that have emotional eating issues. If you don't have emotional eating issues then, like- Josh: You probably don't have to- Annie: Then it doesn't apply. Or what was the difference that you said? That thought control or thought suppression would work for people that,- Josh: yeah. So, here's where it gets really funny. Cause I got really spun whenever the research that thought suppression worked for cravings and emotional eating for people that don't have cravings and emotional eating issues. And but, like, at first I was like, "thought suppression is always bad. Like how does that work?" And so I actually talked to my friend, Amy Evans, who's this brilliant behavioral analyst and she's like, "Well, of course not because the function is different, right? So if the function of that controllers is trying to like push away these uncomfortable emotions and cravings, then it's like an avoidance strategy. But if you don't have issues with those, then it's actually kind of like, maybe it's just like conscientiousness, right? Like it's a totally different thing." And I'm like, "Oh!" So it's good to have genius friends. Jen: Right? So can you give us an example in context? So person A doesn't have ongoing emotional eating issues, so we're talking about, but then something, a craving pops up or, or they're feeling emotional and they're feeling some kind of urge to eat if they don't struggle with ongoing emotional eating issues, then suppression works. Josh: Apparently. Yeah. I mean I don't coach that, but in the, in the research, yeah. Jen: So what would suppression look like for them? Josh: Yes. So, I'm guessing if they didn't score very highly than it's just a simple guideline that they're just like, "Oh, I don't, I don't eat between meals." I don't eat from the, you know, which is, which is totally fine. Jen: Right? Yeah. We call these self-loving guidelines in Balance365. They're not rules. They're flexible guidelines that keep you in a place of self care kind of thing. Josh: Yeah. So like- Annie: Oh, sorry, go ahead, Josh. Josh: I was just going to say if someone doesn't score really high on cravings and they have a little craving, it's pretty easy for them to go like, "Oh, I'm not going to do that." Jen: Right. Josh: "If someone scores really high on cravings- Jen: Then it's a bigger deal to say, "No, I'm not doing that." Yeah. Okay. Annie: I think it's important to note though, as you noted, as we noted in the beginning of the podcast is that that can work for some people, but right now the majority of the health and fitness industry are selling thought suppression. Josh: Yeah. Annie: To everyone. Like, that is, like, the widely accepted common answer versus, "Hey, like, maybe this is normal." Jen: They're also selling emotional eating at any point as as unacceptable. And so, you know, a person who is has an emotional eating episode one day, that's, you know, we're trying to say in this podcast that that's not wrong. And really, if you don't struggle with emotional eating, whether you do or don't engage in emotional eating is not a make or break for anyone's life. Right. It's not, whether you choose the chips or don't, it's just not really an issue. Like it's really a small, tiny little rock that really, you know what I mean? Like we're talking about, there's people that have real loss of control that going on, you know, sometimes daily for them around emotional eating. So, and it comes down to the frequency. How often are you engaging in these behaviors and ultimately what does that end up? What does that look like for you? After three months, 12 months, three years, 20 years, right? Josh: Frequency's everything. Jen: Right. Annie: Josh, you're so much fun to have on our podcast. Do you have more? Josh: Can I throw one other thing out there? The other thing that, the biggest misconception that I've gotten when I've talked to people about this and I've got it so much that I want to make sure not to miss it. This is still a behavioral approach, right? Like they're like, "Oh, you're like deal with your thoughts and like that" but you still, like, you still have to clarify your values and attach behaviors to that. But it's like, so self love guidelines was that? Jen: Self loving guidelines. Josh: Self loving guidelines, or like kind of like more, more intuitive skills or like, all these different things. The whole point of all this is to be able to do those things more frequently. Jen: Right? Josh: Right. So, all of my clients, I shouldn't say all of my clients. The majority of my clients track behaviors, right? So they track how often they have like a mostly balanced meal or how often they have vegetables or how often they, you know, snacked between meals or how often they noticed their hunger before they ate or how, you know, like how often they were full and stopped and like, they track actual behaviors and things that we can count the real world. Monsters on the bus is another thing that they track and count how often they use it. They also track if they didn't need it, like, "Oh, I didn't need it today," but- Jen: Oh interesting. Josh: If they're like, "Oh, I didn't need it and I used it" or "I didn't need it and I didn't use it." Those would be different things and it seems really weird maybe to use like a metaphor as a behavior to track, but it works really well. Jen: So ultimately you're tracking, the behavior change that you have people track is not necessarily emotional eating episodes, but how they dealt with those, whether they dealt with it in a manner that is more healthy than bingeing. Josh: Yeah. Jen: Right. Okay. Josh: Yeah. And so that could look really differently for a lot of different people, but it's like how often did you use this metaphor? How often would you use a diffusion technique? How often did you use your menu of things you can do? Jen: Right, right, right. Annie: Great. So, so you're putting behaviors with it. That's great. Josh: That's what grounds it in the real world. Annie: Yeah. Josh: Otherwise it goes way. Jen: Josh had a thread on his page, several months ago where you said, "sometimes I think" as far as your weight loss clients, you said "If we changed nothing at all except working on stress reduction methods, people would lose weight without changing anything at all." And then I had mentioned or just sleep, like, just a sleep habit, which is, you know, kind of goes hand in hand with stress- Josh: So good. Jen: Isn't it? So it just sort of like, yeah. So imagine if people just, so what we find is people hyperfocus on food, like they just are hyper focused on it and if you zoom out and you get back, if you just laid your foundations for say stress reduction, better sleep hygiene, anything you identify that helps your wellness wheel go, the food just doesn't matter. People will kind of eat until they're satisfied. Do you know what I mean? Like it's often these, the overeating tendencies we have are often a result of these high stress, sleep deprived, poor coping mechanism, lifestyles that we're living, the rest of the overeating issue. You don't have to be so hyper focused on the food or crank the wheel to the right and jump on the Keto wagon or cause you're really never getting to the underlying issues of why you're overeating in the first place. Right? Josh: Yeah. With my most successful clients, all these things we're doing show up as self care. Jen: Right. Totally. Josh: And it's like, and then the people that struggle are the ones that keep trying to do it as punishment. Jen: The food, the food. Yeah, totally. Josh: And the thing about sleep is no one makes phenomenally great food decisions when they're exhausted. Jen: Nobody. That's right. Yeah. Josh: I will throw out there in case there's any people that work like swing shifts or anything like that out there. For a while I had a ton of clients that were nurses that worked overnight and so for them, a lot of it was just acceptance of every time their schedule shifted they were going to be like unusually hungry. And so that is workable. But for everyone else, if we can just turn off screens like an hour earlier, like, man, this all gets easier. Jen: Totally. We just interviewed a sleep doctor before we interviewed you. Josh: Oh really? Annie: Yeah. He said the same thing. Jen: Same thing. Our podcast is the best. Josh: Your podcast is the best. This was so much fun. Annie: Are you always this energetic? I mean, every time, I've talked to you twice in five years, like you always have such great energy about you- Jen: And smiling. You're always smiling. Josh: You're super great. It's fun hanging out with you guys. Annie: You are welcome back here anytime. Josh: Also, this is, like, my favorite stuff to talk about. Annie: So yeah, you are, you're welcome back here. Anytime. Anything, any projects you're working on that you want to tell us about or where can we, where can our listeners find you or keep up with your work? Jen: You're working on a million books. Josh: I am working on a million books, so, losestomachfat.com is still my blog. I still do celebrity workout stuff and emotionally eating research, which is now a weird combination. I've got two books coming out. Lean Is Strong is coming out at the end of this year. And then the untitled emotional eating book is coming out next year. And that's my big stuff right now. It's top secret. Annie: Oh, okay. Oh, okay. Alright, well thank you so much, Josh. Josh: Thank you. Annie: We will talk soon, hopefully. Josh: Okay, cool. Thanks guys. Annie: Thanks. This episode is brought to you by the Balance365 program. If you're ready to say goodbye to quick fixes and false promises and yes to building healthy habits and a life you're 100% in love with, then checkout Balance365.co to learn more.
The Member Spotlight Mini Series continues as Jen and Annie interview Beth, a long-time Balance365 members whose daily gym selfies help keep other community members stay motivated. Beth is one of the amazing women in the Balance365 community - tune in for her inspiring, down to earth perspective on healthy habits and the good that comes from them that goes far beyond weight loss. What you’ll hear in this episode: What was going on for Beth when she joined How Beth found the Balance365/Healthy Habits Happy Moms community Getting past when you get “stuck” The habit that made the biggest difference for Beth Meal planning for a season - Beth’s approach Why Beth does daily gym selfies How Beth found habits became wellness snowballs The role of mutual support between women on social media Feminism and weight loss The problem with goal weights Setting goals you can control vs goals you can influence Beth’s advice to anyone on the fence about Balance365 Beth’s advice to anyone feeling stuck about starting the program Weight loss of a byproduct and the other benefits of eating in a balanced way Moderation as a way to reclaim the body you were meant to have Balanced eating as a way to manage existing health conditions The role of the diet industry in weight gain Resources: New Jeans And Vacation Without Shame: Sarah’s Story Small, Sustainable Changes: A Balance365 Journey With Danica How To Fall In Love With Exercise, Even If You Hate It Vivienne McMaster Episode 21: Before You Delete – How To Handle A Photo You Hate Beth’s Instagram Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Balance365 Life radio. We are back today with our mini series called Members Spotlights. This allows us to introduce you to Balance365 community members who are just killing it inside the program so you can take their wisdom and stories and learn from them. They are busy women and moms just like you who are changing their habits, their mindsets and reaching their goals. Today you're going to hear from one Balance365 member who is determined to find changes she could make that produce results without taking over her life. Beth is a seasoned member of our community and is a self-proclaimed member of the slow starter team but since deciding to take action she has made great strides towards her goals including more balanced dinners and consistent exercise. I can't wait for you to hear more about Beth's experience. Enjoy! Beth, welcome to Balance365 Life Radio, how are you? Beth: I'm OK. How are you guys? Annie: We are golden, we're so happy to have you, we as in me and Jen. Jen's here too. Jen, how are you? Jen: Hi, good. Yes. Annie: We woke you up. You are in a beautiful house coat this morning. Lauren: My Instagram audience is quite accustomed to seeing this housecoat so all good, all good. Not ashamed! Annie: Now it's a signature look and full disclosure, I put one on my wish list. Jen: You don't have a housecoat. Annie: I don't have a housecoat. We call them a robe- Jen: That's bizarre. Annie: Beth, do you call it a housecoat or a robe? Beth: So I call it a robe but what I wear is a housedress. Jen: Oh, I love that. Annie: That's next level, is that like a nightgown? Beth: Yep. Annie: So Jen- Jen: That's my 1950s dream, like but with rights. Annie: I don't know how you can not get twisted when you sleep in house coats. Beth: I don't sleep in it. Jen: Sometimes I sleep in my housecoat. It depends what's going on in my life. Beth: I keep it next to my bed so I can throw it on when I have to go deal with things but no, I'm not wearing it to bed, no. Jen: No, I wear my nighties, they're these silky long things, I don't. I just, you should try it. Annie: No, I'm good in my tank top and sweats. Jen: It's like that meme that went around with the spaghetti straps and the boobs out. Annie: Boobs falling out. Jen: That is me sleeping in a tank top. Beth: Remember when we were like "We're going to stay on topic" Annie: I know that's what I was just going to say, before we started recording we were like, I was talking about how I am pretty good at staying on topic but Jen and Beth are chatty cathies in the most wonderful way possible, they have a lot to say and whereas like, I'm going to keep these ladies on topic and look at us now. Jen: I heard you going for, I saw you going for the B word there and then your lips changed to ladies. Beth: I really respect where they were going. Annie: You know what, the B word in my vocabulary is a term of endearment. Jen: Yes. Annie: But we have also labeled this podcast as clean which is very, very challenging for me so I feel like I deserve snaps for that. OK so, Beth, you have a long, long time member of Balance365 and you have actually been one of those women we've kind of consulted on across the years, I've called you personally and said like "Hey, what do you think of this? What's the vibe on this? What's the community feel on this? And you kind of been, I don't know, like a good sounding board because ultimately we're here for you and our community and you've always been really in touch with our community, so thanks for joining us on the show, it's like about time we have you on. Beth: Yay! I don't know what to say. I'm just happy to be here. Annie: OK. Well, why don't you tell us the Cliff Notes version of how you found Balance365. Beth: Sure, so my sister-in-law, who was recently featured on your podcast, Sarah, she added me to the public group without telling me and this is back in the day when you guys added people in like large groups and so one day and just all the stuff was in my feed. And I was a little bit shocked but it was a message that I really felt good about and it was close to what I was already kind of following in my own social media. So I was in the public group probably, well, you know, 6 months or so and then you guys had a, at the time again Balance365 was going all at once, people were going in groups and so I joined in September of 2016. And yeah, that's the Cliff notes version of how I ended up with y'all. Annie: In hindsight, do you think adding people to the group without telling them is a good start? Because that comes up a lot, like- Jen: That still happens. Annie: And then people, sometimes people are like "How did I get in this group and what is this?" Because our message is quite revolutionary and our opinions so to get and it's big, it's active in a really great way but as you said, when you join the group it can be a little bit like "Whoa!" Like. Beth: Yeah so I think that that strategy can backfire or it can go well, right, so I think for me it was great but I think sometimes for the community it's hard, like people adding, you know, kind of drive by adding their friends to the community, especially if your attitude is "My friend really needs to do the program because she's so crazy and won't stop talking about her bizarre diet, I'm going to add her to this group" like that's horrifying to the community, right, like, because then this person is in there being like "Let me show you my before and after, I lost 100 pounds in 4 months and I never ate any carbs " and you're like "Ahh!" Jen: Totally and then it kind of disrupts the community and some people feel upset even, because they say "I'm in this group to get away from that kind of stuff" Annie: And then the individual can often get defensive and- Jen: Yeah, it's really difficult. I think it's better if people organically find us. Beth: In general I would agree. Annie: Or you approach your person, your friend in real life and say "Hey I've got a group I think you'd really like, would you mind if I add you? Or can I send you a link to join?" Yeah. Well, I'm so happy that Sarah added you and if you haven't listen to Sarah's podcast. Sarah has such a wonderful story too. She's had so many wins in our group and you can find her podcast, we can put that in the show notes too, she's just a gem of a woman. Jen: I enjoy her. Beth: She's my fave. Annie: Is she your only sister? Beth: She's actually my sister-in-law. We're married to twins so I met my husband in college and then I set her up with his brother. We were high school best friends. Annie: Oh that's perfect. I see what you did there, you were just trying to curate your family with people you like. Beth: No new friends. Annie: I love it and now look at you, you're on a podcast with 40,000 women. OK. So, let's let's get to it. You joined Balance365 in 2016. You purchased it a while ago but honestly, as you have been open and shared with us in our community, that it took you awhile to committing to the process and since fully committing you've experienced quite a few changes including weight loss. Can you tell us more about your experience with that? Beth: Sure, so when I joined in September 2016 I was just finishing law school. And starting a career at 35 and I really thought, like, now I'll have too much to implement some habits and lose weight and that was crazy. I don't know what I was thinking. I was entering a new field I was going from having not work a full time job in 8 or 9 years to working 50 plus hours a week so like, it really was not a perfect time for me to focus on implementing habits but I just kind of slowly would implement, like, you know, one habit halfway for 4 or 5 months and you know, dabbled, I did a lot of dabbling. "Oh maybe this is the one! Maybe this is the one! Maybe this is the one!" And there is nothing wrong with that. I actually think that a lot of women when they join program they kind of need a time of doing that. Because they've been relying on programs that project, that portion of my growth. I was stuck there for quite a while, like just about 2 years. And for me that wasn't great, like, I think I was there too long. I needed to kick start something sooner and I think, I see a lot of women in our community who sometimes have that problem, like they get to this point where they're like, "I have to completely address my sleep problem before I can address anything else or I have to completely address this one thing that I'm worried about before I can address something else and for me, I was getting stuck there. Jen: We, it's sort of like, it's like you're waiting for things to be perfect before you can start or something like "My life must look like this and then I can start" and Danica addressed this in her podcast with us as well and I mean, she had the same realisation, nothing changes unless something changes and there is never going to be a perfect time. Beth: Yeah, I, you know, I think it was not the right time, like it was not a good time for me to start when I joined the program. I'm not sad that I did it when I did. I'm happy for the time that I spent allowing myself, because I think that's the other thing is I think some of the women come in and they're, some people who come into a group in any kind of group and they're like, I paid for this and now I have to do it, right? And I think that's relatively unproductive a way to think about things because this is a lifelong experience, right? I can change my habits from now until I die. I don't have to change them all right, you know. And so I think there was a positive to be had with sitting and being like nothing is really changing and that's OK but if you, for me I was starting to feel frustrated with that, that kind of for me was the moment of being like "OK" but then as Danica said, if I don't change something, nothing will change and so for me, some of it was just identifying what kind of habit I can change that would produce a change in my life but not take over my life. I don't want a program that takes over my life. I think that's really important to me. I can't think of anything less interesting than thinking about food and exercise all day and so I needed something that I could make small change and for me that was, I just planned my dinners and then I just ate what I planned. And it's so boring and so mundane but it's what I did and it immediately resulted in changes to my body. Jen: So you were, I guess, that would be your dinner habit which is just one section of Balance365 that we have you address and did it dramatically change what you were eating or how much you were eating or? Beth: So really it was a matter of just, I think it changed the macro makeup of my- Jen: Right, the balance of it. Beth: Yeah, the balance. I was already eating all the all the correct things, I just was kind of addressing, you know, how much protein I really needed at dinner. I was looking at my dinner as a whole instead of just like, well, here's the meat and your vegetable or whatever, like, I was kind of looking at it as whole, you know, like, "OK, what can I change? What will help me stay full? What will be satisfying? What will I be willing to eat? I am known, I suppose, in the community I meal plan once for a whole season because I hate meal planning, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. So I meal plan at the beginning of a season and then we need the same 7 dinners for 13 weeks, which is not for everyone but it works for me and so by picking things that I actually knew I would eat and that were balanced I was less likely to be like "I don't feel like eating that! I'm just going to the drive through?" or I think one big thing for me is they were easy. I picked easy things, which I will say during the 2 years when I was not actually implementing the program, I for sure would see Lauren and Annie talking about hating cooking and I would be like, "Oh come on, ladies, like, it's just not that hard, like, just, like how hard is it, right? But as I implemented this career that, you know, required, like, I have to lean on my husband a lot more to do a lot of that stuff and so planning things that I knew that at the end of the day it would be, there was chicken in the fridge and I could just take a bagged salad and throw it on top of it, like, it made it so that I would actually do it and so I just did, I just ate the dinner that I planned. I think that's so boring but it's what I did. Jen: The thing is studies show that one of the biggest contributing factors to our food choices is convenience and so this is not it's not necessarily a flaw of humans, it's something, you know, it's population wide but we are busy people, we are very busy people and that's why meal planning works. The majority of women who work with us are actually working women, like working outside of the home, women and you know and so you know, we get it. Like, I mean, Annie, Lauren and I work so you, when it comes to supper time, you know, it's just, you know, I don't have time in my day to sit down in the morning and decide what we're having for the day and go to the grocery store and get all those ingredients and you know, I used to do that. I used to really enjoy it, like, I really did enjoy that component of being a stay at home but working, being a working mom is a whole new ballgame and yeah, meal planning can be just such a stress reducer, in a working family, I shouldn't say woman, I should say family. Bring boys in close here. Annie: You know, circling back to when you're talking about how Lauren I hate cooking. Beth: Sorry. Annie: No, no, I can own that because I don't, it's not that I can't, I mean, I can follow directions and probably cook some meals but I just don't want to, like, just like some people don't want to run or don't want to exercise or just like that's just not how I want to spend my time so that's why I really love Balance365 is because I'm not like, if it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work period. And so for me to go out and buy this meal plan that requires all this cooking or all this meal prepping or all this like grocery shopping, like that's just not going to, like it to me it feels like me trying to fit a, what is it? A square peg into a round hole, like, I could maybe do that for a while, like white knuckling, I could like stick to the plan for a little bit but eventually I'd like, that doesn't sound fun, like, that's just not like something I enjoy. So I can still balance my meals in a way that works for me that doesn't require a lot of cooking or a lot of meal prepping or on the flipside, someone that likes to cook can also do a lot of cooking with it if they want. If that's how they want to spend their time and it's like no judgment or no, neither one is better and worse than the other, it's just what works for you, period, is all we're really concerned with. Jen: I wanted to circle back to those 2 years where you weren't inactive, that's the thing, it's not like you bought and then you were inactive, you were very active in the group particularly in, we have a spin off group and some spin off groups, I guess, it's the Facebook group that's attached to our strength program Arms like Annie and you were active in Balance365 as well as you were quite active in Arms Like Annie. So it's not that you actually didn't do anything. You implemented an exercise habit. Beth: That's true, yep, but as, I mean, we've talked about it in the community, many times, like, an exercise habit is wonderful and there's so many positive things you gain from an exercise habit, but you know, if I just change nothing about my dietary habits, my nutrition habits, you know, it may not make a big dent in my fat loss and it didn't but it did produce lots of other positives. Jen: Absolutely, there's so many, you know, I would say fat loss is the last reason to work out. I mean, that's me personally, I don't know how other people feel but there's just so many health benefits to it that you don't even have to throw fat loss on the list, so but that's so, that's wonderful for you, really, holistically to have an exercise habit nailed and then you moved on to nutrition and- Annie: You know, that's actually one of my favorite things about Beth is that she is posting her selfies, her gym selfies at ridiculous hours in the morning because sleep is, you know, a love hate thing with you sometimes, so you go to the gym in the morning by yourself and you post your selfie and half the time you're like "Look, I didn't want to do this but I'm here and now and now I feel better or now I know my day is going to like take off in a completely different direction had I hit the snooze alarm or turn off the alarm and not come at all" and I love that you own it, just like I own I don't like cooking. You don't really like exercise but you see the benefits, like, you feel better, your day goes better, the rest of your habits seem to fall in line, which you've said before, it's kind of a snowball habit, like, your day is just different when you exercise, right? Beth: Yes, that whole, yeah, there's a lot I guess I'm trying to stay on topic, there's a lot to say about my gym habit and my selfies and all of that. I do find I don't enjoy exercise, it's not, I danced in, like, my youth, when I was pre-college I was a dancer and I loved that but I never really found that same level of enjoyment from any other kind of exercise, including like, people were like "You should take a group fitness class, that's like dance based." No thank you, I don't want to, I'm not interested. It's not the same. You know, and people are like "You should do the barre method." Please, no thank you. I will just not. I will just watch my daughters dance and I will get the same enjoyment from that and my sons. I get enjoyment from that but not with the exercise. So I am, I did, I don't like cardio at all, and so I bought Arms like Annie and I think when I bought it there might not have been a spinoff group yet and it turned out the Facebook's spinoff group really helped me achieve consistency with my habit and I feel so ridiculous, I will be honest, like, the selfies feel ridiculous to be me most days. But so there's a couple things, I guess, on the selfie thing, one is, I was mentioned in a previous podcast about what if you hate exercise, so I do, I put selfies every day when I'm in the gym, partly to create a sense of accountability to the group that I've said I will do this and I will do it and I show up. And as weird as it feels to me because I don't think I've done anything inspirational, like, I have women both in our community and women who like follow me on Instagram who are like, they feel that it is inspirational that I get up and I go to the gym. Jen: It is. I find, sometimes I see them in the morning and I'm like "Oh, just go, Jen, just do it, Beth did it. Annie: Beth did it, you can do it too. Beth: It's hard for me to see it as inspirational. I really try and treat my social media like, I try to treat it like a real, when I was coming, when I was having kids, I'm a little older than, my kids are older than y'all's kids and when they were coming up I found it really hard, there wasn't as much social media and I felt really alone in hating being a mom, like I hated it and I felt alone, so when I tried to put myself out on social media in any way, I tried to be really honest about who I am and how it feels. So I do say, I hate cardio, I hate that I'm here in the gym, I say "I had to talk myself into every single set I did today." And I feel like, I see that there are women who feel the same way and they do see it as inspirational that I went. It's funny because I kind of see it as just me like kvetching into the like universe but I see why people feel it's inspirational but also, I do the selfies for me. So a long time ago in the community, I think it was when I was in the public facing group, Jen had recommended something and I somehow came to to the work of Vivian McMaster, she's a photographer and she focuses on, she has programs focusing on self portraiture as part of, like, self acceptance and Annie said the same thing a number of times in the group, like, just taking pictures of ourselves and just seeing what we look like can get us to body neutrality. Jen: We have a whole podcast, not a whole podcast but we've mentioned this in a podcast and it's the whole thing of if you don't like the way you look in photos, you shouldn't take less, you should take more and look at yourself more. You need to get used to the way you look. Beth: Yeah, so I am, I really have tried to, like, so I will say I don't post a lot of unattractive selfies of myself, I'm still extraordinarily vain. Annie: Yeah, like you're feeling yourself. Beth: But I take, literally, in a month, probably thousands of selfies, like, I met admit how narcissistic that sounds but whatever, here it is. And they are attractive and unattractive and they are from angle that look good for me and the angles that don't because when I take them and I see myself I become, like, inoculated against seeing myself. And there was a long time where I was taking a ton of gym selfies and I was feeling good because I was taking a specific angle and I was avoiding all the other angles and I went on a trip with my friends and somebody posted, you know, a picture of a group of us and "Ahhh!" It was like a wake up call that, like, OK, like, I've lost some of the honesty of this practice. And I needed to get back to taking pictures and seeing myself for what it really is and this is just my body, this is just the body that I live in and it's fine and sometimes I feel really great about it and other times I feel kind of ambivalence about the whole thing and neither of those is the right emotion, they are just how I feel in that moment and so, I, so, yeah, so I take selfies for me as well I don't just take them to be an inspiration to the community. Annie: I love it because, to me, to me it's an act of self-love and it's an expression of self-love and I think, it's, sometimes women need permission to do the same and when they see other women taking selfies at the gym from good angles, from bad angles, like, this is cute, I don't really like this but I'm going to post it anyway because this is me like it gives women the permission to do the same and in fact, along the same lines of kind of what both you and Jen were talking about is we don't really cultivate self love by just focusing on the stuff we love, it's also exploring the stuff that we maybe don't love or even the stuff we hate and like why do we hate this, what is it about this, where did this start, where did this come from? Like and how can we move through that or at least like not be so dang uncomfortable with it, like you said when you see that photo, like, "Oh my god, delete, untag, get rid of that, I don't ever want to see it again!" Like maybe just sit with it, which we have a whole another podcast on that we can link in the show notes too but yeah, so I love that about you, Beth, I love that you, you just own it and if you've ever posted a selfie on social media best sees it, she is your top hype woman. She is like, liking that stuff, she's commenting, she's responding to your story, like, "Yes, woman, yes" Jen: Women should, they should do that for each other, we should be celebrating each other non stop because we are coming out of an era where we shamed, we were shamed and we've shamed each other. We are coming out of that era and it's time we women need to stop hiding, post all the selfies. Beth: Absolutely. Annie: Beth will have, I'm just going to, I hope you don't mind me- Jen: I'm going to post one today now. And I'm going to wait for Beth to comment on it. Annie: I hope you don't mind me sharing, Beth but Beth, you even posted, because we're friends on Facebook, like, I think you said something like, I've had a glass of wine or something, post your selfies so I can hype you up. You were going to work, you're like "This is like, I'm going to spend, you know, X amount of time hyping up women in my life, like, telling them how awesome they are." Jen: We're doing a selfie now. Beth: Okay, sorry, i just needed to take one for the gram, I was doing it for the gram. So yes I, so I have a very boring career as a real estate attorney, it's not anything real super exciting and it's not the work that I, I mean- Jen: It's not Law and Order? Beth: No and I love what I do but it is not, it's not lifting up people, you know, the way that I want my life, the way I want my life's work to be and what I have come to realize is like, you can have a career and you can also have a life's work and they don't have to be the same thing and I really truly believe that my life's work is about helping people feel good about themselves and accepting themselves and so it's weird because, like, I'm not, I'm just a girl who has friends on Facebook. Like, I'm not, I'm not, I don't have a public facing Facebook page and on how that's not what my life is about, I can only touch so many lives because I am a busy mom but I have a community of, especially because I went to law school late in life, I have a community of women who are younger than me who, I'm like, you could do this before you're 35, you could be in love with the life that you are choosing, you could be in love with it now and you can accept yourself radically now, you do not have to wait until you're an old woman, you don't have to wait until you have gray hair to decide to love what you look like and so I do. I will, especially, it's true if I drink I'm especially likely to just troll my friends' Instagrams. Jen: Loving up on all of them. Beth: But I will also, like, if I'm having a bad day I will ask people to post selfies in my comment sections so I can tell them how great they are because- Jen: Oh, that's so lovely. Beth: It really does make me feel better, like I feel better doing that and as Jen, I do think, I think loving yourself radically as a woman is a feminist act, like, I think it is saying to society that, like, you know, you can kick rocks, like, this is what we're doing now. Jen: Yeah, we're loving each other, like we are, this is not a woman against woman society anymore.. Beth: No and I saw a meme the other day day and it said something along the lines of "Who needs to send scandalous pictures to men when we can just celebrate each other" and that's how I feel, right, like, you don't have to, like I don't know, I don't care, you don't have to think I'm cute. Like, my girlfriends will hype me up and I am, I joke, I'm everybody's auntie on Facebook because if you post a selfie I am going to tell you how great you look. And I just, I, it's part of, I think, it's one of the things I love most about myself and so it matters. Annie: I love it about you too. Jen: I know that you have to go, Beth, so here's what I hear. I hear radical self acceptance, really bad A-S-S gym habit. Working out, building the guns every morning and as a byproduct of and you started implementing nutrition habits, balanced nutrition habits make you feel good and as a byproduct you have seen some weight loss that you are, I don't know if pleased is the right word, how do you feel about the weight loss? Because I know you are a very, you are, you've, you strongly identify with the feminist movement, I know that about you and so sometimes in the feminist circles weight loss is a touchy subject, right, because as you know it's been used to abuse women for so many years, so how do you feel as a strong feminist who has changed their nutrition habits and is losing weight? Beth: You know, I'm pretty ambivalent about weight loss, if I'm being really honest. I, some of that is because of all the things you mentioned, right, like how our bodies look has been such a weapon against us over the centuries. And so some of it's that and some of it is I have, well, I didn't do a lot of dieting in my life, I did do a lot of binge and restrict, just traditional trying not to eat the bad thing- Jen: Just the traditional- Beth: Just the traditional, you know, thing that we all do, I don't eat anything and then I eat all the things. So I have lost tremendous amounts of weight and been congratulated by the world and then have the experience of gaining it back and feeling like there was something wrong with me for having gained it back so I am a little bit ambivalent about weight loss for that reason, like, just that I want to make sure that I don't put too much of my value in it. Jen: Right. Beth: But, like, so I actually shared that my mother's in town right now and I shared this story with her the other day and I thought it was really, it's one of the things I gained from Balance 365 that I'm the most thankful for. I was in my doctor's office the other day and I told him I was, like, "Look, you know, I'm doing all this stuff and like the weight, really, like it's just, it's a slow slog. I feel like it's not coming off. I'm doing the things I'm supposed to do and it's not coming off." And he told me, he said, "You know, you're an attorney who has 4 children. You live a very high stress life and it will be hard for you to lose weight, like it's going to be hard, like the stress is going to make it difficult," and he said, "So, you know, I wouldn't put a lot of weight on that. I wouldn't put a lot of your focus on trying to lose weight because it may not happen, you know" and it felt really, at first, really discouraging. But there were lots of times in my life where if I had heard that message from a doctor that I would have been like "Well, I'm calling it. It's ice cream sundaes for the rest of the week and I'm staying in bed and I'm not going to the gym" and instead, I mean, this was probably 2 months ago, I have only increased my gym consistency and focused more on my eating because it really turns out weight loss is not my aim doing this, ultimately. I've stopped linking the things that I do for my health to how fat I am. Like I've just stopped linking those two things. Jen: Good for you. The weight loss is just a byproduct, like, it really, you know, it's and that's what Balance365 is about and that's what a lot of women's journeys have to be is that weight loss is not a driver, it's not like, you know, where for a lot of women it was, right? It was like wake up in the morning, OK, what do I have to do to lose weight today, right? Instead of going, waking up in the morning, saying "Hey, how am I taking care of me today?" and the byproduct of that, you know, it is what it is and for some people that could be weight loss. Annie: And one of the kind of philosophies that we preach is that weight loss is not a behavior, it's not a habit, it's a byproduct or it can be a byproduct of our habits and that's not, that's, I mean, we're a habit based behavior change company, so we're focusing on behavior change that you're after, that's important to you, that matters to you, that works for you and if weight loss is a byproduct of that and you're comfortable with it, then we're comfortable with it. Beth: Yeah, and that was a big plus for me here because I've always been like "What's your goal?" "Well, my goal is to lose 50 pounds or my goal is to lose two pant sizes or my goal is to, you know, whatever" and it was like it was revolutionary for me for my goal to be "I'm just going to show up at the gym," like, I'm just going to show up and I may not have any strength gains and I may not lose any weight and I may not have any result, there may not be a result, I'm just, my goal is something that I can control which is shocking because most of us have been in programs for our whole lives where the goal was something that in reality we have very little control over, right? Jen: Right. Beth: You can do all the things right, you can exercise perfectly and you still may not lose weight and you have no control over it so your goal is something you're like, I may never gets to, that's the worst, who wants that kind of goal? Jen: Yeah, I mean, I think you if you know your body well, you know, you can influence your weight, you know, that there are certain behaviors that influence weight loss but having, I mean this is why we have to be very careful with setting goal weights is that what if you, what if you are living a life you feel very healthy and balanced and you're not at that goal weight? Like, what are you willing to do, right and so it's sometimes it's just disappointing to set them, right, like? Annie: Right, well and even in our experience after coaching thousands of women, you know, the goal weight that many women have for themselves is like so unrealistic. "Where did you get that number?" "Well, that's what I graduated high school at. That's what I got married at 30 years ago." Jen: And you dieted for 6 months before your wedding day and now- Annie: Yes and I think, you know, Jen and I talk about this all the time, you know, Jen and I similarly, we're within a year apart with 3 kids, same height but Jen and I have like a 50 pound difference between us and so for me to think that like, "I could be Jen's weight," or for Jen to think "Oh, I could be Annie's weight," like that's just absurd. Like it's just, like, not realistic on either end of the spectrum and so yeah, I think that's just something to consider when, if you're listening and you have a have a goal weight in mind or if that's, like, in your back pocket it's like maybe give that some thought- Jen: Maybe focused on your behaviors and as an act of self-love you can let your weight be what it's going to be while you are pursuing behaviors that feel really good and really healthy for you. Beth: Well and I don't, I guess, I didn't, I don't want to sound like, you know, like, I sound like a Debbie Downer, like, I feel ambivalent about weight loss and you might not lose anything and I should say I have lost 15 pounds since the beginning of September so it's not as if, I'm not trying to say, like, it's impossible to lose weight or you you can't lose fat. Absolutely, it's possible but it's just for me, it's been very freeing to have goals that have nothing to do with my weight, that are just goals that I have control over so I don't want to make it sound like "Eh, lose weight" Annie: Beth, I enjoy you so much. OK, real quickly and then we'll let you get on with your day because, you know, it's a nice Sunday afternoon before the holidays, perfect timing for a podcast. If someone was on the fence and they were listening about joining Balance365 what advice would you give them? Beth: I think there is never, I don't think there's anyone who couldn't benefit from the program. So I will start by saying, "I think you should do it." And alternatively, as a second thing, if you are in a position where, like, you're worried, like, financially I don't know if I can do it, or you know, if you have reasons that you are holding yourself back that are valid ones that for you, then I do think, my experience is that there is certainly benefit to being in the group before you're ready to make changes but it's OK to wait, it's OK to wait until you're ready. So if you feel like it's not right then maybe it's not right right now but there's no one who I wouldn't say "Yeah this is a program that you can benefit from." So, you know do it, you can hang with me in the slow start club. There's a lot of us, there are a lot of us in the slow start club and I think now, kind of my purpose, it's not another life's work but like my goal in the group is to kind of try and help those people who are still hanging back, wanting to start, not knowing how to. Jen: We have a lot of Balance365ers who are listening and so if you and some of them are like, they're holding back from just getting started, so what would your advice be because I saw you tell somebody the other day in the group, I'm not sure what the post was about but you said "Hey look, I waited two years, I think, you waited two years to get started and that was a big mistake." Beth: Yeah. Jen: So what would your advice be to move people out of that zone of like- Annie: Contemplation. Jen: I've started but not starting, I've purchased but I'm not starting. Beth: I think I would say, "OK, so I think, my personal opinion is that starting with the balancing one meal is the right way to go. Now, that was what was right for me, not everybody is going to start the same way and but I'm speaking to people that for whom balancing a meal would be a good way to start and here's what I would say to those people: you have to eat something for dinner tonight anyway. Jen: Right, you might as well balance it. Beth: You have to. It's not as if your stress means you don't eat dinner, in fact, most of us are here because our stress means extra dinner, so like, if you are in a red zone and Annie and I, when we tried to record this in the past and I was so sick, we talked a lot about how I have ambivalent feelings about the red zone as well, like it's not, I kind of feel like "Eh, if you don't want to do it, don't do it. For me, that's a big part of what I love about the community is there's not this sense of like "No excuses," like, there aren't really truly, there are no excuses, you just, you know, you either do it or you don't do it, because you want to or because you feel like you can or whatever, it's fine. If you don't do it, you don't do it. Nobody is watching. Jen: And no one's judging you. Beth: Like, I don't care. I don't care if eat a balanced dinner, like, you're cool. I have met so many wonderful women in the community and you know what, if they don't eat a balance dinner, I could give two, right? Jen: Well, some people don't take action because they feel like, especially in this sort of "wellness industry area" they they don't take action because first of all, taking action in the past has been this big thing, overhauling their life, it's not like, "Hey, just balance your dinner. It's just like this one thing." It's like this overhaul, right and number two is you feel like people are watching you and you're going to be judged and you're going to get this right or you're going to get it wrong and it's like, we're not here to judge you, we're not here, you can't pass or fail. This isn't a, you know, we're just working at change, all together. Beth: Yeah, I guess, so yeah, I guess my advice would be just pick a meal and balance it and it feels, I know it feels like there's 7000 things that are keeping you from doing it, I know it feels that way, because we all feel that way, we all feel like, like you said, it might be the judgment of past diets or it might be fear of failure or it might be actual things, right it might be a sick child or a marriage that's falling apart or it could be any number of things. I have interpersonal problems too. I have and that's not to say,"I have these problems and if I can do it you can do it." I mean, we're all going to live that way forever.I have yet to meet a mom who's like my day is just so smooth and I have nothing to do with my time except meal plan and make perfectly balanced dinners. Like, I've never met that woman. I've never met her. Jen: Yeah. Beth: I don't think she exists. I think she's fake and so you're going to make dinner tonight. You are going to. You're going to eat something so choose to eat something that is closer to what you think would help you achieve your goals. So, for me that meant just planning, I'm going to be honest, like I said, I go to Pudova, I buy chicken and I throw it on top of a bag salad, that is what I eat like 3 nights a week when my children are not home because it means I don't have to do anything. It's my favorite and I probably would eat it 7 days a week if my children were not home and I didn't have to feed them. Jen: Beth, do you feel better? Like, I mean, is there anything, like, can we attach some feelings to this? So because eating balanced meals isn't about, we're not guiding women into eating more balanced meals for weight loss, that's not our primary driver, do you feel better eating more balanced meal? Beth: So yes, one, like, digestive health is better, obviously, when you eat vegetables, friends, like that's just true. Jen: It's just yes. Beth: It's just a fact about your digestive tract and my digestive health is better when I eat vegetables. I personally have some gall bladder issues and when I'm balancing my fats I feel better in that sense and I think my sleep has improved since I've been implementing more balanced eating, probably some of that is because if I'm not going through the drive through I'm less likely to drink caffeinated beverages late in the day. Jen: Right. Annie: Right. Beth: So there's a number of things that I think are positive and some of it, I won't lie, some of it is that fat loss has been a byproduct has also made me more comfortable in my body in a number of ways and so I think there's lots of positives that have come from eating a balanced dinner. Jen: Yeah, I mean, I heard from one of our members as far as the fat loss, she said you know it's the little things like bending down to tie my shoes and not having, you know, all this fat in the way, it's like physical comfort that she quite enjoys about losing weight off her body and I think that's OK to talk about, right, like there's only so much we can control each of us individually and as long as we're talking inside the constructs of what you, what is possible and achievable for you I think that's, you know, totally OK. And the other reality is that in the culture we live in that is so, so guided by diet culture a lot of women, a lot of women the bodies they are in are a result of years, decades of dieting and sometimes implementing these habits and seeing fat loss is about taking back the body you were meant to have before you got into this binge and restrict cycle that the diet industry pushed you into, resulting in actually living in a larger body than what is healthy and just your, what your natural body is, right and I'm here for that, too, right, so we say about Balance365, we're not trying to help women live at a body weight that's leaner than what's healthy for them, we're trying to get you to reclaim the body you were meant to have. Annie: I love these conversations with Beth because it's, like, not just about, like, this exterior, like, this has a very deeply rooted, deeply seated meaning of exploring, like, your relationship with yourself, your relationship, how your relationship with the world affects your relationship with your family and your other relationships and like, how, it just changes how you show up in the world on so many levels and so I just always love Beth's perspective. Jen: Me too. Annie: Yeah, OK, Beth, I know you have places to go, would you mind sharing your Instagram handle? Beth: Sure, my instagram handle is bethiclaus, beth like my name, i, claus, like Santa Claus and you can follow me, I think it's set to public right now but I'll probably get a private but if you ask to follow me and you're a woman- Jen: She'll let you. Beth: I definitely will let you. If you're a man, who know, maybe not. Jen: We're going to link to your Instagram account in the show notes. Beth: Girlfriends only. And so yeah, I mean, yes, if you follow me and then you do an Instagram story, there's like a 90 percent chance if you put a selfie in there you'll get feedback from me. Jen: Praise emojis and heart eyes. Beth: Positive affirms only as I like to say. Annie: Yeah, it's, what a great, you know, it's like dropping a pebble into a pond and watching the ripple, like, expand out. It's wonderful. I think that's such a great way to spend your time. I can't, like how valuable is that, making other women feel good or just encouraging other women to feel good, so thank you both for joining, Jen, this was fun that you were able to join for a member spotlight. It was enjoyable. Jen: Yes. Annie: Even in your house coat. Jen: Yes and now we can all go and enjoy Christmas. Annie: I know, I know but it's going to be way past Christmas by the time this comes out so- Beth: Merry Christmas, y'all. Annie: Merry belated Christmas. Alright, thank you ladies, we'll talk soon. Beth: Bye. Jen: Bye.
GUEST BIO: Jen Bunk is a career coach for tech managers, helping them to upgrade their teams, careers, paychecks and lives. Jen is also the host of the People Stack podcast, where she interviews authors, coaches and leaders of tech companies from around the world. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil’s guest on today’s show is Jen Bunk. Her path into the world of IT was a long one. She started out working in the academic world. Today, she helps tech managers to upgrade their careers. She teaches them how to share what they are doing and the value that adds effectively. That is in a way that quickly leads to promotion, bigger paychecks and a better work-life balance. Her advice is tailored to fit in with the career objectives of each of the people she helps. Jen is the host of the People Stack podcast for which she interviews career coaches, authors and tech leaders, for around the globe. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (0.56) – So Jen, can I ask you to expand on that brief intro and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Jen starts by saying how cool it is for her to be interviewed rather than being the one doing the interviewing. She explains that she is a career coach for technical managers. That means that she helps engineering managers, IT managers, technical project and product managers and others. Occasionally, she will work with data analytics specialists or science team leaders too. She helps these people to upgrade their careers. To get a promotion, move fields get a raise and a lot more besides. Her aim is to help them to do this without having to work ridiculously long hours to achieve this. (2.46) – Do the people you work with have different career objectives? Jen says yes, everyone has a unique story. So, they have different goals and career paths that they want to follow. But, there is one thing that ties them all together. They all feel that they are stuck in their career. Usually, they have worked hard to try to progress, but not been able to do so. Others are doing OK, but are having to work ridiculous hours to achieve what they want or stay in their roles. Most of her clients are middle management. Typically, she is working with the people who directly lead the tech teams. (4.03) – Can you please share a unique career tip with the I.T. career audience? If you want to upgrade your career, it is not enough to be excellent, and strive to be the best and continually add value. That is only part of it. You need to evangelize that excellence; essentially you have to become good at self-promotion. Jen calls it self promotion on steroids. You need to let others know what you are doing and how it is benefiting the organization you work for. (5.13) - So, do you have any specific suggestions of how people should go about doing that themselves? Jen says that this type of self-promotion has to be done carefully. First, you have to get comfortable with the fact that you are going to have to promote yourself. Self-promotion is something that makes a lot of people squirm. What you need to do to get started depends on the circumstances you are in. If you are not doing any self-promoting you need to ask yourself why that is and work out how to get started. Whereas, if you are already doing it and it is not working you would need to take a different approach. Perhaps you would need to communicate more clearly or share what you are doing in other arenas. There is no one size fits all answer. (6.29) – Can you tell us about your worst career moment? And what you learned from that experience. Jen explains that in her former life, she was a college professor. About 10 years into her career, she applied for promotion and tenure. A move that is not uncommon, often, the two go hand in hand. The process of gaining tenure and getting promoted is a long one that typically takes about a year. It involves working with and being assessed by various departments at different levels. For example, working with the Dean of the College, as you go through each level you are assessed. This process starts at the department level. So, initially it is your colleagues, people you work with every day that consider your applications. Unfortunately, at this stage, the department committee told her they were happy to support her for tenure, but not for promotion. Naturally, Jen was shocked and angry. It was a real ‘what just happened to me moment?’ Getting through the meeting was a trial. She could not work out why her colleagues had made that decision. In the end, both the Dean and the provost supported and recommended her. So, ultimately she got tenure and promotion. It was not a great experience, but it was one that Jen learned from. Only then did she realize that the Dean knew what she was doing so could understand the value she was adding. But, importantly, the people she worked with every day did not. The result of that situation was nearly disastrous. (10.03) – Presumably you have taken what you learned from that experience and applied it to your coaching career. Jen says yes definitely. That is where her ‘evangelizing your excellence’ message came from. Her anger at her colleagues turned to understanding when she realized she had not made sure they knew what she was contributing. It was a hard lesson to learn, but a learning moment that means she can be very effective at stopping others from continuing to make a similar mistake. (11.20) – Phil asks Jen what their best career moment was. For Jen, that has been being able to grow her coaching business at an astonishing rate. After just 3 years in business, they reached the 6 figure turnover point. This was a huge achievement in an industry where most coaches typically turnover between $30,000 and $40,000 per annum. It is an achievement that shows what they are doing is effective. Her clients are getting amazing results. (12.20) – Phil says I assume you get some great career stories from the people you are working with. Jen agrees and explains that she is now sharing more of them. At first it felt a little weird, after all these are personal stories. But, she has found that when people are doing great they really want to share their experience with others. (13.00) – Can you tell us what excites you about the future of the IT industry and careers? The fact it is always changing is what excites Jen the most about the industry. The other day, her husband was talking to their nine-year-old son about what he wants to do when he is older. He ended up explaining that neither of the jobs his parents do now and love doing did not even exist when they were kids. Within the IT industry, new careers are constantly emerging. Phil agrees and reminds the audience that this ever-changing landscape means that there are always plenty of opportunities for progress. (14.25) – What drew you to a career in IT? Even in the 80s, Jen loved tech. Her brother got a computer for Christmas. Jen wanted to play on it all the time. So, now she works in the industry she feels like she has come home somehow. (15.12) – What is the best career advice you have ever received? That would be – take extreme ownership of your career. Make sure you are always in the driver’s seat. Phil agrees the days where the firm you worked for automatically helped you to learn more and progress your career are long gone. (15.42) – If you were to begin your IT career again, right now, what would you do? Interestingly, Jen would not do anything differently. She has enjoyed everything she has done, so would do it all again. (16.11) – What are you currently focusing on in your career? In terms of her own career, Jen is building a million dollar business. To do this she will be pulling in other entrepreneur friends. The foundations of this have already been laid with the formation of the Two Comma Club. So, she is switching from fulfilling day to day functions and taking on more of a CEO role. Being the person who sets the strategic vision and leading the way. But, she still plans to do some coaching. Jen wants to continue to have direct access to clients. Phil summarizes this as becoming the person who works on the business rather than in the business. (17.38) – What is the number one non-technical skill that has helped you the most in your IT career? Being a good writer has proved important. But, for Jen her most important non-technical skill has been good time management. It has enabled her to be as effective as possible. (17.45) – Phil asks Jen to share a final piece of career advice with the audience. If you want to progress your career, you have to take true ownership of it. When it comes to our careers many of us act like we are the pawns in a game of chess rather than the player. All too often we sit there waiting for opportunities to come along. Instead we should be acting like the player and be the one who makes things happen. You can, and should, be the one to move the pieces around the board. A client once told her that he felt like he was wearing a pair of golden handcuffs. He was making a lot of money and a great position, but, he did not really like where he worked. Plus, he was working 60 hours a week. So, Jen asked him – who put those golden handcuffs on? Of course, it was him, which was great news because it meant that he could take them off. Phil says that is a great analogy. All you need to do to take them off is to realize that you have the key. BEST MOMENTS: (4.17) JEN – "It's not enough to simply be excellent, and strive to be the best and continually add value.” (4.58) JEN – “Building the excellence and the evangelist excellence coming together is what leads to career upgrading." (15.16) JEN – "Take extreme ownership, it's your career. It's no one else's. You're in the driver's seat." (18.19) JEN – "I like to make sure that every moment is used as effectively and efficiently as possible" (19.49) JEN – "It can be really hard to realize that I'm the one who put myself in this situation. But I can get myself out because I'm the player, not just a pawn." CONTACT JEN: Twitter: https://twitter.com/JBunky @JBunky LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenbunk/ Company Website: https://thepeoplestack.com Personal Website: https://jenbunk.com
Can you love your body and still want to change it? The answer to this question depends greatly on who you ask. Some people in the body-positive camp think that weight loss and self-love can’t co-exist, while the diet and fitness industry encourages self-hatred. Does the truth lie somewhere in the messy middle? Tune in for Jen, Annie and Lauren’s discussion on the topic. What you’ll hear in this episode: Has the body positivity pendulum swung too far? Change as a natural consequence of habits and behaviors Mindset blocks and change What research says about how much control you have over your body Altering appearance for self-expression Examining motivations for changes Being realistic about timing of changes Is there way too much overthinking going on? Mothering yourself Identifying when you need self-compassion and when you need tough love The answer to the question of the day! Resources: Secrets From The Eating Lab Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Can self-love and a desire to change your physical being co-exist or are they a contradiction of one another? The answer to that question is debatable depending on who you’re asking. On one hand of the body positive camp say body love and weight loss can not co-mingle while it seems as if the rest of the diet industry requires a certain amount of body dissatisfaction as a prerequisite to change. There is no doubt in our minds that the push for body acceptance of all shapes and sizes is a much needed message but what about those individuals who want self-acceptance and still desire to change their bodies?This is a quite complex and messy topic and on today’s episode Jen, Lauren and I share Balance365’s stance on how you can strive for change that’s rooted in self-love and acceptance and joy. Ladies, welcome back to another episode how are you? Lauren: Good. Annie: Why? Why can’t you just answer the question? Jen: I feel like you need to address us individually because what happens is, what people can’t see behind the scenes is we are actually on a video conference call looking at each other so then you are like “Ladies, how are you?” and then Lauren and I stare at each other waiting for the other ones to answer first. Lauren: Who’s going to go first? Annie: Quit being so polite and just answer the question. Lauren, how are you doing? Lauren: I am so wonderful, how are you? Annie: I am golden, thank you. Jen, how are you? Jen: Also wonderful. Annie: I feel like that was just so surface-level answers but we’ll go with it. Jen: Well, if you want to do a deep dive in my problems lately. Annie: Would you like to schedule a coaching call with one of the Balance365 coaches. Jen: Well, I need a new podcast called the Jen show. And I’ll just get all weeps and vent. Annie: I do feel like you’ve used some of our podcast episodes to kind of sort through some of your own issues about exercise. Jen: Yeah, but you know what? It’s helpful for people because my problems are their problems. That’s the narcissist in me. I struggle with things a lot of women struggle with. It can be helpful to go through it with a coach. I actually have a really good idea for a podcast series and that’s to bring on Balance365ers on to the podcast and coach them through whatever block they’re struggling with and sending that out to all of our listeners. Don’t you think that’s a good idea? Annie: I do, yeah and all jokes aside, you’re right, you do have a problems. Jen: I am your average busy working mom that struggles to make time for self care and yeah, that’s why I think our podcast resonates with so many women because we all have surpassed 200,000 downloads I’ll just add that in too. We are not standing on our high horses telling everybody what to do, we struggle with all the same things, have struggled in the past currently or we may in the future so yeah, we’re all in this together. I hope everybody feels that way when they listen and talk to us. Annie: I feel like that just got really serious, like we started out all jokey. Lauren: It started out all good and quickly. Annie: You can always count on Jen- Lauren: To make it an intense counselling session. Annie: To turn it into a serious, sentimental intense conversation. Jen: I’m an INFJ. I like intense conversations. Lauren: I don’t remember what my letters are but they’re the opposite of Jen. Jen: Yeah, we could have called that without you going through the test. Annie: OK. All jokes aside, we do have a kind of a heavy topic today, it’s something, it’s a question that comes up so frequently in our community, so frequently in the diet and fitness world and something that we’ve addressed inside our community but not on the podcast yet and that is “Can you love your body and still want to change it?” and by changing it we mean address your body composition, gain weight, lose weight, change your appearance of some sort and that’s a pretty big snowball to tackle, right? And depending on who you ask you’re likely to get a variety of answers. Extreme body positive activists will tell you that body love and weight loss cannot co-exist, do not co-exist and on the flip-side many professionals in our industry or the diet industry in general as a whole that support weight loss believe that self loathing and body dissatisfaction is a prerequisite to changing a body and here we are as the 3 co-founders of Balance365 yet again in the messy middle, right? Lauren: Yup. Jen: Yup: Annie: And so we’re, you know, again, the answer to that question is going to depend on what camp you’re asking, right? So we’re going to answer this question or discuss some of the talking points that we consider when helping our community members evaluate “Can you love your body and still want to change it? Can they co-exist?” and I think we can all agree that this body acceptance movement or accepting yourself at every shape and size is a much needed message for our culture. But what we’re experiencing is that those who still want to make changes are kind of like, “Well, what about me? What do I do? What, like, how, where do I fall into?” and sadly, it feels like in some ways the pendulum has swung a bit too far in one direction, especially when members of our community are feeling shamed for wanting to change their body still or they’re keeping it a secret or they’re afraid to tell anyone. And that, to us, isn’t neutral or an expression of body autonomy which we are super supportive and this is tricky because on some levels what we do in Balance365 is give women the tools and support they need to reach their goals, which can include weight loss, while simultaneously encouraging them to love and accept themselves and there are people out there who believe that these two concepts contradict one another, which is kind of the debate of the moment, right? Now in our industry “Can you love yourself and want to change it?” Does that mean that you don’t ultimately love yourself if you still want to change yourself? Do you have any thoughts, Jen? Jen: Well, newsflash, almost any change, lifestyle change you make in your life and do consistently is going to change your body because our bodies are always in flux and although they are a representation of our genetics and our environment, they are also a representation of our habits. So I recently changed my mode of exercise. I have gone a couple years of just doing like shorter more intense workouts and now I’m back into a phase where I have the time and opportunity and support to do some heavy lifting. I’m actually going through the Arms Like Annie program that a lot of women in our community are which is a strength training program, full body strength training program, heavy weights and guess what? My body is going to change because that’s what bodies do, they adapt to the stresses you put them under. So this I really see as a big mindset block for a lot of people, whether it’s trying to hate their body to change or resisting change because they’ve learned to love their bodies. I got some really good advice this last spring. I was struggling with a certain mindset around business and money. I was at a conference and I was talking to a man who has built multiple companies and sold them and is a multi multi millionaire. He told me he lives on a street in San Francisco and sometimes he walks out and looks down the street and can’t believe that he could buy every house on the block if he wanted to. But he grew up extremely poor and so why we connected is because I grew up without a lot of financial privilege and I find that affects me today but the advice he gave me that I now see is so universal, he said “You are so busy fighting battles in your head that you are never going to be able to get out there and fight the war” and I honestly see this as one of those mindset blocks, one of those blocks that women run into like and makes them freeze and then they expend this time and energy on it. Do I want to change my body? Don’t I want to change my body? Why do I want to change my body? And then they’re just missing the whole thing that change needs to come from a place of self care and if you are taking action on something that feels like you are caring for yourself, nurturing yourself, mothering yourself, then who cares what the outcome is? Maybe your body will get smaller, maybe it will get bigger, I don’t know. Annie: You just ran through my 3 bullet points in like five minutes. Jen: I’m sorry. I did not read the outline. Annie: So Jen summarized that so well and so concisely we can just end the podcast now. I’m just kidding but you’re spot on. You’re, it’s such a good point that you’re so busy, what did you say? You’re so busy fighting battles- Jen: You’re so busy fighting battles in your head you’re never going to get out there and fight the war and this is what we deal with in an ongoing basis in Balance365, any of our Balance365ers listening will say, “Yeah, she’s right. I mean there are so many women posting daily working through these mindset blocks” and it’s really those different programmings that we have that keep us from actually taking action and doing the things that we want to do or need to do in our lives to feel our best, like our best selves. Lauren: Yeah I was writing something earlier about this kind of exact thing, like the mindset piece that we put first is so important because when you get through that the nutrition habits and exercise habits are so simple, like they’re simple. What trips us up is like these mindset blocks like you’re talking about. Annie: And you know, I just want to back up too and I hope this is inferred and I hope that you can just sense this about us by the way we carry ourselves and the way our program is written and laid out but we absolutely believe in body autonomy and we believe that the individual has control over who and what they use their body for and for what and how long and that means that we respect to variety of goals women may have for their bodies and women come to our program with goals of building self-love and healthy habits and some come with a clear goal of weight loss and we don’t place moral value on either goal over the other. We believe that they’re all worthy and we’re here to help women achieve their goals, whatever they are. Jen: We have women share with us in Balance365 that once they really get that self acceptance piece and love their bodies they’re so afraid of losing it because nobody wants to go back there once you’re not there anymore you don’t ever want to go back in that space. So then they start the habit building process and they start losing weight and that puts them into a negative space almost of self sabotage because weight loss then becomes triggering to them as in “Wait a sec. I worked so hard to love that body and now it’s changing again” and the other thing like, newsflash, our bodies are always going to change every single day we are getting older so our hormones are changing, we’re getting wrinkles, we’re, you know, our hair color is changing. I mean, our bodies are always changing and I think that is the biggest acceptance piece that needs to happen is your body is always changing so stop this hypervigilance on trying to control it. Annie: Right and I think that getting clear on the why behind your desire to change your body can help answer some of those questions and so often we see women wanting to change their bodies and it’s rooted in self hate or this misconception that if you fix your body you’ll love your life and your life will be perfect and you’ll have the perfect body or ultimately that you want to feel worthy and you want to feel free of shame and you want to have this loving and belonging and it’s our experience that you can’t hate your body into loving yourself and nor can you hate your body into being healthy and if that had worked I think we would have a heck of a lot more “success stories” in our lives than we really do, right? Jen: The greatest act of self love is loving yourself when you think nobody else will, so when you aren’t fitting into society’s mold of what is lovable, right, so it’s, you know, so if you do have a larger body there is a lot of good and value there of learning to love and accept yourself at a larger size before, you know, before the weight loss journey comes, if it ever comes, you know, whatever your choice but you know, it’s like only loving your kids when they’re well behaved, right, like, when, you can just love your body when it’s doing what you want it to be doing and you can’t just love yourself when your behaviors are on point, right, your nutrition’s on point, your exercise is on point, your rockin’ life, you love yourself but then as soon as your behaviors are off track you’re filled with these self loathing thoughts. That’s not love, that’s just like surface level approval. Annie: That’s conditioned. That’s conditioned love. That’s not and ultimately I think what a lot of us would really like and are striving for is to love ourselves unconditionally. Meaning our body can look a variety of ways, our behaviors can look a variety of ways and we still can treat ourselves with compassion that we would so many other people in our lives. Jen: Yeah, another good analogy I use sometimes with women is I moved into a house, a new house about a year and a half ago and it’s an older house and there was people that lived here before us that decorated, painted, designed to this house in a way that suited them but is not to my tastes at all. So, for example, my bathroom is lime green and I hate it, I hate it but I still love my home. I am still grateful to live in this home. This is the nicest home I’ve ever lived in. Growing up as a little girl my mother couldn’t have dreamed of providing this kind of house for me as a kid so every day I wake up I feel like I’m living in my dream home but my bathroom is lime green. Yes, I do want to change that color eventually. I haven’t yet, it just, I haven’t had time, it has been the right time but eventually I will paint the bathroom, I will do some renovations around this house to change it but that doesn’t, that doesn’t take away from the unconditional love and gratitude I have for this home and I wish that people could feel that way about their bodies. Sometimes there are changes that you want to make and as long as those are realistic and within your realm of control the problem is there is just such polarizing views. There’s this whole view that you mentioned at the start, Annie ,there’s this whole idea that you have complete control over what your body looks like and then there’s the other end of the spectrum people saying “You actually have no control over what your body looks like so don’t even bother thinking about it” but I think it was Dr Tracy Mann, we’re interviewing her on our podcast pretty soon here which is really exciting but she has in her books that studies in her book Secrets From The Eating Lab, studies show that it’s in the middle, you know, as usual, we actually do- Lauren: That messy middle. Jen: Yes, like you can’t change your genetics, of course, but there are certain behaviors we have in our life that will affect the way our bodies look and feel and I think her stats are we have about a 30 percent, 30 percent of the way we look is we’re able to manipulate, which is probably a lot less than some people think and a lot more than other people think and so it’s OK. It’s OK. You can have total love for your body. You can have gratitude for the body that you were given. You can have acceptance of the genes that you have and you can still say, “You know what, I would love to reduce my abdominal body fat and I am going to step forward making change in a way that will reduce the fat I have on my body and that is coming from a place of self-love and self care and also being realistic.” Annie: And I think the important distinction there, Jen, that you’re, in terms of your bathroom, is striving for change doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just different. It’s not good or bad- Jen: Yeah. Annie: I mean I mean to you the lime green might be bad but- Jen: Yeah, I mean, but how some people behave about their bodies is that, taking it back to the house, they would just throw gas around this house and light it on fire like that because they don’t like the way the bathroom looks and here’s the thing, it’s also knowing that there’s a time to address that and not right, like, I have recognized over the last 18 months that trying to make any changes to the interior of my home were just not realistic. I just haven’t had the time or the resources or the money to pay somebody so we haven’t done it and there’s a time to change and then there’s a time to hold the line and just, but you can still wake up every morning and be grateful, right, like it doesn’t have to be something urgent in, like, you know, you can’t love yourself or respect yourself until you have this but I mean, we talk about it in terms of bodies but I mean there’s a lot of people that get hysteria over their house as well because it’s where they live in. Annie: Yeah or you love your job, you enjoy your job but you want to improve in a particular skill set or – Jen: Yes. Annie: You enjoy your marriage, you love your spouse, your partner, your significant other but you wish you could spend more time on date nights or as you noted you love your children but you wish they would listen better at bedtime but you can, we believe wholeheartedly, that you can want to change an aspect or an element of yourself, your appearance, your being, whatever it is and that come from self love, that come from a place of love and care and admiration for yourself, versus- Jen: It’s not that you are more or less worthy with these changes, which is really that key component, right, like I go in and color my hair, I get blonde highlights every 3 or 4 months or so or 10 months. And it’s like, I just like it and I don’t see myself as the less worth, if I, you know, for whatever reason, if I had to go back to my, you know, grow it all out and have it just have my natural hair color, I wouldn’t be like, you know, feeling awful about myself, it would just be “Oh, like, I love coloring my hair. I wear makeup, you know.” There’s all these things, right but like- Lauren: Our outward appearance can be an expression right we are and people have different preferences, people like different hair colors and different hair styles and different makeup styles, that’s OK. It doesn’t mean like we don’t love ourselves if we’re not wearing makeup and that’s how we can use that analogy when we’re talking about our bodies. Like, you don’t have to, we say this all the time, you don’t have to love every little tiny part to love the whole, right? Annie: That’s exactly how I feel about muscles, to me they’re like an accessory, like they’re like my favorite accessory. It is honestly, it’s an act of self-expression for me to have visible muscles. Now if for whatever reason I didn’t have the visible muscles, you know, it might be an adjustment but I ultimately know that I am a human of value, of worth, just innately, not because I look a certain way, not because I can do certain things in the gym with my muscles that look a certain way. I just have value because I’m a human, as do all all women, and I mean and it’s so easy for us to see as mothers and all, we could say the same thing about our kids, like, why do our kids have value? Just because they are, just because they’re beings, they’re living, breathing humans but to give ourselves that same sense of value and worth seems so difficult. Jen: Yeah I think what happens is people, they just, they overthink this and it gets people in a tizzy on both ends whether it’s from believing you can’t love yourself until you look a certain way or believing that if you’re making changes you don’t love yourself, you know, there’s just way too much overthinking going on. Annie: So what with the approach that we’ve already kind of touched on that we take in our program is we encourage our members to adopt a self-love approach to change and if weight loss is the way in which you want to change your body, it can be a by-product of your habits and a way that you care for yourself. Jen: Yeah and it’s always a byproduct of your habits, always, right? So when you are, like, we’ve covered this in previous podcasts, but you can’t just say, snap your fingers and lose 10 pounds. Annie didn’t snap her fingers and grow muscles. All changes are a byproduct of our habits and so once you start looking at changes as a byproduct of your habits then you can look at the habits required and or the skills you need to develop in order to see that change and you can decide if that is self love and self care for you, right? Annie: And you posed a really great question, a thread came up in Balance365 last week and the question you posed in response to her is “Is this goal about health and love and self-care or is this about achievement and ideal?” Jen: Right. Annie: And that can maybe help you distinguish the why behind this. Is this coming from a place of love or is this coming from some other place that really isn’t worth perpetuating. Jen: Right, like I could be leaner than I am right now, I am quite comfortable in my body with my body weight but I have been 20 to 25 pounds leaner than I am now. I can go back to that life but there is a point where the extreme that I would have to take goes from a place of self-love and self care into self harm, right, so I, you know, I eat really balanced meals, I pay attention to my nutrition, eat when I’m hungry, stop when I’m satisfied, exercise regularly, take care of my mental health. If I wanted to lose 20 pounds at this point I would have to pay very, very close attention to my nutrition and to me that takes me into a place of self harm and it doesn’t feel well and that’s sort of my guiding compass as far as is this coming from a place of self care or is this coming from a place of self harm? Lauren: I really like that, like, how does it feel? Jen: How does this feel for you? Yeah. Annie: Yes And unfortunately there are people in our industry that would encourage you to power through that feeling. Jen: They do all the time in the fitness industry. All the freaking time. Annie: They would say “This is a prerequisite. This is a requirement that you regulate this negative self talk or pushing yourself past this comfort zone is something that’s required to achieve these goals that are ultimately of high value, right?” Jen: They describe it as a plateau, right, that you have to push through, which sometimes it, like, I mean, that’s the thing about, you’ve really got to know yourself, right, because sometimes there’s value in pushing through, right, like sometimes you don’t, every time it gets hard you don’t want to give up and walk away. Sometimes there’s hard things that you have to work through but the self harm piece is like “Is this sustainable for you? Are you willing? Are you going to do this forever?” And there’s been different times in my life, like for example, right now I get up at 5:30 in the morning to work out and start my workout at 6 and yeah, there are some days that I don’t want to do that but I push through and I’m always happy afterwards. Right now that behavior comes from a place of self care. When I had a newborn, if I would have insisted on that behavior with a newborn baby when I wasn’t sleeping all night and I was pushing myself to get up at 5:30 to work out at 6, that becomes self harm, right, because it means I am going with less and less and less sleep. I’m not even getting enough sleep to recover from my workouts. So those are really self assessment questions that you need to ask yourself and that nobody can answer except for you. Annie: And that’s exactly why we don’t prescribe weight loss or have weight loss goals or goals in general for our community members because no one knows your body better than you do, not even us who work with thousands of women on a daily basis, like, we don’t know you as well as you do and so we really just want to encourage you to pull that reflection inward and say like, “What is this about? Like, can I love my body and want to change it at the same time?” and maybe for you the answer is like “No, I can’t right now. First I have to work on loving myself, you know. Jen: So we recently had a community member share that she thought she had fat loss goals and she was ready to dig in on those fat loss goals but after some self assessment she’s realized that that actually is not a healthy space for her to be in right now and she loves the idea of just focusing on habits and letting her body be what it’s going to be and that is the ultimate form of acceptance for her and that’s where she’s at right now and we are like “A round of applause, girlfriend” because really, all we want for people is to own their life Annie: Yeah, and, you know, just some of these concepts we talk about are kind of heavy and they’re philosophical but, you know, so often what we hear, what this change looks like, this shift which can be so subtle and so small and sometimes you don’t even realize that it’s happening to people around you is that all of a sudden, you know, we’re exercising because, as Jen said, “It leaves me feeling better. I feel more confident. I have more energy throughout the day” versus “I’m getting up at 530 to punish myself because I want to change my body because I hate my body so much and I just can’t stand another day living in my own skin.” I mean, the behavior looks the same on the outside but on the inside, Jen knows this is coming from a place of self-love and self care. Jen: Yeah we often say and I think we’ve said in the podcast before, “it’s not about the what the people are doing it’s about the why and how they go about it.” That’s where the dysfunction and disorder, that’s where it can be found. Annie: Yeah, and I mean, the same can be true for how you feed your body, how you speak to your body and you know, are you feeding yourself balanced meals because your body deserves to be nourished and again, you feel better when you have balanced meals or are you starving or removing whole food groups or eating foods you don’t like because, again, you loathe your body and you want to change it and if you change your body, you change your life and if you change your life then you have less problems.” Jen: Right, the thing I love and I’ll let Lauren elaborate on this but somebody posted in our group in the last, I don’t know, year sometime, she asked about protein bars and she said “But aren’t protein bars diety?” and then you replied, Lauren, do you want to share that? Lauren: Yes, I don’t remember exactly what I replied but I’ll say what I think about it now. So there’s no, like, diet food or not diet food, right? Like you walk into a restaurant and like two women are eating the exact same thing, they’re both eating a salad and one person restricted themselves and they’re punishing themselves for what they ate yesterday or they’re punishing themselves because they hate their body and the other person is eating to nourish their body and it makes them feel good so that’s why they’re eating their salad, right, like just like Jen said, it’s not always about the what, it’s about the why. Jen: Does it come from a place of deprivation or does it come from a place of abundance and self care? Annie: Exactly and again, they can look the same on the outside. Jen: Exactly. Annie: On the surface. You might not be able to tell, you might not be able to distinguish and that’s why it’s so important that you get really in tune with yourself and what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and that can help you discern, is this self-love or is this self-hate are these behaviors rooted in? And you know, I just, we say this all the time and it can’t be said enough, we have a saying that “We take great care of things we love and your body is no exception” and I think about all the things that I take care of in my life, between relationships with girlfriends, my children, even my house plants, for heaven’s sakes and I want them to feel comfortable and safe and confident and thrive and grow and expand and live this vibrant life, I’m not degrading them, I’m not starving them, I’m not depriving them. I’m actually treating them really sweetly and kindly and with love and encouragement and sometimes that looks like- Jen: Sometimes there’s tough love built into that. Annie: Yes, like, “Jen, do you want to stay in bed because your bed is warm and cozy and it’s cold outside and it’s dark but I know ultimately this is the goal I committed to and I’m going to feel good” Like, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns. Jen: Absolutely. Actually, my mantra, you know, these days I’ve been struggling a bit. And my mantra is “Mother. I’m mothering myself right now.” Like I have just needed, I have needed some tough love lately and it’s not that I’m, like, being a drill sergeant to myself it’s that “Would my mother let would let me stay up and watch Netflix to 1:30 AM when I have to be up at 6 you know 5 nights in a row?” Like, no, and so that’s sometimes where the tough love has to come in but a mother, well, a mother knows. A mother knows when to push and a mother knows when to pull back, right, we do it for our kids every single day but yet for ourselves it’s like we want to put ourselves into like one box and just like stay there either because we see pendulum swing with self-compassion to, right, we see all the time women are like “Oh I’ve watched Netflix for 3 days but self care, right? and it’s like, “I don’t know. I’m not you so I don’t know if that was self care for you or not but I know for a lot of people you have moved from self care to like numbing and avoiding.” And like you know, like, my mother, if I was sick I might watch T.V. for 3 days but if I wasn’t sick my mother, you know, there’s not a lot of mothers out there who would be letting their kids just sit and watch T.V. for 3 days. Annie: After a day she would be like, “OK get off the couch.” Jen: Get outside, right? My parents used to do that all the time, like, “Get your butts outside now,” right, and so you bring it back to that and go like mother yourself. Have you gotten some fresh air today? Have you gotten some movement in? Are you eating balanced meals? You know, eating, you know, high sugar treats all day long, no that’s not self care day after day after day and that’s certainly not balance. Annie: So, you know, I think, this is just my own personal experience but I’ve heard it echoed in the stories of women we’ve worked with in the past is that they kind of are like, “Yeah, OK, I get that some women love themselves and they’re treating themselves well because they love themselves that much. That’s great for them, however for me I’m used to fueling my workouts and my food and fitness choices from self-hate and I’m worried that if I love myself that I’m just going to become lazy and I’m going to eat all the foods and I’m just going to lose all my motivation and I’m going to get complacent, right?” Jen: That’s how it feels when you’ve been in a place of control for so long, I mean what happens to the teenagers who move out of their family home at 18 that have been living under very rigid controlling rules. They go to college and they go nuts, right? Like we will always rebel against these rules. Annie: Lauren and I are like “Yep.” Jen: Yes, so it’s sort of like, you know, it’s just, it’s human nature, right it’s just human nature and so a lot of people might see their pending swing but eventually you need to like sit up and go and you just need to mother yourself, that’s what you have to do and I find that quite effective in knowing when I need a little tough love and when I need some compassion, right. So if my kids were really emotional, you know, school ends, they’re super emotional, they’re fighting, they’re just not doing well, I can look at them and have some self compassion and go like “These kids are tired, like, we’re going to turn the T.V. on a little early today because they they need some downtime, they need to skip their chores today, they’ve got no energy, you know, or emotional regulation skills like this.” Because you you look at your kids and you just assess, right, you’re always assessing what they need and that changes day to day and I think we can do that for ourselves too. We can do a much better job of it than women traditionally have been doing. We’ve just, we live under so many rules, right, like I just think women actually live under so, not just for ourselves but in our society there are so many rules and a societal construct that women always are living around that I think when we do find ourselves in that space of having free time, we may find ourselves in a rebellious space a lot because we actually have no idea how much unconscious time and energy we spend on, like, subscribing to these rules. Lauren: Preach. Annie: Word. So the anti-climatic answer to our question that I posed at the beginning of this podcast is “Can you love your body and want to change it?” is, I mean, Yes/It really depends and that’s something that you have to answer on an individual level. I personally can sit here and say with great confidence that I have changed my body as a complete act of self-love. Or self-love has resulted in a body change is maybe a better way to put it. But not everyone that changes their body is acting out of self love and vice versa and again our bodies are meant to change they’re fluid. They’re ever changing, they’re always changing, especially as women of childbearing age, I mean, my body looks so different than it did a year ago and I’m 2 plus years postpartum, like, it’s till changing from pregnancy I feel like, I mean, my hair for heaven sakes is still changing. But I think, you know, we’re, as usual, we feel like the truth to that question is somewhere in the middle. We are not on either side of one extreme camp or the other and we really want to help put women in the driver seat to answer that question on their own terms, in a way that serves them and feels good to them and anything we can help women, any way that we can help women come across that answer is good for us. Jen: Yes. Annie: All right, good one. Jen: Lauren will go zip in in the background go ” Preach.” We should get you a t-shirt that says “What she said.” Annie: OK, well, yet another great topic with yet another awkward ending in the bag but this is good. This is a good conversation that I think needed to we needed to address on our podcast because again, we’ve discussed it so many times in our community, which again, if you’re aren’t in there and you want to join it’s Healthy Habits Happy Moms on Facebook. The three of us are in there, we’ve got some awesome moderators and a great community system if you want to continue the discussion on loving your body and still changing it or how you can begin making changes from a place of self-love. It will be a great place to learn so I hope to see you inside and ladies we will chat soon, OK. Lauren: Bye. Jen: Bye. The post 50: Can You Love Your Body And Still Want To Change It? appeared first on Balance365.
Diet culture is often so subtle that it can be hard to even identify. On today’s episode Jen, Lauren and Annie tackle the big topic of diet culture: what it is, what it looks like, how it’s harmful and some practical advice on how we can begin to dismantle this hurtful, oppressive system. While this topic is broad and deep, this conversation is the tip of the iceberg and a thought-starter for future conversations. What you’ll hear in this episode: What is diet culture, what does it look like, what does it sound like? Before and after photos – why are they problematic? The impacts of diet culture on the individual, family, and community Making informed choices as consumers to support or not support diet culture How socio-economic factors impact health Thin privilege and how it impacts lives Health, race, and representation in images of health How kids are impacted by diet culture How different healthy weight is for women individually Diet culture and how it creates weight gain How to turn diet culture around Nourishment as a concept that goes beyond food Curating your environment to fight diet culture Resources: Episode 24: Before And After Photos – Comparison, The Thief Of Joy Getting Older: Hillary Mcbride On Women And Aging Linda Bacon’s book Body Respect Setting Body Talk Boundaries Over The Holidays Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Welcome back to another episode of Balance365 Life Radio, we have more than enough research to show that diets don’t work. We know this yet people still continue to diet over and over and over again. Why? Well, it’s likely large in part because dieting is a big part of our culture: diet talk, weight talk, negative body talk. It’s everywhere from office conversations to gabbing with your girlfriends over drinks to the marketing on our food, books, and commercials. Diet culture is often so subtle that it can be hard to even identify. When everyone around you is seemingly celebrating weight loss at all costs and bonding overeating “good” foods and say no to “bad” ones it can be difficult to take a stand against a culture. On today’s episode Jen, Lauren and I tackle the big topic of diet culture: what it is, what it looks like, how it’s harmful and how we can begin to dismantle this hurtful, oppressive system. We know that this is just the tip of the iceberg of a very important topic and discussion and we invite you to continue this discussion on the inside of our private Facebook group Healthy Habits Happy Moms. See you on the inside! Lauren and Jen! We’re back with a big, big topic today, are you ready for this? Jen: Ready. Lauren: Ready. Annie: You’ve got your game faces on, you guys. We’re discussing the term diet culture. What is diet culture? Which, the reason why we want to address this is because diet culture is a term and a phrase that we use frequently in our community and in our content and we really haven’t stopped to kind of unpack what this is, right? And we’re just going to dive right into it because I think we could spend a lot of time talking about this and we want to make sure that we do it justice and who knows, we might have to come revisit this. We’ll see how far we can get on our outline, right, but we know that diets don’t work and this is not a new topic. If you’re new to our podcast that might be a new concept to you but if you have been around our community and our podcast for a while, you know that diets don’t work and the research is there to support it and in fact, the research shows that most people are able to lose weight in the year but the vast majority gain it back with the majority of people gaining back more than they lost within 5 years and to echo the research that’s already out there that supports diets don’t work, we’ve surveyed our community and an overwhelmingly amount of our community have tried dieting and they’ve “failed” yet many women keep dieting, right? We see this all the time, like, people try diets, they don’t have success but they keep dieting and why is that? We would offer that it’s, unfortunately, part of our culture, right? Jen: It’s deeply ingrained in our culture to diet. Lauren: Yes. Annie: Yes. And so what we want to discuss today is what is diet culture, what it looks like, what it feels like, what are the consequences of living in a culture obsessed with dieting and spoiler alert: it’s everywhere. Jen: And yeah, a really good analogy I have is we also live, well I do, personally, where I live, I live in a car culture, a commuting culture, so public transport is not good where I live. You essentially have to have a car to participate in our society and imagine not having a car, how difficult that would make things for you and people would be surprised, like, “You don’t have a car? How do you get around?” So if you compare that to living in a diet culture, it’s the same thing. It’s actually very difficult to not to diet in our culture and it can make your life actually feel harder, initially than participating in the culture. Annie: Because you feel like you’re going against the grain. Jen: You are going against the grain and our society isn’t set up to support people who are not making, who are choosing to not do that. Annie: And because diet culture is so subtle, it can be really hard to identify what it is and what it isn’t and you might not be familiar with the term yet, diet culture, if you’re new to our community but I promise you, you have experienced it and I just want to share just, I pulled these out of a hat off the top of my head when I was reviewing for this podcast some of the ways in which you might have experienced a culture that I think are pretty common. Phrases like “I’m going to be bad and order fries” or how we compliment pregnant women for being “all belly” or tell them how great they are looking after giving birth. Jen: Yes. Or “You don’t even look pregnant” etc. Annie: Yes. People who lose weight are consistently applauded for and praised without question or you might hear phrases like “I’m on a new diet”, “How is your diet going? Have you tried this diet? I lost weight with this diet.” Jen: Yeah or “I’m off my diet.” Annie: Yes, yes, yes, yes. I’m sure many of you listening are probably nodding in your head in agreement that you’ve heard those types of conversations, you’ve seen those behaviors and they’re so common in our daily lives and these are the examples of what diet culture is, could be or what it sounds like are endless but- Jen: Yeah, before and after photos are a really problematic thing in our society and some of our listeners might be in the fitness industry and they might use before and after photos and I just want to say that it’s not, I know the intent isn’t there, I mean you might be coming from a really good place trying to showcase your client’s results and the intent might not be there but you certainly are profiting off of the fear that’s already there and that’s just something I would like our colleagues to sit with. Annie: Which is difficult because that’s something we as a company have struggled with which we have a whole podcast on before and afters and what the consequences of using them can be. We have gone back and forth, should we use them, should we not use them. Because they are effective, I mean, you see them, not even in a professional setting, you know, a girlfriend post that she lost 20 pounds or whatever in a post before and after on just her personal Facebook page and people break their necks looking at it, right? Jen: Right. Lauren: Right. Annie: And, you know, again, that’s diet culture, where we applaud these people for weight loss or think if they’re a better person or more disciplined or of higher moral virtue because they lost weight and we don’t even stop to question “Are they actually healthier? Do they do they feel better? How did they go about achieving that?” like, “Could this person just be sick?” I mean, like, there are so many options other than “this was intentional and they automatically feel better” but let’s just define it, right, this is, the definitions vary from source to source but in general diet culture is a society that focuses on and values weight shape and size over health and wellbeing. It worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue. It promotes weight loss as a means of attaining a higher status. It demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others and it oppresses people who don’t match up with the supposed picture of health which disproportionately harms trans, bigger bodies, people with disabilities, people of color and it can be damaging to both mental and physical health. Lauren: Right. Jen: Right because they just, they aren’t represented in a diet culture. Annie: Yeah, and- Lauren: This is not something we’re even conscious or aware of, right? The fact that it’s so embedded in our culture, is it’s just what we’ve grown up with, it’s what we’re taught to do and you know, we’re not consciously aware of these thoughts or behaviors sometimes, it’s just there. Jen: My social media feed used to be filled with before and after photos because those are the types of pages I followed. Just diet pages, weight loss pages, fitness professionals that were constantly posting before and afters of themselves and their clients and so essentially, anytime I was on social media, which for a lot of women is quite a bit, I was looking at before and after photos and that absolutely affects the way you think and see the world. Lauren: And how you feel about yourself. Jen: Yeah. Annie: And it’s in the marketing of our foods, too. I had a FaceTime conversation with Jen about this topic last week and I got off the phone after talking about diet culture, opened up my fridge and here my yogurt says “light and fit”, you know, to me that’s ingrained diet culture or you know, we’re calling foods “guilt free” or there’s guilt, you know, I think- Jen: It is, it is honestly everywhere and back to the car analogy, it’s like, it’s like roads are everywhere, if you came across a spot in a city that had no roads to drive down, you would go, “What on earth is going on here?” You just take for granted that roads are going to be everywhere and in our society diet culture is everywhere, everywhere. Annie: And again, it also, you know, we’ll talk about this how it oppresses certain populations in a little bit as well but we’re really just seeing one type of body, which we were talking about this before we even started recording, it’s thin white women, you know, in the diet industry. Jen: Of a certain age. Annie: Of a certain age, yes and that can be really harmful and if you don’t stop to question these things, you’ll probably just go with the flow, you know, you’ll just kind of keep swimming with everyone else. Jen: I used to model, which I’ve shared in the podcast before, and I was told at 19 that I was getting old for modeling and that if I hadn’t made it internationally by the time I was 21 that I did not have a future in modeling so that is an indicator of the types of models that we’re seeing. They are very, very young. Annie: Babies. Jen: Yeah. Like most girls go big when they’re like 14 and I was told at 14 by a model agent that I had the perfect body, like, I was perfect at that point to be a model, to have a career as a model in women’s fashion magazines when I was 14 years old. Annie: At 14. Yeah, yeah, you’re selling to adult women as a 14-year old that’s a crazy concept to wrap your head around. Jen: Yes. Annie: But, you know, in addition to talking about what it is and what it looks like and what it feels like, I really want to spend a fair amount of time to on why it matters because, you know, before I was familiar with the concept of diet culture, I thought it was just kind of like on a really individual level, you know, like, I thought like, “Oh, this is just what how this person is choosing to spend their time” and I wasn’t really aware of how it impacted our community or our society and Jen, you know, you said on a previous podcast, like, we talk about how we want society to change or how we want our culture to change, well, that starts with us. Jen: Yeah, we are society, we’re part of it. Annie: We’re part of it. Jen: Yeah. Annie: Yes, so let’s talk about why it’s harmful because it’s harmful to individuals, it’s harmful to families and it’s harmful to communities and the first one, which we kind of touched on is it oppresses a large majority of the population on an individual level, you know, just on ourselves, it encourages people to believe that they are less than until they achieve some level of weight loss or fitness goals, right. It makes you engage in self-doubt, you doubt yourself, you feel like you can’t trust your own instincts. It lures you into thinking that you failed because you couldn’t stick to your diet plan and oftentimes people that are engaged in that kind of thinking are thinking things like “I can’t do this because I look like this. I can’t do this because my body is this” and I have personally experienced that. I remember my husband wanting me to go rock climbing and I couldn’t, like, I was too worried about could I, am I going to fit into the harness? Is the harness going to hold me? Is this something that my body is allowed to do, like, and it turns out I could have, I just was too wrapped up in thinking- Jen: You were too big to do this. Annie: Yeah, the self-doubt that that was my limiting factor, right. And then on a community level, it contributes to a culture that makes it acceptable to treat people as less than because of their bodies, right and in fact, when I was researching this there was one study that I came across that it noted that 15 percent of hiring managers, only 15 percent of hiring managers, would hire an overweight woman for a job. So essentially it’s allowing employers to see overweight people as sloppy or lazy and just not hire them. Jen: Yeah and so you don’t see the person or their skills or their education, you see the body. Annie: And we’ve talked about that, or talked around about that, you know, about how what it looks like when you go to McDonald’s and sit and have you know a cheeseburger and French fries versus what it looks like when a larger body goes to McDonald’s. Jen: Yes, thin women can post photos on social media of eating like a whole pizza and be proud of it and people will high 5 them and I think there’s even, I read a blog post a couple years ago, I can’t remember the author now but basically it showed comments under this photo of a like a thin, gorgeous girl eating a huge pizza and there were males saying “Oh, that’s so sexy” and then next to a photo of a really large woman eating a whole pizza and the comments were “That is so disgusting.” Annie: That’s just heartbreaking and eye-opening. Jen: It’s awful. As far as going, “Hey”, like trying to address the diet culture we live in and your everyday behaviors and the way you talk and think around it, like, that’s really what we’re trying to address here, right, like there are people that are seriously hurt because of some of your unconscious everyday behaviors that contribute to upholding a society that oppresses A lot of people in our culture. Annie: And you know, I have no doubt that there are people with hearts of gold and good intentions that are engaging in diet culture like Jen: Absolutely, I mean, there’s probably still areas of my life if I really dug in, I mean, that’s all part of our work, right, is unraveling that. Annie: Yeah, it’s oftentimes not intentional. It’s just, you know, what you’ve learned, what people of before you have done, what you’ve seen other people do, what you’ve heard other people say, you know, I remember, like, early as a trainer talking about concepts that I, that would make me cringe now in terms of diet culture and it’s like, when you know better you can do better and that’s part of what we want this podcast to do today is just start creating some discussion and awareness about what diet culture is and how it impacts our lives. Jen: Yeah, I even recently have been thinking about something. So I love LuluLemon leggings, they are my favorite. They fit me so well and they’re really good quality, I love them and recently a bigger woman called me on shopping there. She said “You are supporting a company that will not carry my size and has openly had the founder talk about that they don’t cater to women my size” and I felt really uncomfortable and that’s something so I’m just, full disclosure, being open about my own journey but I’m really kind of sitting with that and going like “Am I going to be OK with that that they don’t carry over a certain size and I’m going to keep shopping there or can I keep shopping there but bring it up to management, write letters, like, you know, what can I do?” Like, because I don’t feel good about that and then the other one was Victoria’s Secret which I have vocally and openly called out that company for years and years now of their objectification of women. And they recently went public on record to say that they don’t make larger sizes because that’s not their market and they don’t want to sell to women in that market and I have not supported Victoria’s Secret for years and years but that is just something for us all to think about, right, like would you would you keep supporting a company that said they don’t want to sell to black women? Annie: Right. Jen: Like that’s not their market? Or disabled people? Sorry, our store is not wheelchair accessible because we don’t want, we don’t want people who are in wheelchairs in this store. Annie: Yeah. When you take it out of the terms of bodies and when you put it in that context, it’s a no brainer, right? Jen: Yeah and I mean that is part of living in a diet culture that we all so, we don’t even think about that oppression of larger people, right, so, you know, and as soon as you take it into that context of color or ability then it’s like “Oh, wow, no, that’s awful” but then you bring it back to bodies and you’re like “Is that awful? I don’t know. I have to think about that.” Because it’s just so ingrained that you really have to think about it. So those are some thoughts I’ve been sitting with lately just being honest with our audience that it is a journey and you will continually realize that there are ways that you contribute to supporting diet culture. Annie: Well, I mean, yeah and just again, all the ways that it shows up in your life. I mean my drink of choice used to be a skinny latte from Starbucks or like eating skinnypop popcorn, two things that I really enjoy I hate the name. Lauren: Yeah. Annie: Why did they have to be named that? And you know, so can we just call it nonfat lattes? Jen: Yes. Annie: Like yes, yes i can. I don’t have to engage in that or I can stop buying that product as you noted or I can call it something else or you know, my light and fit Greek yogurt, sorry, Yoplait. I don’t like the name, I like your yogurt, I don’t like the name. In addition though to, going back to how it’s harmful, oppressing individuals and on a community level, it also hurts, as Jen noted ,people of color, those with disabilities, people live in poverty because they’re just less likely to be able to access the tools that some people believe can “cure” or address some of these health-related issues or size-related issues such as health care, gym memberships, nutrient-dense food and in fact, I went back and reference Linda Bacon’s book Body Respect, which is a great book if you haven’t read it. And she notes that social and societal differences account for the largest part of the population’s health, even more so than behaviors, biology or genes so really, like the culture, the socioeconomic status that you are brought up in, you’re raised in that you’re living in, plays a bigger, way bigger role than what you’re choosing to eat or- Jen: Yeah, I often say, like, if you are going to be talking about the health of our society and losing your mind over obesity rates, you better be bringing socio-economic conditions into that conversation and letting me know what you are doing to bridge that divide in socio-economic situations across your culture because you cannot stand on your platform and talk about how everybody just needs to eat healthier, you know, what I mean? Once you start understanding the big picture you start to understand actually how useless- Lauren: Like all you need to do is buy all organic produce, lean meats that are grass-fed, get the special bulletproof coffee drink and you’ll be good to go, right? Jen: Right, it’s elitist, it really only helps- Annie: Privileged people. Jen: People in privileged people, right, helps or harms, that’s a whole other question because if you already have those privileges, you know, somebody is just making you anxious about not being privileged enough or perfect enough then, you know, it’s, anyways so yeah, I mean, part of our work, if we really do care about the health and wellbeing of our society is about how to raise children up out of poverty so that we can see them with better outcomes in life, right? Annie: And just, again, going back to the definition of diet culture, you know, that it promotes thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, like, you know, I’m not any better or worse than someone that’s going to the gym or that has a gym membership or that eats organic bananas than is, you know, than someone that eats conventional bananas, like, but so often we do, we praise people that have those behaviors, that have access to those services or memberships that’s like, they’re doing something right, right? They’re just better. Jen: Yeah but people love to hear that, like, people love to hear, people love rags to riches stories and so you, like, even I look back on myself, you know, I am a thin, white woman, like I have so many privileges in our society because just because of those things. I was born Caucasian and thin. But I even look back on, you know, the way I used to pat myself on the back, like, as if I was just this, like, awesome hard worker and it’s not that I didn’t work hard for certain things, you know, for my education, for everything that I have today for, you know, that I do work out and consistent with exercise but you know, there was a time in my life where it was an elitist thing almost, like, I thought I was, you know, just extra special for whatever reason but it turns out I actually was born with a headstart in life that a lot of people didn’t have and for somebody to start a health and wellness company and grow it to what we’ve grown ours to in the last 4 years as a fat woman of color, now that is hard work. Do you know what I mean? Like, there’s just certain privileges that the 3 of us have that allowed us to, that people will take advice from us online because we’re all thin. Annie: Yeah it’s that this is a heavy topic. Jen: It’s uncomfortable. It’s uncomfortable for us to acknowledge our own privileges, like it really is but it’s so important in order to, if you want to see more equality in our society, like, women, we talk about it all the time, wanting equality with men and that seems to be an easier conversation to flow. But then, you like, let’s talk about all equality, right, and then that means it’s easy to sit back and be a victim of inequality but like what if you are a perpetuator of inequality, like that is uncomfortable. Annie: Yeah. Jen: But that is so important. We expect men to do it, right, we want men to do it. Annie: To be able to objectively look at our behaviors and say, like, “I could be potentially contributing to the problem” It’s like- Jen: Yeah like here are small ways- Annie: It’s hard to face. Jen: Here are small ways. Yeah, exactly. Annie: Absolutely. OK, so backing up, how it’s harmful. It oppresses a large majority of the population, I mean, when we say large, like, that’s pretty much everyone except for thin white people, I mean, which is, like, that leaves a lot of people out, that’s really exclusive. Jen: Yes. So just if, people who are struggling understand this, if you go do a google image search of and just type in like “health and fitness” you will be met with images, 99 percent of the images that come up are, like, thin white people. Annie: Yeah. Jen: I feel like I need to do that real quick. Lauren: I’m doing it right now. Jen: OK just to make sure I’m right. Annie: I just, as you know, as a personal trainer I know that I’ve searched personal trainer images it’s all white men. Jen: Or if you type in healthy women, so I just typed in healthy women on a google image search and I’m scrolling to the scrolling, scrolling, I saw one black woman, one, rest, oh here’s a woman laying in a bed of fruit with a tape measure wrapped around her waist. So yeah, it’s just thin white women, that’s all it is. Annie: Yeah and that’s not, that’s not true representational, truly representational of health. Jen: Absolutely not. You feel, then, the idea of diet culture is that you have to be a thin white woman to be healthy. Annie: Yeah. Lauren: Right. Annie: And that so far from the truth that it’s ridiculous. OK. Moving on. Another reason it’s harmful, one of the many reasons diet culture is harmful is that our kids are catching on quickly to this culture, the the new normal of these behaviors and conversations. We’ve shared these statistics so many times. I’m going to share them again because, like, it needs to be heard again and again and again. Over 80 percent of 10 year olds are afraid of being fat. 80 percent of 10 year olds are afraid of being fat. 53 percent of 13 year old American girls are unhappy with their bodies. The number grows to 78 percent by the time they reach 17, by middle school 40 to 70 percent of girls are dissatisfied with 2 or more of their body parts and I mean, that’s just 3 of the many alarming statistics. And inside of Balance365, Jennifer, you share an observation from author Jan Jacobs Brownsburg, do your remember this, when you wrote about this? How she had been studying girls diaries. Jen: Yeah, yeah it’s in the 1st chapter of Balance365. Annie: And you read her book and you noted that she was writing about how girls, she was studying girls diaries and how these girls were writing about a desire to better themselves and she notes that the difference was pre-war, they were talking about being the self development was focused on helping others and putting more effort into school or reading and by the 1990s bodies had become a preoccupation, that they were writing about. Jen: And appearance and makeup and fashion and yes so this is also such a hard conversation because what if you really like fashion, you know? Where Hilary McBride pointed out in our of the last podcast we did with her. You know, are our interests and beliefs and you know, all of that, is that who we are or is that shaped by our culture? And so- Lauren: It’s messy. Jen: It’s very messy, right and but yes, so basically that book looked at what girls valued and how they wanted to better themselves 100 years ago versus today and that there are there’s just been a dramatic shift in values over the last 100 years where I think most women would say “Gosh, like, you know, I wish, I wish my daughter was more focused on school than boys and makeup and all of that but that’s the culture we live in” Like, you can say one thing as a parent, “Hey, this is where you should invest your time and energy as a girl to be successful in life, to be happy, to be fulfilled” but when you have a whole culture and society telling them differently, they’ll stop listening to you. My Mom, my mother was so amazing at that, my mom was so ahead of the game in the nineties raising me in the 2000s. But, you know, I was surrounded and I was in a culture that clearly valued bodies. I remember when Britney Spears’ first single dropped in she had the, I remember just crowding around the CD in the CD insert, like the first friend who went and got the CD, they would pull the insert out and we would all just- Annie: Read the lyrics and look at the photos. Jen: Yeah we were just surrounded, like, looking at these photos of Britney Spears and she was wearing a little skirt and it was just, like, everything right and yeah, and we even see it in Healthy Habits Happy Moms, our own Facebook group, where we want to so badly want to see this shift, we see, once in a while women might come in and post a before and after photo, they may be new to our group or whatever, they don’t understand the culture in there yet and even when that happens it will get so much attention. Well, I noticed the other day that a woman posted in the last year she has added in a couple habits and her triglyceride levels are back down into a normal healthy range and it did not barely get any engagement and I look at that stuff and I think, even in our group, it’s so depressing because it’s like that is what health is, like, those are the things we should be celebrating. We don’t know what that picture means. We don’t know if her blood pressure is through the roof. We, it’s just, yes so, it’s just, it’s so depressing to me. I’m like Society doesn’t care if people are healthy, they care that they’re thin. Lauren: Right, like stop framing it as health and wellness, right? It’s thinness that you are celebrating but back to the the diaries of the girls thing too, we talk about all the time how women say in our in our Balance365 group, like, I have all this time and mental space that has opened up since I stopped focusing on my body and dieting and like, I kind of see that in this this study from this author, like, where would we be if we weren’t so focused on ourselves and our bodies, like, where would we be if we were all still trying to better ourselves in other ways? Jen: Right, would fighting for equality with men still be a conversation? Like imagine if women took all the time and energy they put into their bodies and their appearance and put that on equality- Lauren: Or any issue. Jen: Any issue, getting politically active or you know, yeah. Annie: Which is a great segue into the 3rd way I wrote down why it’s harmful is it keeps us from living our lives and as we’ve talked about, our conversations are consumed with diet talk, weight talk, body shaming. On a really small scale, we hesitate to eat kids cake at birthday parties or we hesitate at going out to eat with a girlfriend because we are fearing putting on weight or deviating from our meal plan but I know the 3 of us have talked about that we could not have started this business if we were still eating, breathing, living diet culture. Like we wouldn’t have the capacity for it. Jen: I did a talk for a women’s studies class last year via video through, I was just asked to do it remotely basically so I filmed it in my home and it was for the University of the Saskatchewan, a women’s studies course and I did my 1st year of university at the University of Saskatchewan and at that time I wanted to be a doctor. When I started university I wanted to be a doctor and I had to basically drop out by my 2nd semester. I had to move down to part time studies because I was struggling with an eating disorder by then. It just, it was my whole life, it became my whole life. I was starving, my B.M.I. was 17, I was running on a treadmill for like one to two hours a day every morning, not eating, it just it consumed me and that might be a more extreme result of living in a diet culture is actually developing an eating disorder but there was a study done in the States, I think the University of Southern California and they surveyed 10000 women and 65 percent of women report having disordered eating behaviors. That’s huge. Lauren: I had the same experience and I think it’s, I think maybe getting a diagnosable eating disorder is rare but struggling with disordered eating and having it take up your life is not rare. Jen: No it’s very common. Lauren: Yeah I remember coming home, in my senior year it it took up my entire life. I wouldn’t go out because I had to come home and I had to do my workout and I had to eat my broccoli, like I could go out and eat. I had to come home and yeah, just the same way that you’re describing. It took over my entire life. Annie: I am just scrolling on Instagram, I swear it was Erin Brown wrote, had a quote or shared a quote at one point about how all the possibilities and opportunities that have been missed because women were worrying if their thighs were too big. Jen: Yeah. Lauren: Yeah Annie: And that hit home for me. I mean, everything from rock climbing to saying no to opportunities to speak or present or share or work with a client or you know and I think about some, just in the health and wellness world, some of the women in our community that have even expressed, like, I have a really an interest in helping other people, becoming a personal trainer, becoming a nutritionist, getting the certification but will people want to take advice from me because I look like this? Which is anything outside of the norm and that’s really sad, that’s unfortunate, really unfortunate so I want to do our part to break that, right? Jen: Yeah and the messy part of this conversation is trying, talking about weight loss in the context of it not being about diet culture. So that is a really hard conversation to have because we are all about body autonomy and letting women decide what’s right for them and for some women, fat loss is part of their wellness vision. And so, you know, but in within Balance365 constructs you would understand that it’s behavior change that leads to sustainable fat loss etc, etc, etc, we have many podcasts about this. And so that is just really and that’s why chapter one of Balance365 is diet deprogramming because you really have to untangle what it is, what is driving these thoughts, right? That is something really tricky to untangle so where we talk, you know, Annie has lost. Annie used to be a size 22 and now she’s a size 12, is that right, Annie? Annie: Ish. Yeah. Depending on the brand. Jen: Yes and so for, Annie getting healthy, ditching diet mindset, ditching disordered eating, cultivating healthy habits that she can stick to resulted in losing 10 dress sizes which is amazing and I will celebrate that with Annie. I do not think of Annie as a better person than when she was a size 22. I think she was just as worthy. Annie may not have felt that but, and that is the whole problem in our society that we actually believe we are more worthy when we’re smaller. However, on the flip side, me doing all those same things, ditching dieting, ditching disordered eating, ditching and actually cultivating healthy habits that work for me in my life have resulted in me being about 20 to 25 pounds heavier than my leanest weight. And so that is a really important thing for women to understand when we talk about Balance365 and we address weight, we are there to help women become a healthy weight and that is going to look different for everybody. I am not interested in any way in supporting a woman in figuring out how to live life at a weight that is not healthy or sustainable for her. I am not interested in giving her a bunch of diet tricks that make sure, you know, that allow her to be super lean certain times of the year, that’s just not where our focus is and so Balance365 really, you know, the conversation is more about, is not about what losing weight, it’s like what is a healthy weight for you and the thing is in Balance365 so many women have dieted for so many years they don’t even know what that is. Like they haven’t been able to maintain their weight for 3 months, let alone figuring out what maintaining their weight for years and years even looks like for them and I know I didn’t know. I was just constantly going, you know, because I was constant dieting, disordered eating, rebounding. I was basically slingshotting to below what a healthy weight is for me and then right back to above and below and above and I was just slingshotting back and forth where once I found my, you know, what’s healthy for me was basically smack dab in the middle of that and that is what I have been able, that I maintain my weight for the last 4 years through, you know, even some very stressful seasons of life, like because this is actually what’s healthy for me, but that can be a tough pill to swallow for women because for some women that weight is actually heavier than what they are now and that’s terrifying for some women. Lauren: And I think it’s hard for us to communicate that in a diet culture, right, like it’s hard for us to communicate we’re going to help you get the size of body that’s right for you. It’s not always weight loss, sometimes it’s weight gain, sometimes it’s, you know, you’re pretty much the same weight but you have more freedom, you know, to eat the way you want. Annie: Because in diet culture weight loss is equal to a higher status. Jen: Yes, always. Yes. So in a diet culture weight loss is always the goal, right. Annie: Right. Jen: Yes but we do, you know, we’ve got women who have lost significant amounts of fat inside our program but for them, being in those larger bodies was a prison for them because that was not the right weight for them, it was well above what was healthy and sustainable for them and a person gets to that space because of diet culture, because of the constant yoyoing of diets and every time they diet they lose 10 pounds and they put on 35. They go on another diet, they lose 10 and they put on another 35 and at some point those women, fat loss becomes it isn’t about diet culture anymore, isn’t about worthiness, it’s about reclaiming the body that they were always meant to have had they never gone on a diet at all. Lauren: Right and going back to diet culture, our culture is to blame people with larger bodies, right, that it’s their fault that they are in a larger body when it’s diet culture that put them there. Annie: Exactly. Lauren: Many, many times, right? It’s because of the dieting that they’re in a body that’s larger for them and obviously, that’s not universally true but in a lot of cases. Jen: Yes. Annie: Yeah, I feel like we could spend hours talking about how this harmful on so many levels. But I also want to leave some time and some space to talk about how we can kind of start to change it and the first one, I feel like this is our answer to everything on changing everything is just creating awareness, like, you know, like, we’ve talked about this in so many pockets on various topics but just opening your eyes and paying attention to what is diet culture, where you see it, where you experience it and where you hear it and just like start listening, start paying attention. Because as Jen said earlier, once you start seeing it, you’ll realize it’s everywhere. The second thing is break up with dieting. And I want to be clear that you don’t have to be on a diet to participate in diet culture, like that’s key. Like this isn’t just something that people who are dieting are participating in. But also that giving up on diet culture doesn’t mean that you’re giving up on your health. Like there are other options. And one of the ways you can start breaking up with dieting is to question the rules that you’ve been taught, the “rules”, right? The foods that you’ve labeled as good and as bad, your relationship with exercise, like what does that look like, are we exercising to punish ourselves, because we hate ourselves, because we think when we’re thin our life is going to be perfect and we’re going to have the perfect body and people who weigh less have less problems. And this can take years, like this is, I mean, as Jen mentioned earlier when she’s talking about some of how her decisions she still is kind of wrangling with, like, we’ve been in this and we’ve been doing this sort of work for almost 4 years and we’re still, or if not longer but specifically with our company for for almost 4 years and we’re still, like, kind of wading through the mud, like it’s cloudy and it’s messy and it’s muddy and it’s like, is this health? Is this diet culture? Is this supporting where I want to go or is this, like, disguised, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, so to speak? And then also vote with your dollars and your energy. Just a simple refusal to feed the diet industry, buying products that support it, whether it’s food, systems, magazines etc. You know your yogurts, your places you’re shopping, where you’re buying your clothes. Jen: And this stuff works. It can feel hopeless but, like, we are seeing a shift, like we are seeing a shift and people are getting really loud about it and companies are paying attention. Because we are seeing, we have never had so much, we don’t have a lot of diversity but we have never seen so much diversity in the media as we do today and that is from the work of all of us individually just throwing those pebbles into a pond which eventually make a wave. Annie: One of the places I really like to shop is Aerie, even, I don’t know if there’s an age limit on Aerie. Lauren: I really like Aerie too. Annie: I really like it and every time I go in there there are, you know, they’ve openly declared that they have stopped photoshopping their models, there’s often disabilities, women with disabilities in their marketing. There is, you know, not maybe as large of a variety of body types and skin colors as I would like to see but it’s more so than it was, you know, 3, 4, 5 years ago and just to circle back to LuLuLemon, obviously anyone that follows me knows that I love my Lululemon and I’m an ambassador for them and I would say the same thing for them too, following them on social media, they are carrying additional size ranges, like, they’re, I think they’re moving, what I see from them is- Jen: They’re moving Annie: They’re moving in that direction. Jen: And the thing is so, it’s understanding too, I remember, Annie, we had this talk right so the political party that I have traditionally voted for in Canada frustrates me to no end and so much so that actually our last federal election I did not vote for them and that’s sometimes is a stand that you have to take as a person but there’s another choice is to get involved in that industry or those companies or that political party and try to make change from within and so as far as Lululemon I don’t know if I’m going to stop shopping there but I am thankful for the awareness that my friend brought to me to say, “You know you’re supporting a store that doesn’t even want women my size in there” and that just stopped me in my tracks and what I am definitely going to be doing is going in and saying “This is how you make people feel, people I love and what do you have to say about that?” and that will be escalated. I recently took a stand at my local pool, so this is just another small example but I shared this on social media, I haven’t shared it on our podcast yet but there’s a swim club at my local swimming pool and I witnessed this male coach probably in his late teens, early twenties talking to a group of probably 11, 12, 13 year old kids making fun of people who are over 200 pounds and just the way he was, it was awful and I was sitting in the hot tub while he was doing this with the team and I’m sitting with my kids and after they left I really had a very, I addressed it with my children, like “That was not OK,” etc but then I’m not going to stop going to the pool, like that is a place that we enjoy and frequent. What I did do was I went to management and told them that this had happened and they were so thankful and now they will work, because the swim club is an external club that comes in, so now they will work with the club to make sure the club understands that this is a body-inclusive environment and that is not OK. So there are ways of, you know, there are certain brands you might love, you know, etcetera but until they are like that Victoria Secret, I mean Victoria’s Secret stepped up and said: “No, we are not changing.” They basically said, “We do not want big women in our stores.” I will not shop there anymore, that is my choice but I haven’t shopped there for years. If you have followed me long enough on social media you’ll know why. Annie: You’ve had some runins with Victoria Secret. Jen: They know me but so that’s just a choice you can make. You don’t have to walk away, it doesn’t have to be this break up, it can be like “Hey, I support you and I love you guys, I love your brand but here’s what I need from you to keep supporting you.” Annie: Which is actually a conversation that I have had many times with my local Lululemon store and they’re all about it. They are they are game to do whatever they can to help support that as well, I mean, they acknowledge that like “Yeah, we would love to be able to dress all women and like how can we make our voices heard and what actions can we take and how can we be more inclusive and more welcoming to men and women of all varieties even while in this very moment we only serve pant sizes up to a 12 or a 14? What else can we do, how can, you know, how can we start to create change?” and you know, these are the tough and sometimes uncomfortable conversations we need to have. Lauren: Well and I think too it’s sometimes even more impactful than boycotting, right, to have Annie in they’re saying, like, “Look, this is how what you’re doing impacts me, impacts these people, right? Annie: Right. Yeah and in addition to refusing to feed the diet industry, kind of along the same lines as to build your life online and in real life with people, books, music that support how you want to feel and hopefully that’s not a part of the diet culture and my friend Meghan talks about nourishing her body and when she first told me that nourishment was one of her core values, I kind of rolled my eyes because I thought she was going to give me this like elitist version of how she eats paleo. Jen: Green smoothies. Annie: Yes and what she was talking about, how she defines nourishment is what she puts in her ears, what she puts in her body, how she moves her body, what she reads, what she consumes on social media, like those are all the ways in which she nourishes her body and I love that definition and you know, just like Jen said earlier, you know, her feed used to be filled with before and afters and I’m guessing you’ve unfollowed. Jen: No, I don’t see any of that anymore. It’s jarring to me when I see before and after photos now, I’m like “Oh, where did that come from?” Annie: Yeah and it’s like, it’s OK, sometimes, you know, unfortunately like the saying “fences make good neighbors”, you know some of your friends might be really heavily engaged in diet culture still and you might have to unfollow or set some boundaries. Jen: Yeah, I say “It’s not personal, It’s about me, not you” right, like, “You go ahead and post your before and after photos, it doesn’t serve me and if I saw the odd one now I’d be fine but I I recognize it’s a slippery slope, right, if you have, you get on Facebook for 15 minutes and you have 16 before and after photos come through your feed, like eventually, eventually, that becomes our reality, like, it just does so yeah, curating your environment is so important. Annie: Yeah what else do you want to add before we pop off? I mean, I know this is such a heavy topic and there’s so many aspects and components to diet culture but I just really wanted to kind of throw something out there sooner rather than later for our community who might be new and might be struggling with the concept of diet culture and because even it’s so subtle sometimes I miss it, you know, sometimes I don’t even realize that what I just participated in was diet culture, what I just bought was supporting diet culture. Jen: I would say it’s OK to like get to the awareness stage and start noticing and making small changes in your life, one thing that I feel very passionate about is not overwhelming women and feeling like they have to be the only crusader for this cause, like, we really have only so much time and energy and number one needs to be taking care of you because you will never be able to take care of others until you can take care of you and us three going from the awakening to the taking care of us to making sure our cups are filled to starting this company to becoming crusaders that was a years in the making process, right, like, I didn’t realize one day diets don’t work and I have been part of this machine that exploits women’s vulnerabilities for my whole life to the next day starting a podcast and talking about all these issues, like, I mean, we’re talking years so don’t feel like you have to do all the things in one day but you’ve got to make sure you’re taken care of first. Lauren: Yup. Annie: The awakening, that sounds- Lauren: I like that too. Annie: I was like “Whoa, yes! Sign me up for that” Jen: Stay woke, friends. Annie: Stay woke to diet culture. That should be our new hashtag. Lauren: Hashtag. Annie: Hashtag stay woke to diet culture. Lauren: Tag us if you use it. Annie: All right this was and can be a really heavy topic but, and it is serious, like this is detrimental to our individual and cultural health and especially our children who are just unknowingly, you know, being exposed to it. We had a really great podcast on boundaries where we talked where Jen made the analogy that compared it to secondhand smoke and diet culture is the same way, you know, like that’s, you know- Jen: Just blowing smoke in your kids’ faces all day long. Annie: Yeah and we don’t doubt the intentions or love that a parent would have for their children, so creating awareness to how harmful this can be is, you know, the first step to really making some steps in the right direction but if you want to continue the discussion, if you want to discuss what is diet culture, what it isn’t, is what you’re experiencing or what you’re participating in part of the problem or part of the solution please join us inside our private Facebook group Healthy Habits Happy moms 40000 women that would be happy to continue this discussion inside there and the 3 of us are in there too participating as well so if you have more questions or if you’re still confused or if there is something that you want to talk about that we didn’t talk about in this hour, let us know we’re here, like this is just, I have a feeling this is just going to be an ongoing topic. Jen: Yeah this was the tip of the iceberg. Annie: Yes, the tip of the iceberg, exactly All right, well thank you ladies, it was a good chat. Jen: Yes. Annie: Alrighty, bye bye. Jen: Bye. Lauren: Bye. The post 49: Diet Culture Explained appeared first on Balance365.
When the New Year rolls around, people start making resolutions to change their lives. More often than not these ventures end in failure, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not a lack of willpower, motivation or hard work. It’s just the way we make resolutions isn’t always consistent with the science of behavior change. Jen, Annie and Lauren explore the three ways you can make better resolutions this year, or even decide whether you need to make resolutions at all. Resolve to join us and learn more! What you’ll hear in this episode: The best time of year to buy used exercise equipment New Year’s resolutions and FOMO The Power of Suggestion, product placement and targeted ads Jumping on the bandwagon and following the leader The perfect storm of post-holiday shame Shame-based marketing as motivation for change Ending the binge-restrict cycle Learning to let the pendulum settle Zooming out to give context to holiday eating What happens when you try to change too many things at once Outcome-based goals vs habit-based goals How to turn an outcome-based goal into a habit-based goal Resources: Five Stages Of Behavior Change Episode 15: Habits 101 – Hack Your Habits, Change Your Life Episode 22: The Oreo Cookie Approach To Breaking A Bad Habit Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: The New Year is upon us and with that comes optimistic feelings of a fresh start, a clean slate and a chance to reach our goals. Love them or hate them, it’s estimated that almost half of Americans make resolutions every year. Step into any gym the 1st week of January and it’s clear that fitness and weight loss goals are topics for most resolution makers. Resolutions are a dime a dozen. It’s sticking to them that can be difficult. Sadly, the reality is that most of us who vow to make changes in 2019 will drop them before January is even over. On this episode of Balance365 Life Radio Jen, Lauren and I dive into common reasons why New Year’s resolutions fall flat and changes you can make to help ensure you stick with your goals long after the New Year’s excitement fades. Enjoy! Lauren and Jen, welcome back! We are discussing New Year’s resolutions already, can you believe it? Lauren: No. Jen: I can’t believe how quickly this year has gone. Annie: No, I feel like I blinked and it was like the end of the year. Jen: I feel like I just saw you guys in San Francisco in February. Annie: I know, it was like a year ago. Jen: I know. Annie: That’s what happens when you see each other every day and talk to each other every day, all day. Besties. So we are talking about New Year’s resolutions because, I mean, it’s obviously a timely subject, we’re coming up on the end of the year and people are thinking about what they want to accomplish in the New Year, right? Which is ironic because we used to have a challenge, we did a challenge a couple years ago called the Screw Your Resolutions challenge and it was our alternative, our Balance 365 alternative to resolutions because so many of us have made resolutions and failed, right? Have you done that? Jen: Most people. Lauren: Yeah. Jen: In fact. Lauren: No, I’ve never done it. Jen: In fact, I keep my eye out for workout equipment around March and April because it all goes back for sale, you can get really good deals on treadmills around that time. Annie: Yes and workout clothes as well too, like they’ll go on, I mean, they’re not on sale right now necessarily but because it’s a popular time to be buying them. Jen: Yeah. Oh I mean second hand- Annie: Oh, OK. Jen: March, April, yeah people, they buy, they get the deals in December-January, they spend $2000.00 on a treadmill and then by March-April it’s back up for sale for like $400.00 So keep your eye out- Annie: Because that treadmill trend- Jen: on buy and sell websites. Yeah because you just hang laundry on it, really. This is what you do. I mean, I’ve been there as well. But I sold my treadmill when we moved last time and I really regret it because now I’m looking at getting another one. And but I’m going to wait I’m going to wait for the New Year’s resolution dropouts to put theirs up for sale- Annie: Yeah, she’s going to take advantage of you guys, listen. Jen: March-April. Annie: She’s going to prey on you. Lauren, what about you? Have you made a resolution and failed to keep it? Lauren: Yes, pretty much every year besides the last five. Yeah, it was always obviously diet exercise related too. But then I would add, like, other things so I would want to do all the things. Annie: Yep. Which we’ll talk about. Please don’t jump ahead of my outline. Lauren: I’m sorry. Annie: We’ve talked about this. Jen: I made a New Year’s resolution-ish. It was a couple years ago it was really big to choose a word, like choose a word for 2016 or 2017 whenever it was and I jumped on board that train and it was a success but we will talk about that later. I won’t skip us ahead. Annie: What was your word? Jen: It was respond. Annie: Oh, OK. Jen: Rather than react because I found myself, I was, like, you know, I could be quite reactive. Annie: No. Jen: So I really worked on that secondary, that response, when your inner B. F. F. comes in and it’s like “Whoa, chill out, girl.” Annie: Yeah, I dig that. Jen: What about this? Annie: Yeah. Jen: So then I would find, you know, I think it was 2016, I worked really hard on it and I’m much better at keeping my reactions under control and responding. Annie: Well, I’ll be interested, maybe a little bit later you can tell us about why that was so successful versus other attempts. But before we get any further, really, today we just want to discuss, I have 3 main reasons that we see resolutions kind of fall flat and I want to be clear that we are not anti resolutions, we’re not anti goals, we’re not anti action plans or whatever you want to tackle, resets, restarts, refreshes in the New Year because I’m totally one of those people that gets super excited about the idea of like a clean slate, like, that’s really, like, I love, like, a fresh start, going to start over. I get to do this. I’m going to do it right. It’s super exciting and super motivating but just the way in which people approach them and their expectations around resolutions are usually why they aren’t successful with them. Jen: Yeah we are pro, we want you to be successful. Annie: Yeah so we’re going to discuss 3 ways you can make your resolutions a little bit more successful because again, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with resolutions inherently, It’s more how we approach them and our expectations surrounding them. So let’s just dive right into it. The 1st one is that remember that you can set goals, create new habits, set intentions any time of the year, right? Like this is not something specific just to New Year’s Day or New Year’s Eve, you can do this February 1st, just the same as you can March 1st or May 15th, like whatever time you want to set new goals, you can make new goals and as I noted, I totally understand the excitement that comes when everyone else around you is doing the thing, right, and it’s contagious and I have severe FOMO, you know, fear of missing out so I feel this pressure like “Oh I want to do that, like, that’s really exciting, right?” Jen: Well, it can be like when you go shopping with your girlfriend and you only need one thing, like you need a pair of jeans and then you get in the store and your friends are like “I’m getting jeans. Oh, I also need earrings and look at this top, it’s so cute, and this coat” and then all of a sudden you’re like “Yeah, those things are so great. I should look at them too and I should get them too” and then all of a sudden you’re leaving the store with like 6 bags and you only want one pair of jeans, right? So during New Years, it’s just that you’re just surrounded by people changing all the things and you’re like “Well that is such a good idea, I need to address that in my life too. Oh and that would be great too and that too” and then all of a sudden you’ve got 10 New Year’s resolutions. Annie: And the power of suggestion, sorry, Lauren, go ahead. Lauren: I was going to say, well, even more than that for me is I would feel like I had to make a New Year’s resolution period, like even if I was not in a particular space in my life where I could handle a new goal or setting a New Year’s resolution, like, I had my daughter 5 years ago on December 1st and so it was like “Oh, I should make a New Year’s resolution” while I had an infant, you know, right, probably not the best time. Annie: Yes and I was just going to add to the power of suggestion is really, really strong around this year because Jen you’ve shared advertising budget numbers from the diet and the fitness industry, they spend a large percentage of their marketing budget this time of year. They are pushing, pushing, pushing- Jen: Yeah, the first few months of the year, the 1st quarter. I can’t remember what the numbers are, I’ve shared them on a past podcast but it’s like 65 percent of their marketing budget is spent in the 1st couple months of the year. Because yeah, so it’s everywhere. Annie: So you’re really, really, you’re likely seeing it in magazines and commercials and newspapers, in bookstores and anywhere you’re going, essentially, to buy this product, buy this program, purchase this service, purchase this membership- Jen: Yeah, people have no idea, like, how much thought goes into marketing and so even, you’ll see, I noticed in my local bookstore that throughout the year when you walk in there’s different tables set up featuring, you know, new books or this all these books on this topic. Well, in December or January the diet table comes to the very front of the store so when you walk in it’s right there. Because they know, they know that that’s the time to be selling these books, to put them right in front of you, get you thinking about it, it makes you buy them. We like to think we’re so in control of our choices but we really are not. Annie: I was just going to say that because I know, Annie 10 years ago would have walked into Barnes and Noble or whatever this bookstore, saw the diet book and “it’s like they knew what I wanted,” like, yeah, how did I, like, you know, how did they know but really? Jen: If you don’t even think about the change, it’s like, this must have always been here. Annie: Right, it’s like, like, you know, it’s like, it’s, now we have Amazon ads popping up on our feed, you know, like Lauren, you just talked about how you were, posted about your standing desk. Lauren: Oh my gosh, yes, I got this standing desk which is amazing, I got it from Costco, I don’t know if it’ll still be here when this airs but I got it from Costco and I posted about it on my story and I had never seen an ad for a standing desk before and after I posted it on my story I was started seeing Instagram ads for this other standing desk and it freaked me out. Jen: Oh. There’s so many conspiracy theories around what Facebook and Instagram listen to and of course they deny, deny, deny but that happens to me all the time. Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to a friend about something, like, in person- Lauren: Yes. Jen: Then I’ll start seeing those ads on my feed. Lauren: Yeah. Annie: There’s a meme that it’s like, of course, if I had a dollar for every time I started a sentence with “There’s a meme” on Instagram that says “Oh, oh, that’s weird how this showed up on my feed when I didn’t talk to anyone about it, I didn’t type it, I didn’t search it, like, it’s, like, there in your brains, you know- Jen: You thought it. Annie: Yes, but anyways, it is, you know, it’s kind of like when you go to Target and your kids don’t want goldfish until they see the goldfish and then you know and it’s like “Now I can’t live without the goldfish.” Jen: And you have to and there’s also food, food companies have to pay more to get their products on the shelf at eye level. Lauren: Yes. Jen: Do you know I mean because they know it leads to you choosing it more so they make a deal with, you know, whatever supermarket chain and they pay a fee to have their product at eye level, like, you really, if you know what I mean, like, it’s just there’s so much of this that goes on that consumers aren’t aware of. Annie: Right, which we kind of went off on a tangent there and I think that would make a really great podcast about how the the science and psychology behind marketing and how it works the way it does, especially when it comes to health and wellness but the point here is that you can set these goals any time of year, so even though the bookstores are pushing it or you might feel like you’re seeing these messages to get these really brand new fresh goals around your health and your wellness. It seems like it’s everywhere. Remember that you can set these 6 months from now, 3 months from now, any time a year. You don’t have to feel pressure to do it on New Year’s Day. Jen: Yes and now that we have told everybody about it, you will start noticing it and you can be more critical about it and this is called media literacy and media literacy has been found to be one of the greatest tools in preventing disordered eating and body image issues. So pass it on. Annie: Pass it on. Stay woke, right? Jen: Stay woke. Annie: OK. Number two, remember your why. Ask yourself “Does this really matter to you?” when you’re setting your New Year’s resolutions because along the same lines of getting caught up, this can tend to be following the leader, kind of like Jen said when you’re shopping with your girlfriend and in my experience, what’s personally happened to me before is one girlfriend dinner is like “Oh yeah, I’m going to join this gym, I’m going to start this program, I’m going to start this diet” and the rest of us are like “Oh yeah, like, I guess that sounds good,” like, “That sounds good to me, I’ll do that too” or like “Guess I hadn’t really given it that much thought but she’s done the research. And she seems to think it’s a good idea so I’ll do it too” and if you listen to our Stages of Change podcast with our Balance365 Coach Melissa Parker, you’ll know that skipping stages like contemplation, where you’re thinking about doing a thing and preparation, where you’re making plans to do the thing, are actually really vital to your success and this is one of the reasons people- Jen: Not skipping stages. Annie: Sorry, yes, not skipping stages. It’s really vital to your success and this is one of the reasons that people can fall flat on New Year’s resolution time is because they join the gym, they buy the meal plan, they sign up for the challenge or whatever it is they’re doing without really considering “Does this even matter to me? Is this a good time in my life to do this? Is this reasonable to think that I can do whatever is required to make this goal happen?” Just like Lauren said, like, she just felt this pressure to make a resolution and it’s like “Hey, I just had a baby. Maybe now isn’t the time to be all in on whatever it is I’m wanting to do” and if you give it some reflection and you come up with like “No, this isn’t OK. This isn’t the time, this isn’t the thing I want. That’s OK. It doesn’t mean that you’re stuck wherever, you’re out forever. It just means that maybe you need to re-evaluate and get some clarity on what your goal is and how you’re going to get there. Jen: Yeah, it often is related to, I think, feelings of guilt around holiday eating as well so, I mean, that’s why the advertising is so successful, right, because they know you’re feeling bad about all the eating and sitting around you’re doing over the holidays and that becomes your motivation, right, which is shame-based motivation, which we also know through research that shame-based motivation is not lasting. Lauren: Yeah, and I’ll add too on this that this is why we actually added a section in Balance365 it’s called The Story of You and it helps you to uncover what your values are and what your core values are and so not only does that help you when you are making changes because when you make a change if it connects with one of your core values you’re more likely to stick to it but it also can weed out this extra stuff so you can think back “Well does this really support any of my core values?” and if it doesn’t you can feel a lot better of saying like “Oh, this isn’t for me, like, it’s good for them, it’s not good for me.” Jen: Right. Annie: And circling back to what Jen said about shame-based marketing, you know, I think in the past when I have started a new diet or a new exercise routine on New Year’s Day it has usually been to combat those feelings of shame and guilt about eating too much, missing the gym because I’ve been busier than normal, the weather’s been crummy, not enough daylight, you know, whatever fill in the blank and they know this. Lauren: Yeah, that was always me, like it comes right after the holidays, right, where everyone’s crazy busy, there’s treats everywhere. And it’s just like, it’s kind of like a perfect storm, right, everyone’s doing it, you feel crappy, the advertising is being pushed to you, so it comes together on January 1st. Jen: Yeah and it’s just it’s all part of that roller coaster, though, you could start if you zoom out a bit and start identifying trends so most people wouldn’t binge over Christmas if they weren’t dieting before Christmas. Lauren: Right, yeah. Jen: And most people wouldn’t diet before Christmas if they were bingeing at Thanksgiving. Lauren: And then you wouldn’t feel crappy, right? And wouldn’t be like “I need to do something.” Jen: Right, so the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is also a very, very popular time to go on a diet so, you know, people go into the holiday, basically, diet to counteract their Thanksgiving bingeing and to prep themselves for Christmas. Someone just said the other day, told me a friend of theirs was working on losing 5 pounds in preparation for the holidays and I’m, you know, it’s funny kind of, but you’re also like, I just cringe and think, “Oh my gosh, like, you’re basically just announcing that you have an eating disorder and that you are starving yourself in preparation for being able to binge.” Lauren: Right and that just feeds right into the cycle. Jen: Yeah and then so you binge over Christmas and then you get back on that diet rollercoaster for January and then, you know, then you restrict, then you binge and then you’re restricting for your bikini season and then it’s just, it’s just wild. Annie: And most people are trying to stop that cycle in the binge, when they’re in the binge they want to pull all the way back to restriction which I totally get, like, that seems to be, like, “Well, duh, like, I, you know, I’m either all in or I’m all out, I’m on the wagon, I’m off the wagon,” like there’s just two extremes and our approach would be to just let that pendulum settle down in the middle like, don’t pull it so far back. Jen: Yeah, so Chastity, she’s in Balance365, she said the other day is that people want to stop bingeing but unfortunately they don’t want to stop restricting. However the solution to stop bingeing is to stop restricting as well. Lauren: Right. Jen: And people just really have a hard time wrapping their heads around that. Annie: Absolutely, I mean, it can be scary because it feels like you’re letting go of some of that control, especially if you’ve been dieting for years and that’s what you know, that a lot of women feel comfortable and in control when they’re dieting, even if they’re miserable, even if they’re white knuckling it. Lauren: I remember someone when we first started doing this had been dieting for years and years and she was terrified when we told her like stop counting your points, stop counting, like, just give yourself permission to eat and she was like “I will literally start eating and never stop.” Jen: I remember that too. Lauren: And like, spoiler, that didn’t happen and now she lives a free life and she doesn’t count and she’s happy with her progress but she was terrified, like there was a real fear for her. Jen: Right. Annie: So once again we went on a little tangent. Jen: As we do. Annie: I’m just looking at our outline, like “Remember your why” and now we’re talking about restriction and it’s all connected though, isn’t it? Jen: So remember your why. So remember that you don’t want to be on the diet roller coaster and that is your why for not jumping on board a new diet in January. Annie: Well and why am I doing this again, if I am being honest and years past it would have been to try to avoid or to remove some of those feelings of guilt and shame, so it’s like “OK, I’m just going to try to regain all of my control by doing all the things and doing them perfectly” and you know, again, it just, what that does is eventually perpetuates the cycle of this diet cycle. Jen: Yeah, an alternative to feeling guilty is to say “Wait a sec, I’m human and just like everybody else at Christmas, I indulge in the holiday foods and move along.” Annie: Yeah. Because the holiday foods are yummy. Jen: They are. Annie: They are yummy. And yeah and just cut yourself some slack, right? Lauren: Yeah. Annie: OK, so we covered the first two. A, you don’t have to make these New Year’s resolutions just this time of year, you can set goals or new intentions or create new habits any time of year, then you evaluate like “Does this really matter to me? Why am I doing this? What’s my purpose? What’s my mission behind this? What am I hoping to get out of this?” and then if you come to the conclusion that “I still want to move forward. I still want to make change” and your resolutions are around things like eating healthier, exercising more, drinking less, quitting smoking then we’re talking about changing habits which, shockingly, is something we’re pretty good at helping people do. Surprise! And Lauren you have some really good information about creating and changing habits, but essentially it boils down to you don’t have to overhaul your entire life overnight because so often people go to bed on New Year’s Eve and they’re like, they set these plans and they’re going to wake up like a person with completely new habits on January 1st, like 12 hours later, new year, new me, right? Lauren: Right. That would be really nice. Annie: It would be great if it were just that simple, if all the change could happen. Jen: If worked, we would encourage it. Lauren: Yeah, right. Annie: Yeah, it’d be a heck of a lot quicker but will you share the statistics about why changing too many things at once isn’t likely to bode well for you? Lauren: Yes, so we share this all the time, actually but I find that it’s so eye-opening for people is that studies show that if you want to change a habit and you change one small thing and only that thing you have about an 80 percent chance of sticking with that change long term, which is actually really good for percentages. If you try and change too things at the same time your success rate of sticking with both of those things drops down to about 30 percent and then 3 or more changes at the same time your success rate drops to almost 0 sticking with all those changes and then the more things you add on, the less and less your success rate will be. Annie: That’s not very promising to change a lot of things at once is it. Lauren: No, so not only do you not have to, you shouldn’t if you care about sticking with it, right? Annie: Yes, so when you think about someone that wakes up New Year’s Day and is like I’m going to change all 3 of my meals, plus my snacks, plus my sleep habits, plus my water and alcohol consumption, now I’m also going to add going into the gym 5-6 times a week, that is so many behaviors that it takes to change, I mean we’re talking about, like, let’s take a look at a meal, like, what does it take to change a meal, like, it could change what you put on your plate, how you prepare your food, what kind of foods you’re buying at the grocery store, it might require, do you even go to the grocery store in the first place versus eating out, I mean, and those are the little steps that take to build a really great solid habit that so many people overlook. They just think “I’m just going to start eating a balanced breakfast, lunch and dinner tomorrow, all the time, forever and ever amen.” Lauren: And our brains just don’t work like that. It’s just the way we’re wired and you know, we, like our brains, like consistency and constants and so it’s not going to bode well for you if you try and change everything all at the same time. Jen: I don’t even like going somewhere new in the grocery store, like a new aisle. Like when I when I’m looking at recipes and there’s just some whacko ingredient, you know, that either you can’t find in a regular supermarket or I’ve just never seen that before I’m like, “Next!” Like, I just really resist. Yeah. Annie: I think, yeah, I mean, obviously when it comes to cooking I’m the same way. I see it is a recipe with more than like four ingredients and I’m like “No, I’m out.” Lauren: Thank you, next. Jen: Yeah, I know as far as our plans on expanding our our recipe collection on our website and just looking at, like, when we had a woman making recipes for us this fall and the first couple she sent me I was like, “Listen, like chickpea flour is just not going to fly.” Lauren: I feel like we should have a test where like if Annie, Lauren and Jen can’t make it it doesn’t get put out there and we would be like, “Pizza. Quesadillas. Chicken.” Jen: Yeah yeah and so it’s like, I remember I would go all in like back in my dieting days on making things like cauliflower pizza crust. Lauren: Yes I would take so long to make meals and they would always taste like crap. Jen: Yeah and so but then it’s like, you know, five years later, we’re just having pizza, like just regular crust and it’s way better. Lauren: Like, it’s fine. Jen: It’s like all those steps, right, like all those steps to make, to just get in the habit of making these healthy pizza crusts and yeah just really makes no difference. Annie: And now, yeah, I feel good just throwing some veggies and some fruit and some extra protein on my Jack’s frozen pizza. Jen: Yeah, like, I’ll just have a side of cauliflower with my regular pizza. Instead of trying to work it into the crust. Annie: I really like how you say cauliflower. Lauren: Cauliflower. Annie: Anyways, yeah, but truly I think people really underestimate how much energy is required to change just one habit and it’s definitely a slower process but what we hear from women in our community that are working through our program is that it feels effortless, they’re not white knuckling through all these changes and just like, “Oh my gosh, I hope I can do this. I just need to do this for a little bit longer before it comes automatic.” They’re like, actually, they’re kind of like looking around like “Is this really all I’m doing? Like, this is all you want me to focus on?” and we’re like “Yeah, actually.” Jen: Just this one thing. Annie: That is. Jen: Yeah. Annie: And if you’re talking about changing existing habits, which that comes up a lot around New Years resolutions too is the best way to change an existing habit is to replace it with a new one and Lauren and I have a pretty good podcast, actually two podcasts on how habits are built, like Habits 101, and then how to change or break bad habits, so if you want more information on the science and the process behind habit building and breaking bad habits, I would highly encourage you to listen to those because, I mean, I think we give some pretty good tidbits. Lauren: It’s pretty good. Annie: I mean, it’s alright. And the other thing I want to add onto that too in terms of habit changing and going a little bit slower is to discuss the difference between outcome-based goals and behavior-based goals because so often, again, resolutions seem to be outcome-based goals. I want to lose 10 pounds. I want to run a 5K. I want to compete in this challenge or whatever and it doesn’t really address the behaviors, like, OK, how are you actually going to do that? What actions are you going to take to lose 10 pounds? Like I’m not poo-pooing weight loss as a resolution goal, your body, your choice. But how are you going to lose that 10 pounds? It might be I’m going to start exercising on Monday, Wednesday, Friday for 30 minutes or I’m going to replace, you know, X, Y, Z with vegetables on my plate or I’m going to increase protein or you know, whatever that looks like, we would encourage you to write your goals based off of your behaviors, not the outcome you want, because so often if you take care of the behaviors, which we have more control over, the outcome will just naturally be a byproduct of it and so often I see women doing all the right things and they don’t get the outcome they want and then they feel like a failure, you know, they’re making all these great changes. Especially when it comes to weight loss. We’ve seen women work their butts off to try to lose weight, you know, they’re maybe exercising more, they are addressing their self talk, they’re getting more sleep, they are cutting back on sugary drinks or alcoholic drinks or whatever that is they’re working on and they step on the scale and they’re down 3 pounds instead of the desired 10 pounds and all of a sudden they feel like they’ve failed. Lauren: Right. Jen: When they’ve actually succeeded in all these areas of life that a lot of people struggle to succeed in and it’s huge, it’s a huge big deal. Lauren: Yeah. Annie: Yeah, when really if you just zoom out and it’s like “Oh my gosh, look at all this great change I’ve made, I’m feeling better I’m taking better care of my body or you know, whatever it is, fill in the blank, that we just tend to lose sight of that when our goals are outcome based. Lauren: Also when they step on the scale and they see that, that they haven’t lost as much as they had hoped, they also a lot of times will be like “Well, what’s the point, right ?” and then they don’t continue doing those behaviors and it’s the continuation and consistency of those behaviors that’s going to lead to possibly them reaching their goal, right? Annie: Yeah, so the easiest way to turn your outcome based goal, if that’s what you were thinking about before listening to podcast, into a behavior based goal is to just ask yourself “How am I going to achieve that? How am I going to run a 5K? How am I going to run a marathon? How am I going to lose 10 pounds? How am I gonna?” Jen: Yeah. Annie: You know, like and then usually that how, that’s the behavior. Jen: Yeah and then realize that that outcome goal you have actually could be made up of a series of behavior changes that need to happen one at a time, therefore it may not happen as quickly as you like, which is OK. Life is long. Annie: Yeah, it’s the tortoise and the hare, right? Jen: It’s a journey. Annie: Yeah, as cheesy as that sounds, people are probably like, “Oh, come on.” Jen: It’s a journey. Lauren: Zen Jen over there. Jen: I know. Annie: Enjoy the process. Jen: Gandhi. Annie: We need one of those successory memes. You know, popular in the nineties. OK, well those are the three main points I wanted to discuss when it comes to New Year’s resolutions. Is there anything you two would like to add? Lauren: I don’t think so. Annie: OK, let’s do a quick review. First of all, before you set your New Year’s resolutions remember that you can set these new goals, create new habits, set new intentions, you can have a clean slate any time of the year. I totally understand that it’s super enticing to have like new year, new me but you can do this on May 1st just as easily as you can January 1st. The second one is to remember your, why does this really matter to you? Are you just doing this because your girlfriends are doing this or because marketing is telling you to do this or is this something that you really desire and then on top of that are you willing to do what it takes to make that happen and sometimes the answer is no, like Lauren said, you know, she really maybe wanted some of the things she wanted after having Elliott but it just wasn’t, the timing wasn’t good and honoring that, and being like, “Hey, I can just put that on the back burner and wait a little bit to start that until I’m ready to make those changes and I’m able to make those changes and stick with them” is absolutely, that’s an OK answer. Jen: I know you always say, Annie, there is more than two options, it’s not always “yes” and “no”, there’s a third option which is “later.” Annie: I would love to take credit for that but that’s actually Lauren. Jen: Oh, I’m sorry, Lauren. Lauren: Yes. Annie: Yes. I was like, as soon as you said that I was like “Oh, I really wanted credit for it because it’s good, it’s good advice, but I’m going to be honest, that’s Lauren’s advice.” Yes, later is always an option which I think is, that’s goes back to your maturity about responding, Jen, versus reacting, you know, so many people can get reactive during New Year’s resolutions like they feel compelled to do something just because everyone else is doing them and it’s like, if you just have pause, like think like “Do I want this? Was I considering this before I heard Susan over here talking about her weight loss? Like. Jen: I always think of my inner BFF like she’s, she just like, she comes to me in that first second I react and then give it 20 seconds and my inner B.F.F. is sitting beside me like “Hey, girlfriend. Calm down.” Annie: That first voice in me though, she can be really kind of grumpy sometimes. Jen: She’s my naughty friend. She’s naughty. Annie: Let’s do it! Yeah! Is this is code for Annie and Lauren? Jen: There’s Annie and then there’s Lauren. Annie: Annie is like shoving you into the mosh pit at a concert, like “You can do it!” and Lauren’s like, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Jen: Let’s stay safe back here. Annie: Both are needed sometimes, OK? And the last point we just discussed today was that you don’t have to overhaul your life in one night, that to think that you’re going to go to bed on December 31st and wake up 8 hours later a completely different person doesn’t usually happen for people and that’s not, that’s not because you lack willpower or motivation or determination or discipline, that’s just the way behavior change works and it takes time and slowing down the process to focus one thing until that becomes automatic and then layering on brick by brick is usually the best place to start and we have a saying too that we stole from James Clear that “Rome wasn’t built in a day but they were laying bricks often” Lauren: We changed it to make it our own. What’s our new one? Beyonce wasn’t built in a day. Jen: Beyonce wasn’t built in a day. Annie: Beyonce also wasn’t built in a day. So if you could just lay a brick, you know, if you have these big goals 2019, 2020, 2021, start with a brick, really and lay your strong foundations, good solid habits, one by one and you’ll get there eventually and hopefully you’ll wake up one day and you’ll have this big beautiful Coliseum and you’ll be like “Oh, that was easy.” Jen: Exactly. Exactly. That really is how it happens. Annie: Yeah and I know that’s probably sounds a little bit ridiculous or a little bit too good to be true but you need to be able to play the long game for behavior change, you have to have big picture and patience which, I’m saying that to myself right now. I’m talking in a mirror. And yeah, hopefully this helps people build some better resolutions. I would love to hear what people are working on. So if you are working on something for the new year and you want to talk about it, please join our Facebook group, it’s, we’re Healthy Habits Happy Moms on Facebook. We have 40,000 women in our private Facebook group and if you need a place for safe support, reasonable advice and moderation, this is your place to go. Jen: I got a huge compliment yesterday. I was at a cookie exchange with 10 women and not many people know about my our company locally where I live and actually a couple women from my community just joined and the one woman said to me yesterday “Your group is the first place I’ve ever found that actually promotes you giving yourself grace.” Lauren: Aww. Annie: Can we like get a testimonial from her? Jen: I’ll ask her. She’s in Balance365 now. Annie: Oh that’s wonderful. Jen: She would be happy to. Anne: Yeah, I think it’s a pretty sweet place. We have amazing women, it’s really, it’s not it’s not us, it’s our community that’s made it such an amazing place to be, they provide support, applause and encouragement and tough love sometimes when it’s needed. It’s a great place to be, so find us on Facebook at Healthy Habits Happy moms You can also tag us on social media on Instagram and show us what you’re working on, show us your more reasonable New Year’s resolutions. Jen: Yes. Lauren: Yeah, I like that. Annie: Yeah, me too. OK, anything to add? Jen: No. Lauren: No. Annie: We’re good to go? Alright, well, we’ll talk soon, OK? Lauren: Bye. Jen: Bye. The post Episode 46: 3 Ways To Improve Your New Year’s Resolutions appeared first on Balance365.
Narrator: Effective selling takes an ecosystem. Join host Jen Spencer, as she explores how to super charges your sales, and master the art of never selling alone. Welcome to the Allbound Podcast, The fundamentals of accelerating growth with partners. Jen: Hi everybody. Welcome to the Allbound Podcast. I'm Jen Spencer. And today, I am joined by Travis Smith who is Technology, Global Channels and Regional Vice President for HMI Performance Incentives. Welcome Travis. Travis: Hi Jen. Thanks for having me. Good to be here. Jen: It's great to have you. And for those of you listening who don't know Travis has a lot going on. So, in addition to his role at HMI Performance Incentives, he's also the CEO and Founder of Move the Channel, which we're gonna talk about, and CEO and Founder of TribeVest. So we're gonna get into a lot of good channel talk. But first, can you tell us a little bit about Move the Channel, because I know that's something you're really passionate about. I'd love to get a quick overview of what this is. Travis: You bet. Absolutely. Again, thanks for having me Jen, and good to be here with all your listeners. Move the Channel, absolutely is something I'm passionate about, and it's hard to believe it started eight, almost nine years ago. And in the way that it came to be was…of course, you know, I come from the technology space. So worked with a number of manufacturers and developers, worked for some distributors, was even a VP of sales for a system integrator and re-seller. So, along the way I had met a ton of friends. You know, colleagues, partners, and people I liked and really respected in the channel marketing and channel sales space. And, as you know in technology, there's a lot of moving that goes around, so it's sometimes hard to keep track of everybody. And so, I was playing around in this new thing called LinkedIn. You gotta remember this is 2010. Jen: Right. Travis: So it was kind of a very new...it's hard to believe. Jen: Right. Travis: In particularly, groups were even more new or more foreign to some of us. What I saw was that it was an opportunity to create a group, a community of old friends that I had met and worked with over the years. And so, I came up with the name. I'm convinced it's dumb luck, but it's a little bit of the genius of what has become Move the Channel community, and that's the name, Move the Channel. And we...I invited probably 40, 50 of these people in my network. Again, as a way to kind of keep in touch, and really, not just keep in touch but it turned out to be this network of friends that supported each other, collaborated, opened doors for each other. We even went as far as calling ourselves the Move the Channel Mafia, which I'm glad we didn't do. Sounds exciting doesn't it? Jen: I know. Travis: But, you know, it didn't take long. Here was this tight-knit group of 50 of us. And before we knew it we had 50, and then we had 100, and 1,000, and then, you know, 4,000. And now we have over 6,000 channel marketing, channel sales professionals worldwide. Jen: It's awesome. Travis: And that's how we came to be. Jen: I love it. And I just love, you know, your mission, the vision of it, you know, really trying to cultivate a community. And a lot of people try, and it doesn't always work. And so, I think you got in early like you said. You've kept it very helpful, it's organic. And I think that it's authentic. And I think that's part of why it's been so successful. Do you have like a success story about channel leaders who have been part of this community? Anything that you can share, like an anecdote of something really cool that's come out of it? Travis: You bet. And you nailed it. If you were to go try to start a group today, there's just so much noise and so much out there, it's hard to stand out. So, you know, credit a lot to the name, which I think captured a lot of people's attention and creativity. And the timing of it, getting in first, was obviously a big deal. I think we were, if not the first, one of the first groups dedicated to channel marketing and channel sales. Over the years we've really just been blown away by the impact that Move the Channel, and the reach that Move the Channel has been able to have. And there's...you know, I think about the successes out there, and all the channel leaders in the community. I mean, every time you see these lists of the channel chiefs, the women in the channel, at anytime they're kind of recognizing leadership in channel marketing and channel sales. There's a really good chance that they're a part of this community, whether it's in a Move the Channel group, or our movethechannel.com. But, you know, what we're probably most proud of is just all of the connections that have led to business successes in this group. It's impossible to measure, but I can't tell you how many stories I hear about two people, two leaders getting together, you know, connecting, finding each other from the group or Move the Channel community, and connecting and helping each other. Look at their respective channels from a different angle, through a different lens. And so we don't take credit for these big events that happen, or huge successes, but we like to take a little bit of credit when they actually...those connections were made in the Move the Channel. And a lot of, you know, finding new hires, more teammates, and even vendors. Finding vendors that have helped them achieve their goals, getting referrals to vendors that have helped them achieve their goals. So, you know, there's a lot of specific people that come to mind, but I think highlighting the success of the community is what I'm most proud of. Jen: Well, I think it's definitely something to be proud of. And maybe people listening here, well, if they haven't found Move the Channel yet, they'll go join that community and start reaping the benefits of it as well. Let's talk about HMI Performance Incentives as your, kind of that's your day job, right? That's your main gig. So tell us a little bit about that. And I really wanna learn how you've seen incentives really put to use in the channel. Because it's a big question, you know, people talk about incentivizing sales reps, gamifying experiences, incentivizing your channel. Channel sales reps are, you know, they're just their sales reps that are just not working all the time for you, right. So I'll stop talking. You tell me more about HMI. Travis: You bet. Absolutely. Yeah, you're right. You know, and there's a lot of buzz words out there. It's tough to know what's the appropriate strategy when it comes to engaging, not with just your channel partner, right? And I think of the channel partner at the organizational level. And then there's the channel sales person, the person, the human that works for the partner organization, or the partner sales engineer, or customer support. And HMI, gosh, it's such an exciting company right now. Even though we've been around for 35 years, we really are at an exciting point. We continue to innovate and move the incentive world forward. You know, Jen, when most people think of incentives, they think of the reward. And don't get me wrong, the reward is so critical. If you don't have the right reward, and the reward isn't motivating, your strategy is dead on arrival. Jen: Yeah. Travis: And more than ever, the reward options are more compelling to your target audience. You know, we're seeing huge trends towards experiences, and sporting events. You know, pick out not just merchandise or things like that. You can actually pick out the event, the theater, the summer concert. And don't just stop there but pick the date, the venue, the seat. And what about booking a hotel, and a shuttle to the show, you know, all this online in the incentive program, real time. And it's really, really cool. But let's be honest, I mean, compelling rewards are the baseline, you know, that's just the beginning. And I think what's most exciting that we're seeing at HMI is how channel incentives are solving big problems, you know, big challenges in the channel. And again, most people don't think of incentives like solving challenges. Jen: Right. Do you have an example, like an interesting use case you've seen for a particular partner program? Travis: Yeah, there's a lot of them that come to mind. You know, when I think of these challenges that we're solving, I think of…you know, the three that come to mind that are most common out there is the manufacturer distributor, either, A, doesn't know who's selling their stuff. They might know the partner that they've signed up to distribute or sell their solutions, but they don't necessarily know the sales person on the front line. And so, you know, they don't even have a database to communicate to them. And that's one challenge. The second challenge is you know who these people are. At least you have their contact information, but you don't really have any insight into them. You don't know how they're selling it, or what else they might be selling, or how your solutions might be complimenting their total solution that they're bringing to their customers. And then, C, you know, the third would be insight. They know who the customers are, they have a pretty good insight into their business, but they don't have...are they really winning the engagement, you know, the mind share, and grabbing the mind share and wallet share of these partners? And, you know, HMI has a pretty, really cool story to tell around solving these problems through channels and incentives. So for example, if you were looking to bring in a new, you know, someone that you didn't know. You don't have their information, but they're supposed to be selling your stuff, but you wanna communicate to them. It's much easier to get them to come sign up and register for an incentive program than it is a partner portal or something like that. Jen: Right. Travis: Right. And I know you guys understand why the indirect sales force are just not going to those types of applications. And therefore, you can't really engage with them very well with the traditional partner portal. But anyway, you know, an incentive program, it's pretty easy to not only get them to come register, but to surrender all sorts of information. Even maybe competitive information on who else they're selling. But anyway, back to your main question, you know, I think if I was gonna kind of single out one impressive program out there that just comes to mind, it's with my buddy Todd Owens over at QLogic and Cavium. Who's probably one of the...Jen, I've got to introduce you to him if you don't know him. He's one of the brightest and most strategic thinkers in the channel as far as I can tell. But what he did was he took HMI and his program and turned a traditional incentive program on its head, where most incentive programs are at the core incentivizing for sales. He doesn't reward for any actual sales but rewards all for engagement and enablement. So things like watching a 90-second video and taking a quick quiz, setting an appointment with one of his sales engineers in the region. So there's all these kind of other things that he's measuring and tracking, and ultimately giving rewards out for, which has been really cool. Of course there's a direct correlation between the people that are engaged in doing these things, and the sales that come in the end. Jen: I love that. Yeah, you have to introduce us, because I love the idea of incentivizing. Not the end result, but the behaviors that you know are gonna lead to the end result. So that's awesome. Love it. I want to ask you about your time at ProfitStars. So you were at ProfitStars before you joined HMI. When you were there, you were really in the thick of it, living, you know, day-to-day strategic alliances, identifying, recruiting, on-boarding, and then managing those partners. I'd love to hear some of the biggest struggles that you had in executing your job effectively, because a lot of our listeners are living that life right now. Travis: You bet. Yes. You know, but before HMI and Move the Channel, that was my world. You know, that was the world I was living. And I mentioned working for a number of manufacturers and distributors. And so, a few years ago, I was actually recruited back to that world where they wanted me to run their strategic alliances and roll out partner programs. And was just an incredibly awesome and exciting initiative…for those of you who don't know ProfitStars, it's part of Jack Henry, the $1.8 billion software company that sells through banking channels, so banks and credit unions. And then ProfitStars is the division that sells through all the other partners. So everybody that's not a bank or credit union. And that was the division I was in. And it was pretty easy, because the name was so well-known and they're so respected. You know, getting a meeting with the owner or CEO to sign them up as a partner wasn't a difficult part. And, you know, the CEO and the partner got the value prop that ProfitStars and Jack Henry were bringing to the table. So closing the partner, and you know, recruiting partners was a little bit the easy part. I know that not everybody has that luxury, but that was the case. And it turned out that, you know, the biggest challenge wasn't finding and signing up the partner. It was, you know, how can we engage with that new partner's front line. The sales people, the account managers. Jen, as you know, they're the ones that have the influence over the sale. Jen: Yeah. Travis: So that was our challenge, you know, and that was the fun part. And had a lot of good success, and very proud of the work there. But, you know, it's not something you solve and say, "Oh, we're engaged with the front line and sales people check." Jen: Yeah. Travis: It's something that you're always working on. Jen: Right. Travis: You're always, you know, making sure that you continue to engage and have their mind share. Jen: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think, you know, speaking of that kind of engagement and results that you get. You know something we talk about quite often here is that 80/20 rule in the channel where, you know, right, 80% of revenue comes from 20% of partners, or even more. You know, even 90/10 sometimes, or more often, lately it seems that we're hearing that. And a lot of that goes back to recruitment, and then how you're engaging, how you're maintaining mind share. You know, what are your thoughts on this principle? Is it something we just have to accept, that this is just the way it's gonna be? Is there a way to avoid it? Love to hear your thoughts on that topic, because I know there are people that definitely fall into both camps. Travis: Sure, sure. Yep. There are people out there that just accept it, and the statistics would be tough to argue that. But, gosh, great question. We've seen though, HMI specifically. I think we're uniquely positioned to help with this dilemma. You know, here's the thing, it's way easier to move up, you know move up an existing customer, a partner, than it is to find and train a new one. And, you know, recruitment and out there finding new partners always needs to be part of your plan. But, if we could just take a look at that middle 60, you know that middle 60%, and focus on them. You know, there's a great opportunity to move them up to that next level. And the challenge has between with performance incentives and channel incentives is a lot of companies kind of roll out these blanket reward programs, right? And when you do that, you have the same 20% hitting those goals and enjoying the rewards, or the president's club trip to Hawaii. And, you know, taking a page out of Allbound's book here, you know, it's all about…today, it's all about personalizing it, and customizing it to each individual person. So, to be honest, the technology wasn't there five years ago. But today, literally, each person that logs in to, you know, an HMI system for example, has a completely unique experience. You know, they see their unique goal or threshold, or unique promotion that's available to them because they sell a certain product or in a certain region, or there's unique rewards available to them. You know, all depending on their demographics or how we've segmented the customer/partner database. So, and then those goals are based on how much they sold from the previous quarter, or how much they sold from the previous year. It's not this, you know, "You have to sell this for us to get our attention," it's, "If you show us progress, we're gonna invest back in you." Jen: Awesome. Travis: And we call this intimacy at scale. You like that? Jen: I do like that. I do like that. Travis: I'm trying to get it to stick. Jen: No, I like that because I think it's something that; you've hit on something that really plagues, you know, a lot of sales and marketing professionals. And the tactics that really work well tend to be ones that are very hard to scale. Because as soon as you start scaling something, you start automating it, it makes it impersonal. And then, you lose that effect, right? Like, you think about the experience, the feeling you get if someone takes the time to write a handwritten note to you, right? And so, I like getting this note, right? Well, then it becomes, let's just e-mail everybody, right? And then it's just another piece of noise in your inbox. And so I like that, I like that idea of intimacy at scale. Yeah. I'm a fan. Travis: Right on. No, that was an awesome perspective. You're right. You know those things that work we try to scale them, and then in the process, we lose the personal touch. And that's usually what it is. It's the personalization that we lose. But, you know, I think technology is finally there. We can still personalize and have the user feel special, because they are, if you're using the right systems out there. Jen: Yeah. Travis: And as a result, you know…so getting back to the 80/20 rule, you know, if we kind of segment our partner, customers in your A tier, and B tier, and C tier, you know, we're all about moving those C tier customers to B, and the B's up to the A tier. And then...now, the only problem is how do we create a new tier for those A's because we've run out of letters. Jen: Right. Right. So I've one more, like channel question for you. And I'm gonna ask you to kind of look through your crystal ball here. Wondering about the future of partner programs, you know, you think about like the last 10 years or 20 years, and then where we are today, they've definitely evolved. If you were to look ahead, where do you see the future of partner programs going? And what are you most excited about for the next decade or two of this world of strategic alliances? Travis: Gosh, that's a fun question. Good question. You know, partners...it used to be…I mean, I guess if we were going to look back before we look into the future, it used to be, you know, the strategy was build it and they will come. And that included all these resources. And they would build these things and kinda put these libraries in place. And back in the day when there was only a handful of vendors doing that, they actually had a little bit of success. They would actually get their partners to come and use these resources. But today, there is just so much noise. Everybody has these resources that they expect their channel partners to come to and access and use. And it's not happening, and it's not gonna happen in the future. It's not build it and they will come. Jen: Right. Travis: It's not the field of dreams. And so, you know, what we're seeing now is...and where I see the future is, it's not getting all these assets and resources. It's how can you integrate with your partner? How can you integrate? And you've always tried to integrate your product into theirs. You know, you've got to keep doing that. You've got to integrate your marketing into theirs. You've got to keep doing that. And you've got to keep doing it better. But the real advance is gonna be, how can you integrate with the buying experience? And can you help your partners be more effective out there selling, and help them through the journey? And, you know, we don't have all the answers there but it's starting to crystallize. Again, companies like Allbound are doing things in ways that people had never seen before or considered just a couple few years ago. And those are areas of advancement that are starting to show us the future of channel marketing programs. And on the HMI side, five years ago we weren't having intimacy at scale, and customizing each participant's experience in the channel incentive program. Today we are. There's a long way to go, but that's where it's heading. Those are gonna be the vendors that win. The ones that can integrate into the buying experience. Jen: I agree, because it's all about the customer. That's exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing that all transpire along with you. So thanks for this. Thanks for sharing a lot of your time today with me about incentives and channel programs. This has been awesome, and I do hope that folks who haven't had a chance to participate in Move the Channel will get over to LinkedIn and join that group and start contributing to that group's success. Thank you for starting that. I think it's...I'm glad, I'm very glad you did. Travis: Also, I think it's where we first crossed paths, virtually. Jen: Yep. That's right. So, but Travis before I do let you go, like, really, I have some more personal questions that I always ask our guests. Just so we can get to know you a little bit better. So I'm gonna put you through that rigor now. So, my first question for you is, what is your favorite city? Travis: Gosh, great question. Cleveland, Ohio. Jen: Really. Tell me why you love Cleveland? Travis: You don't get that answer very often, do you? Jen: No, I don't. I don't. I've been there once, and I liked it when I was there. But why do you like Cleveland? Travis: You know, I'm a little bit from Ohio, and a little bit from California. I always joke my parents when I was really young, so there was a lot of back and forth. I was born in California, more raised in Ohio. But growing up in Mansfield, Ohio, which is about an hour south of Cleveland. I became the biggest die hard Cleveland Browns, Cleveland Indians, Cleveland Cavs, and everything Cleveland. And it was always such a big trip to go to the big city. And so, I have really fond memories of it. And to this day, it's still one of my favorite cities to go visit. Jen: That's great. That's wonderful. Okay, next question for you. Do you consider yourself an animal lover? Do you have any pets? Travis: I do. I'm not a cat person, although my wife is. Jen: Okay. Travis: But fortunately, she's also a dog person. And we saved a mutt from the pound, about seven years ago, and it's part Boxer, part Lab, part Golden Retriever, and a few other things that we're not quite sure. But it is still a puppy today. Seven years later, it has not calmed down a bit. And her name is Honu, which is turtle in Hawaiian. Jen: Yeah. Travis: So, we call her a dog turtle. Jen: What inspired that? I've never met a dog named turtle. Travis: We went on our honeymoon in Hawaii, and went swimming with some honus, some sea turtles. And we found ourselves kind of calling them, and trying to get their attention like you would a dog. Jen: Okay. Travis: And so, we said, "When we get a dog we're gonna call him or her Honu." Jen: That's great. Oh I love it. Okay, next question, Mac or PC? Travis: Oh gosh, I"m sitting here looking at both right now. Jen Spencer: Oh, you're one of those. Travis: I have both, and I love both of them. I have recently been turned onto Mac, and that's where I run a number of my businesses. But, you know what, I have the Microsoft Surface Pro. Jen: Okay. Travis: And, pretty sweet, I have to say. They've come a long way. Jen: Yeah, I've heard great things about that. Okay, last question for you. Let's say I was able to offer you an all expenses paid trip, where would it be to? Travis: It would be to Sydney, Australia. Jen: All right. Have you been there before? Travis: I have. I spent a summer abroad over there. And I've been trying to get back ever since. Jen: Well, I hope you have a chance to return. Travis: Well, should I expect that package in an e-mail after this, or? Jen: No, not any time soon. Travis: No, I was just curious. Jen: Never. It was just hypothetical. Let's say, I was able to offer this. Travis: Yeah. I would say there or Patagonia, Chile, which is another place I've been before, but I'm dying to go back. Jen: Well good. Travis: How about you? I'm curious, what's your answer on that one? Jen: I wanna go to Greece. I really wanna go to Greece, because I want...my background is in theater, and there's a lot of history there, and I want to be able to experience that. But then, I also just love to like just chill on a beach and do nothing. And as far as I can tell, I can do both of those things in Greece. And so that's what I would like to do. Travis: Beautiful. Jen: Yeah. Travis: You've almost made me change my mind. Jen: Oh. Travis: Now, I want to go to Greece. That sounds awesome. I've never been, and that's definitely one high on my list too. That's cool. Jen: Well, thanks for again spending some time with me today. It was awesome. So if anyone wants to reach out to you personally, obviously, they can go to LinkedIn and they can join the Move the Channel group. Is there another way for them to get a hold of you if they want to chat, maybe about HMI or anything that we've talked about here on the show? Travis: You bet. You can go to movethechannel.com and reach me there by submitting just an e-mail, which is perfect. And also, at my HMI e-mail, tsmith@hmiaward.com. And I look forward to it. I love this stuff. I'm kind of nerdy when it comes to channel marketing and sales programs, as you can tell. Jen: Perfect. That's what I like to hear. Thanks again. Thanks Travis for joining me, and thank you everyone else. And we'll catch you next week with an all new episode. Narrator: Thanks for tuning in to the Allbound Podcast. For past episodes and additional resources, visit the resource center at Allbound.com. And remember, never sell alone
Vince Menzione, Founder of Cloud Wave Partners, join me, Jen Spencer to discuss long-term relationships with partners, compensating partners, collaborating with the competition and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast. Effective selling takes an ecosystem. Join host Jen Spencer as she explores how to supercharge your sales and master the art of never selling alone. Welcome to the Allbound Podcast, the fundamentals of accelerating growth with partners. Jen: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Allbound Podcast. I'm Jen Spencer, and today, I am joined by Vince Menzione, who is founder of Cloud Wave Partners. Welcome, Vince. Vince: Jen, thank you. I'm just so excited to be here. I've listened to some of your episodes. You've had some amazing guests, and just delighted and honored to be here. Jen: We're glad to have you, as well, especially because your business experience just screams channel, and I love getting a chance to chat with people who have seen all aspects of channel sales and marketing. I mean, you were VP of Sales at General Dynamics, you were a general manager of Partner Sales Strategy at Microsoft, you host your own podcast, "The Ultimate Guide to Partnering." You're truly ingrained in the partner ecosystem. Can you share a little bit about what drew you to and what has really kept you working in the channel? Vince: That's a really great question. You know, I think it all started, Jen, because when I started off in selling right out of college, and I had a degree in marketing and wound up in sales because that's where the big money was. I saw that the people in my organization were making most of the money in the sales organization. And so I worked with companies, in four companies, that were, kind of, underdogs in their market, and candidly, I hated cold-calling. And so, you know, being a Marketing major and realizing that I needed to create credibility for my company in my offering, I started early hosting events and inviting complimentary companies to present their solutions along with my company's solution in order to build our credibility and our brand, and that led to a lot of, sort of, ad hoc collaboration with organizations that grew over time and then formalized into relationships, alliances, channel partners, and the like. And the one company that I was with at the time, we took that company from about 6 million in sales to about a 125 million. And then I did a turn-around where I was actually asked to start the government sales business and build a channel from scratch for that business, and that was a pretty interesting time. It was right after 9/11, we were selling to the government ruggedized computers, and we had a very unique offering, but we're underpenetrated our market. And so, I leveraged the relationships that I was building. I leveraged PR, events. I even spent time on Capitol Hill trying to get our message out through local congressmen and the staffers and the like. And so, this resulted in an amazing success that led to my joining Microsoft to lead the channel strategy all up for public sector. And so, I've always believed in the philosophy of one plus one equals three or more and mutual success and collaboration and at my core, I'm a connector. So I guess partner is just really ingrained in my system. Jen: Yeah, absolutely. I love that. I love that philosophy, and you wrote this article. It was called "The Three P's and how every partner needs to think in the Third Wave," and those three P's were partnership, policy, and perseverance. And you talk about driving business outcomes, you talk about shareholder value and market share. I'd love if you could elaborate a little bit. It was such a great piece but elaborate, for this audience, about, you know, how does partnership really fit into what you're referencing as being the third wave, the Internet of Everything, and then we'll link to the article in the show notes also, but, you know, can you give us the Cliffs Notes version? Vince: Sure, happy to. And that article was a direct result of seeing Steve Case speak, actually, at an event, a Microsoft event, hearing him being interviewed by my leader at the time and then also then reading his book "The Third Wave." And what really resonated for me there was just this evolution, you know, from the Internet to the app economy to the internet of things, and that there was this need that I still believe is under-appreciated around working across policymakers about just the amount of cooperation and collaboration that needs to take place between government agencies and private business. We're moving into a whole nother economy right now as you know. I mean, this disruption in the cloud is changing everything, and the Internet of Everything is all about, you know, things like smart cars, the ability to monitor for, you know, police officers to monitor things like gunshots and doing gunshot detection that ties into how a police officer responds to how municipalities deal with water and wastewater management to, you know, traffic lights, all kinds of things that were not part of the computer ecosystem in the past. And it requires this collaboration, again, between the agencies as well as just a common working knowledge on policy and things like that that those policies...some of those policies need to change or be updated to support this 21st-century environment that we live in. I'll give you an example actually. I was thinking about this. Jen: Yeah, that'll be great. Vince: Yeah, so you know Uber? I mean, you know, an incredible disruptive technology, right? But Uber has, kind of, built itself on disrupting and not collaboration. And I think about this at times because, you know, you'll go into certain cities, you'll land at an airport, and you'll realize you can't get an Uber, right? Because the city has basically blocked them because they feel like it's predatory and competitive to what their cab services do and what they feed off of that, their tax revenue dollars to that. But what if Uber had gone to those agencies, to those municipalities in a spirit of cooperation rather than fighting them, and said, "Hey, you know what? We can collaborate more effectively together. Why not have it so that Uber can then communicate to the mass transit systems in those cities?" Think about things like this, I take the train to my exit or my stop, I should say, and my Uber is then waiting for me because Uber has created a bridge or a collaboration technology to that municipal transit system and knows when that train or bus or you know, other motor transportation will arrive at that stop and you know, calls an Uber and my Uber shows up for me automatically. I mean, these are the type of things that you could see happening with the closer collaboration in what a lot of people are calling smart cities or cities of the future and those kinds of technologies where municipalities and private industry come together for the greater good. Jen: That's a great example, and it's that we really...I think that the crux of it is that we have to evolve in terms of that policy, our business practices. And far too often, I see organizations trying to kind of shove tomorrow's collaboration into today's or yesterday's practices, and it's hard. I mean, what you're suggesting is innovative and it's optimistic. It's challenging, right? This isn't something that's gonna come very easily. Vince: It is challenging, and also, the companies don't always get it, you know? I talked about the need for not just the collaboration, the cooperation but the patience and persistence that are required, and I might have mentioned this in the article. I was reminded of this because it takes a long time...If you're going to work in a regulated industry like healthcare or government, the sale cycles might be longer, the hurdles that you have to face or overcome like, you know, regulations, like HIPAA compliance and health care, or maybe just the fact that you're selling to a government entity and you have to have the right contracting vehicles, and the sales cycle is longer, those things take longer. And I was reminded of an example from that company that I built the government practice for. We initially had a CEO running the business who didn't get that. He didn't understand the government sales cycle and how long it took to build the government practice. Often, government agencies look at you and they frowned upon companies just coming in and kinda poaching business in their market. They wanna know that you're gonna be in that business for the long haul, and they wanna see a track record of proof and success for a period of time before they'll award business to you. And so that particular CEO didn't get it. He didn't wind up staying in that role very long, but we persisted and the business took off from there. And so, again, you have to have the patience and persistence to drive forward if you wanna achieve an objective. Jen: You had some really, you know, great experiences and successes in managing channel for Microsoft's public sector. I was really hoping you might be willing to, sort of, share, recount one of your best partnership stories with our listeners. Maybe a time you achieved a great revenue goal together, there was some big accomplishment or some strategic alliance that was able to be formed. Do you have anything for us? Vince: You know, I have a lot of stories for you, and if we've got time, I can tell you, actually, more than one great example. I kind of paint a couple of stories for you here. But there was one particular instance where, you know, we were getting into the cloud space and competing directly against Google for email business, and this was at a time when Google was going into the cities, and they were the cool, new, you know, shiny, new object, I guess, if you will, and Microsoft was just moving...I don't even think we called it Office 365 yet. It might have just been called BPOS which was Business Productivity...That was the original name for Office 365. And we were looking for partners to help us be successful in that market and recruited a partner of Google's, one of their launch partners for the Gmail product to the Microsoft ecosystem, but I had trouble getting that partner engaged with the sellers in the public sector business because they were averse to working with anybody that worked with a competitor. And so, I really had to break down some barriers. My team had to break down some barriers to demonstrate that that partner would firewall their Google business from our Microsoft business and that they wouldn't share information between the entities so that if they were gonna work with us on an account, they would not work with a competitor and vice versa and that they would firewall any information they knew. And it took some time, but that partner wound up being very successful, being a Partner the Year, getting elevated in status. They're now what they call a National Solution Provider or NSP, and they won Partner of the Year Award in Education, and they were just spotlighted in the healthcare business for a great success that they've had in the healthcare business this past year. And so that was one example. Jen: That's great. Vince: I had another example too that I wanted to share, too. Jen: Yeah, please. Vince: I was thinking about this one, and this one was, again, in the government space, but it was a large systems integrator, whose name will, you know, go unmentioned here. But this systems integrator was an influencer in their market but very vendor-agnostic. They didn't partner with other organizations, but they became a big fan of Microsoft, and this led to...And again, this was persistent. This was like years and years of working with them, meeting with them, getting them in to engage with our teams that they really became the big fan of the technology when we released Surface, when we started moving to Azure and the cloud. And we developed this strategic alliance and started to co-develop some very cool technology around security, and it was through some of those agencies and government that we really can't talk further about, but you know who they are, and they went from being very vendor-agnostic to being raving fans and creating an alliance and strong partnership with Microsoft that took off. And I was actually reminded that when I was trying to kinda bring this partner along. I had a very senior Microsoft sales leader at the time say to me, don't waste my time with them. "They're not gonna partner with us. That's not their approach." And that person's no longer with Microsoft, but we persisted. Again, persistence, trying to drive the right outcome for the business, and you know, just having the end in mind in terms of what we need to do in order to be successful. Jen: It's actually a really good segue. I love hearing success stories. The benefit of having channel sales and marketing professionals on this show is also to hear about some of the problems, some of the mistakes that have been made over the years, so that we can make sure, you know, we teach those and those mistakes aren't made again. Are you willing to share any mistakes or problems you've seen business leaders have to deal with when managing alliances for their business? Vince: Yeah. That's quite a bit of what I do on "The Ultimate Guide to Partnering" is I try to uncover the pitfalls as well as the success stories. And on both sides of this equation, it comes down to not really understanding or having a common vision of what the outcome needs to be and not understanding each other's operating model. So in the case of partners that are looking to engage with companies like Microsoft, and this is true of other tech giants, is it's just not understanding, you know, the cadence of the business like when is a good time to engage, when it's not a good time because it's the end of a quarter or end of the fiscal year. It's thinking that just because you are a partner that "you're just going to get all these leads and access to customers where these big companies have lots and lots and lots of partners," and they can't just open up the doors. It would erode their customers' confidence in them if they did that, so it's understanding how to best engage with a field organization. And again, it comes back to this kind of being in it for the long haul, understanding the mutual outcomes that you're looking to drive, and being in it together. In the case of Microsoft...Again, it comes back to...I'd mentioned that one partner, particularly Google partner. Sometimes, the field sales organizations don't want to collaborate with a partner that they see as being somewhat competitive to them because they offer other offerings. And in today's world in this time of rapid transformation, you need everybody, actually, to help drive your business, and so you have to be a little bit more open to the conversation and maybe firewall the conversation so that we're specifically going after this particular outcome together, and maybe we're competitors someplace else. Jen: I think, you know, a lot of what you touched on regarding, you know, those challenges or the way to really approach an alliance or a partnership, it's really cultural in nature. And you know, for me, I see that as this is...that's top-down, right? That's the leadership of the organization and from the CEOs level going down into the organization of making sure that there is a culture of partnership, that there's the understanding of "why," why are we doing this, learning from each other, looking at the KPI's that we're gonna be holding our team accountable to and ensuring that they are the right sort of KPI's, you know? But also, I talk to people all the time who go, "Wait a minute. I'm just a cog in this machine. I have a job to do." And so, do you have any advice you would give somebody for, you know, who really wants to build partnerships successfully, build partnerships with transparency, and the way that you're suggesting, when they've been inserted into and organization and maybe don't have the opportunity to craft that culture from the onset? 16:20 Vince: That's a really good question, and I think you're right. It comes from the top-down in the organization. And I see this way too often where sellers are very good at one specific function, and that's calling on the end customer. And in many cases, some of those best sellers, bestselling people, best sales people are the ones that are also, I'll call them control freaks for lack of a better term here, and they don't want anybody else involved with their account, and anything that's introduced into the account is an issue. I would say to those sellers or sellers that are in an organization that thinks that way is that you have to think differently, right? You have to really think about the adage of, you know...I can't think of this term. I'm gonna come back to that one. But just the adage that I mentioned earlier about one plus one equals three or more because it really is a collaboration leads to a greater set of outcomes for you and for the customer. And it leads to raving fan customers as well as a partner that will collaborate with you and bring you into opportunities later on versus kind of having the blinders on and saying, "No, I want to control this account. I don't want the partner involved." Not being willing to kinda give up the reins or give up control of the outcome or the time frame for the outcome to happen is a reason why a lot of people are unsuccessful working in partnerships with other organizations. Jen: Well, there's certainly a lot of fear. I think that that control freak, sort of, nature, you know, that you're talking about comes from this fear of, "I'm not gonna be successful," or "Someone's gonna encroach on my work or what I'm doing." And I guess, it's up to those leaders to, you know, set the culture but also identify the processes, procedures, provide the tools and resources so that everyone's worst fears, whatever they are, get them all out on the table, "Okay, what are you most worried about happening? And let's make sure that those things don't happen," or "Let's just dispel this rumor, okay? This is not...That is never gonna happen. Don't worry about that." Because I think, it just comes down to trust, and people want to feel like, you know, they're being taken care of by their organization. And when you bring a partner into the mix...sometimes, if you haven't had experience working collaboratively with partners, you know, I think that could be a little bit daunting for some folks. Vince: It is, and then it's also knowing just that this is a relationship. This is an ongoing long-term relationship. It's not transactional. Before Microsoft evolved the cloud business, there were some people at Microsoft that only engage with the partner that was transacting the Enterprise Agreement. And so, I would get the phone call around this time of year, which is the end of Microsoft's fiscal year, and that was the only time the sales person wanted to talk to the partner person. And of course, it was really...they were really ready to just jump on them because the order hadn't come through yet. Rather than building that relationship, having lunch once a month to discuss account strategy and account planning, all the things that should have happened, these people were just really in the moment for the transaction to happen. And it was just about that time of year or that time of the cycle versus having this ongoing relationship. You mentioned trust, building trust, having transparency, a mutual respect for each other's business, and business cadence and you know, set of outcomes. What's in it for me? Knowing each other's wins is so important, right, that that radio station, WIIFM, you know, What's In It For Me, that both organizations have, right? Each organization has its own business and set of outcomes that they're trying to drive against, and understanding that mutual respect is just so important to success. Jen: There's something else I want to ask you about, and a lot of the people that we talk to, you know, here at Allbound are either, they're in one of two camps...they either are have been hired to enter an organization and literally breathe life back into the channel partner program. So in those cases, it's typically the company has some kind of a partner program that really wasn't very well architected. Maybe they kind of fell backwards into it, right? Someone comes to them, and says, "I wanna refer your business," or "Let's cut a little bit of a deal." And the beginnings of a partner program are put into place and other folks kinda jump on board, and then it becomes its own living beast, and now, someone's got to come in and wrangle it. So we talk to a lot of people that are in that kind of world, and then we talk to folks who mostly, you know, at rapidly growing SAAS companies that have gone...their go-to-market strategy has been direct, but now, they have these goals to start a channel program. They're starting from scratch, and it's just this open field, like of, you know, what do they want to build? And I'm wondering if you have any advice for either one of those people. I don't know if that advice would be different or if it would all be rooted in the same. If you can kind of like think back to sort of the beginnings of what it's like to start building something. What advice do you have to give these people who are setting out to build a successful channel partner program? Vince: It's a really great question. I think about just how, culturally, the organization has to think differently, right? And in both of those examples, right? So we had a program, why wasn't it working, you know? Maybe it was that conversation we're just having earlier about mutual trust and respect. A lot of times, I see organizations, they wanna go fix something, and they think that one particular individual could come in as the new channel chief and just that person will create some type of magic or hocus-pocus on the situation. It's much more ingrained in the culture of the organization that tops down approach. It has to be buy-in from everyone in the company especially from the financial acumen, the chief financial officer CEO level, all the way down into the field organization. Compensation has to be structured so that sellers win when partners win. That's an important aspect. Compensation drives behavior, right? So if I were to look at a program, an existing program, I want to look at a few things. I would want to interview the partners. I'd wanna interview the sales people. I'd wanna understand where the cultural imbalance was and then design programs and readiness tools and compensation incentive models that drove the right behavior both for internal sellers as well as for partners. And so, that's how I would think about that. I think from this SaaS model, I think it's fairly similar, as well, again for companies that are moving from the Direct model, they're trying to grow through their channel. Again, they have to take a look at their current business model, their revenue streams. You know, what could be changed to drive this mutual behavior, this behavior that drives to a successful outcome ultimately for both the sellers, the partners, and for the customers? Jen: Great, that's wonderful, wonderful advice. And I love that you mentioned compensation because it is what drives, you know, everyone. And if those compensation structures aren't aligned, that can really cause a lot of headaches with the partner program and making sure that program is successful. This has been so great chatting channel with you. Before I let you go, I do put all of our guests through a little bit of a speed round of more personal questions. Are you ready? Vince: I'm ready for this. I've listened to a few of your episodes. I don't know what's coming my way but go for it. Jen: All right. Okay. So first question is, what is your favorite city? Vince: That's a good one. My favorite city is Philadelphia. Jen: Okay, tell me why? What do you love about Philly? Vince: Well, we lived outside of Philadelphia for about 26 years. My kids love Philly. My daughter went to Temple University. It's a city that's on the rebound which is what I love about it, and it's become my new favorite place. Although I love Washington DC and spend a lot of time there, Philly has got this new exuberance about it, and I love the phoenix rising from the ashes. And I see Philly in much the same way. They're building new skyscrapers, Millennials are moving back in the city at a pretty high clip. It's still an affordable city and a very livable city, and they have great, great restaurants. Lot of great BYOBs, and just they're underrated in many ways but just a great little city. Jen: And pretty much...I went to Philly once and all I did was eat when I was there. Vince: It's a common thing to do in Philly. Jen: Right. Okay, question number two, would you consider yourself an animal lover? Vince: I am. I am, actually. I didn't grow up an animal lover, so that's a great question. I didn't have a dog until about 15 years ago, and we had 2 dogs up until a couple weeks ago. We'd lost...one of them just, you know, passed, and so I've learned to love dogs. And I've learned a lot about life through dogs and just giving back to them and just getting all that love and loyalty that you get from a dog. Jen: Yeah. Sorry to hear about that loss. What kind of dogs? What breed? Vince: Shih Tzu and Shih Tzu-Bichon blend were the two dogs we had. Jen: Oh, yeah. Fluffy, fuzzy. Vince: Fluffy, fuzzy. And the other reason why I didn't have dogs when I was younger, I had really bad allergies as a kid, and so they're hypoallergenic and they're just, you know...they're terrific dogs. Jen: Yeah. Okay, next question, Mac or PC? Vince: Well, PC. Jen: I should've known, right? Vince: Yeah, you know, I do...I'm a huge fan of the Surface, and I knew Panos Panay at Microsoft when he released it and just, you know, still a super fan. Although, I will tell you that I have iOS. I have an iPhone, and I do love the apps and the finished quality of the apps. Jen: Excellent, and last question, let's say I was able to offer you an all-expenses-paid trip, where would it be to? Vince: I'm a real beach person, so, you know, it's probably gonna be Saint Barths, but there's this other piece of me that wants to be on the coast of like Sicily right now...and eating great Italian food, so I'm gonna go with Sicily instead of Saint Barths, how's that? Jen: Yes. Well, Sicily, right? So you can...there's water, right, and the food. You get the best of both worlds. Vince: That's right. Beautiful blue water and great Italian cooking, so, you know... Jen: Perfect. Vince: Well, thanks so much for taking some time with me and with our listeners today. It was great. If anyone would like to reach out to you personally, what's the best way for them to get a hold of you? Jen: So I have become a fan of social, and in fact, just...really getting the hang of Twitter but my Twitter handle is @vincemenzione, that's V-I-N-C-E-M-E-N-Z-I-O-N-E. I can also be reached at LinkedIn and Facebook at the same handles and on Instagram, as well, and then my email address is vincemenzione, without any dots or dashes, @gmail.com. Vince: Perfect. Jen: Thank you, Jen. This has been a great pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. Vince: Again, thank you for your time today, and thanks to everyone for listening, and we'll catch you next week with an all-new episode. Man: Thanks for tuning into the Allbound Podcast. For past episodes and additional resources, visit the resource center at allbound.com, and remember, #NeverSellAlone
Allison Pickens, Chief Customer Officer at Gainsight, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss customer success, aligning vendor and partner relationships and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast. Jen: Hi, everybody. Welcome to The Allbound Podcast. I'm Jen Spencer, and today I'm joined by Allison Pickens, who is the Chief Customer Officer at Gainsight. For everybody who doesn't know Allison, she's been recognized as a top 50 sales leader. She's an Ivy League graduate. She's worked for and advised multiple SaaS companies and has been featured on a variety of podcasts, and even hosts her own. So I'm very happy to have her here with me today. Welcome, Allison. Allison: Thanks so much for having me, Jen. Jen: Oh, I'm so glad to have you here, and I think it would be great if we could just get started with you sharing a little bit about Gainsight and what you guys do. Allison: Absolutely. Gainsight is a customer success platform, which means that we help you orient all the different departments at your company around the successes of your customer in order to generate higher retention rates, higher expansion rates, and stronger new business through really strong advocacy from your customers. Jen: Awesome, such a critical element in any SaaS organization. One of the reasons I'm most excited to have you here today is because there has been so much talk in the SaaS industry about customer success and about the intersection of customer success and channel partners. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about where you think customer success can really meet the channel in today's modern SaaS market? Allison: The topic of aligning with your partners around the success of your customer is one of the hottest topics in the customer success industry right now, everybody is talking about it. I don't think anyone has figured it out quite yet. It's probably one of these trends that will fully emerge, I think, a few years from now. That's probably when we'll see it really widespread. But there are a number of companies that are at the forefront, pushing on their vendor relationship, and the way that they describe their vision for partnering with their channel involves a few elements. So one of them is developing, first of all, a shared sense of accountability for the outcomes of your client, which is a new thing. Expecting partners to be accountable for customer success is a new thing, so that's the first pillar. The second one is they're realizing that in order to work more effectively with their channel partners they have to have a shared 360-degree view of data on their customers. And then, from there, the third element is they want to make sure that they have a shared definition of target for those metrics. What are the KPIs that matter, and what thresholds do we expect our channel partners to achieve with their clients? Finally, the fourth one is about having shared, prescribed playbooks for each stage in the customer journey. As a vendor, what do you expect your channel partners to do at each step? Some of the leading companies out there that are thinking about this are actually training their partners on these playbooks and ensuring that there's strong buy in. So that's what the vision tends to look like. Again, some of the leading companies in this area are pushing on a few initiatives to try to get to that end stage. One of them involved is first defining the return on investment that your channel partners should expect from investing in customer success. For example, in the SaaS industry and increasingly in other industries, folks take it for granted that you should make your customers happy. If you're a channel partner with a razor-thin reseller margin, it may not be obvious that this is an investment that you should make. So customer success organizations are helping them put together that ROI model to justify that investment. Secondly, vendors are thinking about, "How do we make sure that we're prioritizing which channel partners we work with to start?" Some channel partners are boutique firms that don't have a ton of resources. Others are large with a robust executive team, and sometimes they have a customer success executive on staff. As you think about profiling your partners, it's worth identifying what are those major attributes that would define a partner that would be most inclined to be successful working with you on this and piloting this customer success initiative so that eventually you can roll it out to a much larger percentage of your channel partners. Vendors are also thinking about, "How can we develop that shared view of data on our customers? For example, how can we share the upcoming renewals that a channel partner should be focused on? How can we make sure that they're aware of the Net Promoter Score ratings that the end customers have submitted?" So actually, at Gainsight, one of our big focus areas this year when we think about our product roadmap is allowing that type of information sharing to take place. Finally, on the KPI side, a lot of vendors are thinking about, "How can we actually encourage our partners to think about a customer health score as being a primary measure of customer outcomes that they should aim for?" And even some companies are pushing the envelope and starting to think about, "Should we have dynamic margins for paying partners that are contingent on different levels of health score?" So this is a provocative idea. I haven't seen anyone roll it out yet. I think we're going to see some major changes in these dimensions over the next couple of years. Jen: It's very exciting. I love how Gainsight is really at the forefront of driving this message and working with these best of breed organizations who are focused on aligning those partners with customer success. You actually recently wrote a blog called "Aligning with Partners on Customer Success." and we're going to make sure we include that in the show notes here. And in it, you talk about the shared responsibility for positive customer outcomes between a partner and the vendor. For a CEO who might be listening to this podcast, or maybe a board member, or somebody who is really thinking about the overall success and health of an organization, can you share your thoughts about the value in aligning those vendor and partner relationships? Allison: It's hugely important. For so many organizations, they can only afford to hire customer success managers for a portion of their customers, that's the reality. We'd all like to say we've got infinite budget to invest in customer success, but there are real pressures that we have from our executive team and our board. So, especially for large enterprises, we typically see them start to assign customer success managers to their largest customers or maybe the strategic ones mid-market. But often the SMB customers are covered by resellers. So if I'm thinking as a board member of one of these large companies, one of my questions might be, "How do we make sure that we drive up our retention rate in spite of not having people assigned to some segment of our customer base?” And for that reason, actually working with your channel to drive higher retention rates, higher expansion rates is a very powerful initiative. I expect that a lot of executives are going to be focused on this going forward. One of our clients actually is a really fast-growing SaaS company, and they've grown largely through working with channel partners. They have a pretty small sales team, so their partner organization internally is very critical. They have invested heavily in partner success managers, as well as the partner account manager team, which is focused on helping these partners drive more sales and deals. So, apart from that, they're thinking,"How can we make sure that these end customers are achieving certain milestones along the customer journey?" And the partner success managers are working really closely with the channel partners on that. Jen: Do you have any specific recommendations for the customer success professionals in these SaaS companies who are beginning to work with partners to help drive customer success, any tips, tricks, feedback you can provide for them? Allison: Jen, that's a great question. I would say check out the blog post that I wrote together with Chris Doell from Cisco OpenDNS, we've laid out a recommended playbook for steps that you can take right now to start aligning more effectively with your channel. The key is you don't have to boil the ocean from the start. You can pick just a handful of partners that you want to pilot this new initiative with, and they can help you actually prove out your model, iterate, and ultimately roll it out to more partners. I'm a big fan generally of the agile approach to operations, and I think, especially in customer success where we're often figuring things out for the first time, it's especially important to run thoughtful experiments so you can learn very quickly and ultimately, decide on the best practice for your company. Jen: I think that's really great advice. Being able to really test and prove something out is extremely valuable, especially when we all seem to be going a million miles a minute in all parts of our business. Looking at channel as a whole, I'm wondering if you could comment on some of the biggest challenges or maybe even mistakes that you've seen leaders make when they're growing their channel and maybe the impact that's had on customer success perhaps? Just based on your wealth of experience, what can we learn from? Allison: I would say don't underestimate how valuable customer success can be for the channel. I mentioned earlier a lot of resellers are struggling with razor-thin margins, but the reality is that many of them are also trying to build services businesses, which tend to have much higher margins, maybe in the 30% or 40% range. So what that means is, if they can develop a customer success program where they become more embedded with their account, the likelihood that they will be able to sell more services actually increases, because given that they're really close to these accounts at this point, they'll be able to identify new opportunities where they can add value and charge for it. Additionally, of course, there's the other value prop which most vendor-based customer success teams tend to see, and you can drive up net retention by a meaningful amount. We see as vendor organizations rise in maturity from stage to stage as we track it at Gainsight, they will experience an 18% point increase in net retention. That's super powerful, and I would imagine that, especially as we start to collect data on this, we will see a similar trend in partner organizations that start to adopt customer success best practices. So I think the key is for us to educate our channel partners on the real nature of this ROI and then start to collect the data afterward. Jen: Gosh, I can't wait to see that data. That's going to be amazing. One more question for you, and it's pretty simple. What's the most exciting thing about working in a customer success environment? Allison: For me, the most exciting thing is seeing how many people are succeeding in their careers and achieving new levels of success because the customer success industry has taken off. There are so many people that I've met who were previously in other functions, who perhaps were customer success managers in the really early days, 5 or 10 years ago, who are all now actually in leadership roles, thriving, building large teams and building careers for other people. I think that the career momentum in this space is really powerful, and ultimately I think that's been embodied, especially lately, in the instance of customer success leaders becoming CEOs. We're actually seeing Chief Customer Officers become CEOs. I think ultimately that's such a strong mark of the importance of this function, and also a sign of the really dramatic career growth that a lot of people are experiencing. I find it really inspiring. Jen: I agree with you as well. It's an exciting time. It's a really innovative space, and I can't wait to see what comes next. This has been so great. Before I let you go, at the end of all our podcasts I ask a couple of more personal questions just so we can get to know you a little bit better. So, I've got four more questions for you if you're ready, really quick. Allison: Let's do it. Jen: All right, so first question is, what is your favorite city? Allison: Honestly, I would say my favorite city is San Francisco. I live in San Francisco, and I really do love it. I think the open-mindedness of folks out here and the innovative spirit are unmatched, and I feel grateful to live here. Jen: Absolutely, I agree. Question number two, are you an animal lover? Allison: I am, I love animals. Jen: Do you have any pets at home? Allison: I don't, no. I travel a lot to see clients, so it's a little bit tricky to take care of a pet. But I often think about getting a dog actually. If I did get a dog, I would say it'd be a labradoodle. I just think they're adorable. They're fluffy, they're energetic, they're happy, and at some point, I would love to have one. Jen: Oh, they are adorable. Okay, question number three, Mac or PC? Allison: Definitely Mac. I used to work in finance actually, and for that PCs at the time were actually far superior to Macs. But nowadays, now that I'm no longer in spreadsheets all day, I'm very happy to be using my MacBook Air. Jen: Awesome. Okay, last question. Let's say I was able to offer you an all-expenses-paid trip. Where would it be to? Allison: I would really love to go to the Galapagos. I've been reading a lot about animals lately. I'm actually reading this book that's about how it's very difficult for us as humans to assess accurately the intelligence level of animals. And when you look at the research, it shows that animals are actually a lot more intelligent than we give them credit for. So, over the years, as you mentioned, actually I've become a big animal lover, and I would love to go to the Galapagos, where you can see all sorts of species that you can't find anywhere else and just really appreciate them. Jen: Oh, that sounds wonderful. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for sharing a little bit about yourself, your insights about customer success and channel partners. It was so great having you. If any of our listeners would like to reach out to you personally after the podcast and maybe connect with you, learn more about customer success and channel, what's the best way for them to reach you? Allison: You can reach me at my profile on LinkedIn. Feel free to add me to your network. I accept pretty much all customer success-related invitations that I receive, so feel free to connect there. Jen: All right, wonderful. Make sure you add that personalized invitation. Let them know that you heard Allison on the podcast, so she has a frame of reference. I think that's always helpful. But, again, thank you, Allison. Thanks, everyone else, for tuning in, and we'll catch you next week with an all-new episode. Allison: Thanks so much, Jen. Man: Thanks for tuning in to The Allbound Podcast. For past episodes and additional resources, visit the resource center at allbound.com. And, remember, #NeverSellAlone
Jessica Fewless, Vice President, ABM Strategy and Field Marketing at Demandbase, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss partner matchmaking, the role of partner marketing, enabling partners by focusing on their customers, and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast. Jen: Hi and welcome to The Allbound Podcast. I'm Jen Spencer and today I am joined by Jessica Fewless, Senior Director of Field and Partner Marketing at Demandbase. Welcome, Jessica. Jessica: Thanks for having me, Jen. Jen: Well, it's so good to have you and, you know, before we really dig into your job I'd love to hear a little bit about Demandbase and our listeners I'm sure would love to know a little more about what you guys do over there. Jessica: Sure. Demandbase is a sales marketing and advertising technology platform designed specifically for B2B marketers. It helps to identify accounts that are most likely to buy from you and the most likely members of the buying committee. And then it helps you attract them to your website and engage them with relevant messaging, once they get there, you know. Last but not least, it allows you to deliver really helpful insights to your sales team in order to help them turn those prospects and customers into revenue for your company. Jen: I love it. And I also love that, you know, you are in the sales and martech space, and we're seeing so many sales and marketing technology organizations who have traditionally, you know, been selling direct. We're seeing them start to adopt indirect strategies and, you know, when I was preparing to speak with you and I'm looking at Demandbase's website, it seems like you have a really solid strategy in place for your partners in terms of segmentation, you know, you've got your agency partners, technology partners, then you have consulting partners. Can you talk a little bit about how your marketing differs with each one of those groups? Jessica: Yeah, absolutely. You know in the evolution of Demandbase... So I've been here for four years now, almost half the life of the company, and when I started, I was originally brought on to do partner marketing. But immediately at that point, you know, I would say that our company wasn't quite ready yet for a mature partner marketing function. You know, we did simple things like worked with partners and sponsored their events. You know, and co-sponsored events in the fields and stuff like that, but that was really kind of pretty surface level type of partner marketing. But more recently, you know, as the ABM category has grown, as Demandbase has grown, our maturity as a company and the maturity of our channel sales team has really blossomed. We went from having one and a half people in that role to about four people now, building out on as you alluded to Jen kind of those separate segments: the agency, technology and consulting partners. And, you know, the reason we split them out like that is, you know, it definitely helps scale our efforts as a company. You know, eventually, you get to a point where your own sales team can only do so much and you really need the help of partners to help scale your efforts from a sales perspective. And so, you know, the reason we split out into three different categories was because our value proposition to them and their value proposition to our customers is very different with each one. You know, with technology partners, those are the partners that we have developed technology integrations with, and so really aiding those B2B marketers to kind of tie multiples of their martech stack together to either deliver additional insights, or deliver additional capabilities that they can have when they use either one of the technologies in a silo. And then when it comes to agency partners, you know, typically this is on the digital agency side or the media agency side. So once again, it's a give and take relationship, we help educate them about account based marketing because that's what their B2B customers they're talking about. And then on the flip side, they help us because a lot of our customers and prospects are asking, "Okay, you know, typically we've been using, say, B2C advertising techniques, we know there's got to be a better way or a custom built way for B2B." And so we're able to bring those agency partners into our customers and prospects to help them solve that problem. And then third, is our consulting partners which is kind of a combo of the two, consulting partners and system integration partners, where they can provide some strategy for the client, but they can also help with the selection of and the implementation of technology. So, you know, I think you can see that it really makes sense that we segment them out that way because each one of them is a very different audience for us. Jen: Right. And, you know, they're gonna need different things from you. But you've really built an ecosystem, a true partner ecosystem there, and which is excellent because I'm sure you've got some of those agency partners that are interacting not just with you, but they are also interacting with certain technology partners that you might have to offer a solution, a custom solution for, you know, that end customer. Jessica: Yeah. Definitely, I mean, it was really interesting we had our marketing innovation summit, which is our annual conference back in April actually. And, you know, it was really interesting because we had a partner mixer and it was typically those things that are a lot of glasses of wine and bottles of beer to drink and, you know? Jen: Yeah. Yeah. Jessica: And as it goes on it gets a little bit chummier, and more fun, and whatnot. But what's really interesting is that this year, myself and the four channel sales folks on our team spent most of the night playing almost, you know, partner matchmaker. You know... Jen: It's interesting, yeah. [crosstalk] Jessica: We had a lot of consulting and agency partners there and they were like, "Well, hey, introduce me to some of your other technology partners so I can start to connect the dots," right? Or it was a technology partner who was like, "Hey, introduce me to some of these consulting partners because I think we are in the same account together and it would be good to like, compare notes." So, yeah, so that was a really interesting kinda evolution in the maturity of our partner ecosystem. Jen: I love it. I love it. And, you know, you mentioned you've been at Demandbase for four years, but I mean, you've been in marketing for 18 plus years, right? So you've worked in non-profit, which I have too, so, we have those battle wounds together. And companies like you were at Autodesk, you were at Adobe, I'm curious about...what are some of the bigger shifts that you've seen in partner marketing over the years? And this answer might extend beyond partner marketing because I'd love to know what, you know, you're doing today that's different from what you did like even as early as four, five years ago. Jessica: Yeah. So, I think to kind of draw back a little bit on some of my time at Autodesk and Adobe and more recently now at Demandbase, I think, you know, the role of the partner marketer has really changed. You know, it's one of those things, or it should change, maybe is a little bit more accurate. So, you know, one point, partner marketing was kind of a program or a project management role. It was one where, you know, they kind of stood in between the marketing team and the channels sales team or the partner team, and their sole focus was really on joint marketing with key partners, right? And so then they would talk to the partner, understand what the partner was trying to achieve and brainstorm, potentially some ideas, and then we'd go back to the marketing team and say, "Hey, marketing team, what can we do here? This partner XYZ is interested in doing “A”, can we fit it in?" And, you know, I don't know about you or any of your listeners, but I found that process to be completely frustrating and unfulfilling, right? Because you'd have all these great ideas and then you take them back to marketing, marketing is like, "No, sorry we don't have the bandwidth or we don't wanna interrupt any of our other programs to fit this in or, you know, or, or, or..." Right? And, you know, now, today I feel like partner marketing managers need to be full blown demand gen marketers. Ones that cannot only brainstorm possible programs, but also be able to execute on them, and be much more proactive and who they're gonna reach out to and partner with. You know, it's definitely one of those things that has been changing although there's still that classic like project manager partner marketing person out there, and when you encounter them, I find them to be ultimately frustrating. Because you're like, "That's great, I wanna work with you but aaah." Jen: Right. Right. Well, and I think, you know, if you look at, okay, well how did we get there? And, you know, one of the things that we see is that a lot of organizations that say, "Yeah, I wanna build this channel of partners." But they ultimately under resource that channel, and so they look for this one person who can be the 'be all end all' and like do everything, right? Who can be the operations person, that project management person and oh yeah, they can just do marketing, they can still be responsible for the revenue too. And we just know you would not do that in any other setting. You know, you wouldn't have that one person be responsible for all things related to the direct part of your business. And so, a lot of it just stems I think just from organizations kind of skimping on the resources that need to be put into the human capital to grow a partner program. Jessica: Yeah. Well, I agree and I think the other thing too is, and I've started to describe it as such, is that I kind of looked at the role of partner marketing as a bit of a Venn diagram, which hopefully everybody is not gonna glaze over when I say that but.... And I think that the two circles are the work that you do in service as the channel sales team, the work you do in service as the marketing team, and then that center section is the joint marketing you do with the partners, right? Because it isn't just about joint marketing, or in, at least in most organizations, it isn't or it shouldn't be, right? So on the pure channel side of things there's new partner recruitment, there's on-boarding, there's nurturing of those partners and those sorts of things to help the channel sales team to be successful, and actually helping those partners influence sales for your company, right? So that's solely dedicated as a channel team and then on the marketing side, you know, there's gonna be some of the somewhat mundane but necessary part of partner marketing role, which is connecting partners with the events team for sponsorships and, you know, working together with partners, or co-sponsoring a field marketing event or those sorts of things. But also, connecting with the right partners for potential thought leadership opportunities and those sorts of things that elevate both your organizations in the eyes of your potential customers. And then in that center section is the true joint partner marketing, right? I think what most people think of when they think of partner marketing and why it's really important if you don't have the other two parts of the role, I feel like that's part in the middle is what, like you said, gets under resourced and kind of missed. Jen: Mm-hmm. I love that Venn diagram kind of, like look, as you were talking through it, I was picturing it and we might need to collaborate on some content for the future because I think there's something really there. You kind of touched on this a little bit, but I wanna dig in when you think about like some of the strategies that you've implemented to really help ensure your team is creating the content that's gonna keep those partners engaged, and foster long-term relationships with them. I mean, do you have any guidance or any tips for our listeners on what they can do because a lot of organizations onboard... or I guess the recruitment of partners and their onboarding of partners isn't where they have a challenge, it's then actually engaging them, and truly activating them once they've joined that inner circle. Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. I think that the biggest thing now is, you know, I think everybody thinks of, "Okay I'm gonna build a partner portal and then I'm gonna put all these things out there about our product so that our partner knows about our products, so that they can go sell our products. And in today's world, I would just call that table stakes like, yes you have to do that stuff but that's the bare minimum. You know, what you really wanna be enabling your partners with is content that's gonna help them be more successful with their clients. And hopefully, that's the benefit of your organization as well, but things that are gonna help them raise the bar. So, in our world, you know, yes we have webinars, and we have data sheets and all that fun stuff about what's going on with our product, but on the flip side of that, we definitely want to help educate them at account based marketing because that's gonna help them rise above their competitors in many cases, because a lot of the agencies and consulting partners aren't talking about account based marketing yet and so if an agency can come in and say, "Oh, account based marketing? Yeah, we're all over that." That's gonna make them look good and that's gonna help them in business which is gonna then, in turn, ingratiate them to us. Jen: So, in addition to the supporting partners and positioning them so they can be positioned as you know, experts in account based marketing, and giving them content that's gonna help them earn business and is going to set them up for success, have there been any promotional programs or anything unique that you've created to help them be successful and keep those partners happy? Jessica: Oh, that's a great question. Promotional programs? I wouldn't say so at this point, I think that's partially because, you know, we're just getting to that maturity of our channel sales and partner program, but we had a point this year, like I said at the marketing innovation summit, where we had a mixer and we, I mean, we have no problem getting a hundred people in the room. I think the next evolution for us is in 2018 to have a partner summit, right? An advance of that partner mixer, one where it's definitely an out bound where we can update them on the latest and greatest from us or the ABM industry or those sorts of things, but also for them to be able to provide some success stories, like, "Here's how we found success in working with Demandbase to help with kinda educate the rest of the people in the room." And, you know, then once again to network and make those connections amongst each other. But I think that's kind of the next evolution for us is getting to that summit phase and I think to your point there around promotions, hey, maybe what we'll start to do is with some of our onboarding and our nurturing, you know, we point people to our partner portal, maybe if they check all the boxes on their onboarding report card, they get free tickets to our conference or that kind of thing. So, I'm sure we can build that kind of stuff and/or, you know, do some gamification around it, but we've really haven't gotten to that phase yet. Jen: Well, it sounds exciting and there's so much time and so many great ideas, so I'm sure there'll be amazing things for your partner program here in the next couple of years. Looking back the last few years, you personally really dedicated yourself to building and executing an ABM strategy and I thought, you know, without... I mean I know we can have a whole separate conversation just about that, but I'm wondering if you can tell a little bit of what you've done and specifically why it's been important for like channel partner success. Jessica: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, you know, kind of talking about ABM at a really high level it's, you know, understanding the accounts that you want to sell to and then going out and finding them and selling to them, right? That's kind of the pipe dream or the promise, so to speak, of account based marketing, and it's not a dream, it's, in fact, a whole methodology around that, but, you know, when we talk about it, we actually talk about it having three key audiences. One, prospects, so selling to new potential customers. Two, your existing customers, right? They're your existing customers, you know even more about them than you do about your prospects, so you should be able to sell it to them even better, right at that whole 80-20 rule like, 80% of the work goes into getting a customer, 20% is in keeping and up selling them. And then the third audience is your partners, because if you're talking to your partners in the exact same way that you're talking to your customers and your prospects they're gonna tune you out, right? They don't really care what the shiny new widget is, right? What they care about is what you're doing from a strategy perspective, or how that shiny, new widget is gonna help them be more successful, right? So, if you just sent them to a web page that said, "Hey, look, we have this new thing." They'll go, "Interesting." If you send them an email, and you personalize your website to say, "We have a shiny new thing and it's gonna help you and here's why." Now that helps, one, attract new partners, but to also engage the ones that you already have. Jen: That's perfect. Great. Great. Really great advice. And, you know, I'm thinking about things from their perspective, like I always do, of kind of being the little guy, and you guys have some real members on your list of technology partners. I mean, everything from like IBM, and Salesforce and Oracle to Drupal and WordPress, and Optimizely, and HubSpot, I mean, some big heavy hitters in the martech space, and for a lot of organizations, they might see those types of companies and partnerships and think, "Gosh like there's no way. Like why would these companies partner with me? I'm just kind of starting to build my program." Do you have any wisdom for gaining traction and partnerships with these kinds of tech greats? Jessica: Yeah. That's an interesting one I think, you know, part of us just building our company is what drew these partnerships together for us. As our company grew, as the ABM category grew, right? We became more and more important to these companies. Now, to your point, when you're just starting out, not everybody has that kind of at their advantage. I think for us what we really went after was, when talking to all these partners was, how can we make your solution relevant for account based marketing, right? So I think for anybody, it's figuring out how is your solution partnered with their solution? How is that gonna make their solution more successful, right? And so, we provided that relevance and a burgeoning category that everybody wanted a part of. So, it was kind of our value proposition to working with those folks, and, you know, paid off in the end. Jen: Absolutely. Absolutely. Are you guys still, at this point, are you still sort of like, whale hunting for organizations like that or has your focus when it comes to partner recruitment or I guess actually let me say this, are you still actively recruiting new partners? Or is your energy really focused on maintaining and engaging the ones you have? Jessica: Yup. I would say it's probably 50-50, at this point, kind of where we spend our energy. So yes, absolutely to kind of list that you listed out earlier, those are a lot of the technology partners that we have, you know, there's kind of discrete list of technology partners that we wanna engage, bring on board and work with, and I think at this point we've probably got 75% to 80% of them kind of in our wheelhouse. However, on the agency and consulting side, ABM is a new growing business for them, so just like we practice account based marketing and build a target account list for the new business side of our company, where we decide who are the targets we wanna go after? And we build the marketing and sales programs to go after them. We've actually done the same thing on the partner side. So I've sat down with our channel sales team and said, "Okay, who are the next 50 partners you wanna have in both the agency and consulting categories, right? And let's develop, you know, a whole integrated marketing campaign around going out and getting them." So, exactly the same type of strategy and which might seem kind of silly to some. I mean, I don't know if it works for everybody's business model, but for us it's really, really important because just like I said, you know, even if an agency partner influences a million or two million dollars of business in a given year, that's really helping to kind of amplify our efforts, so it's worth it to us to have a broader set of those partners on board. Jen: It makes perfect sense to me and we have a saying here at Allbound, it's "Partners are people too." And as cheesy as it sounds, sometimes we unnecessarily over-complicate channel partner, you know, that channel partner realm. And just like, you know, you're communicating with people, you're collaborating with them, you're prospecting them, you're engaging with them, same thing goes for those partners that you would like to bring into your world, so makes sense. My last question for you as it relates to channel marketing is, you know, I'm wondering if you have some kind of sound bite, some kind of concise piece of advice that you'd like to offer to other leaders in partner marketing. Jessica: Wow. I kind of liked your last statement there I feel like that's almost... I don't think of it as a sound bite, but I think that the biggest thing is to think of your partner marketing function as a demand gen function focused on partners. You know, so that you're getting the right set of skills, people who have a marketing background, people who are used to being focused on things like pipeline and revenue because that is gonna incent the right types of behaviors and they're gonna go out and find the right types of partnerships that are really gonna make the company successful. Jen: Awesome. Awesome. Well, before I really let you go, Jessica, I have a speed round of a couple of more personal questions that I ask all of our guests. And so I'd love for you to play along as well. Jessica: Okay. Jen: As long as you're okay with that. So, first question for you is what is your favorite city? Jessica: Barcelona. Jen: Woo! you answered that really quickly. Have you been... Jessica: Off the top of my head. Jen: Have you been there multiple times or just once or...? Jessica: I have. I have and everybody talks about, you know, Paris, and these other places and I don't know, like Barcelona to me is just such a vibrant city, and it's kind of the best land of both the east coast and the west coast of the US and then plopped into Europe with all of that richness of culture, I just absolutely love it. Jen: Wonderful. Okay. Second question, are you an animal lover? Jessica: Oh, absolutely. Cats and dogs. Jen: Do you have pets? Jessica: Two cats and, you know, someday when I stop traveling so much, definitely I will have some dogs. Jen: Yeah, it's tough to have a dog when you are not home for sure. I love all creatures. It's absolutely ridiculous, but that's great. Question number three, Mac or PC? Jessica: Definitely a Mac. I am a convert. I was always PC until I came to Demandbase and I showed up on my first day with a Mac, I figured it out and now I look at a PC and I'm like, "Ah, how do I use this thing?" Jen: Isn't it funny, Apple like they've rewired our brains, you know. Jessica: They did. Jen: It's unbelievable, between my MacBook and my iPhone, it's like I don't know how to do anything else. Jessica: Yes, exactly. Jen: All right and last question for you is, let's say I was able to offer you an all-expenses-paid trip, where would it be to? Jessica: Wow, that's an amazing question. I think I would love the opportunity to travel and probably South America. Just really dive in and, you know, get to see different wine regions and coastal villages and the mountains, being able to deep into Patagonia and those sorts of places. I think you know, being able to spend a couple of months there would be pretty amazing. Jen: Sounds great. Sounds like a good vacation. Thank you so much. Thanks for sharing your insights with us. It was such a pleasure just getting to know you and hear about what you got cooking over at Demandbase. If any of our listeners would like to reach out to you personally, maybe ask about using ABM and their channel, or to kind of swap stories with you, what's the best way for them to reach out to you? Jessica: Yeah, you can definitely look me up on LinkedIn, I'm always happy to make new and more connections there. And then also, I'm on twitter @jfewlessB2B, so I'm constantly posting new stuff there, so feel free to connect with me there, and, you know, direct message me if you have questions on anything that I've posted out there. Jen: Perfect. Sounds good. Well, I appreciate it and I'm sure our listeners do as well so thank you for your time and thanks, everyone, for tuning in and we'll catch you next week with an all-new episode of The Allbound Podcast. Jim: Thanks for tuning into The Allbound Podcast. For past episodes and additional resources, visit the resource center at allbound.com and remember, #NeverSellAlone.
John Sekevitch, President of CyberSolutions.io, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss, conflict between direct and indirect sales, making your partners money, customer experience ownership and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast. Jen: Hi, everybody, welcome to The Allbound Podcast. I'm Jen Spencer. And today I'm joined by John Sekevitch, who is President of CyberSolutions.io. Welcome, John. John: Thanks, Jen. It's good to be here. Hi, everybody. Jen: It's great to have you here. And before we dig into sales leadership and channel, tell me a little bit about Cyber Solutions and what that organization is. John: Well, Cyber Solutions is a channel. Right now there's roughly a thousand companies representing about 5,000 different offerings in the cyber security space. And each one of them wants to have access to cheap information, like the security officers of major banks and financial services, organizations, large retailers, and other high tech companies with intellectual property to protect. And as a result of the challenges that these companies are having in going to market and getting access to their targeted executives, they work with channel partners such as I in terms of bringing their products to market. So right now, I'm representing a couple of application security companies, a threat and vulnerability management company, risk management company, one involved with threat intelligence sharing, and finally, another associated with risk scoring and security scoring for cyber insurance purposes. I think what's going on is it's very difficult for new companies to get access to the market. So more and more companies are going right to channel partners rather than trying to field a direct organization first, and then expand into the channels. And I'm sure we'll probably get into some of that later. For the most part right now what I'm doing is helping these companies and representing their offerings to roughly 100 of those types of companies. So I have established strong relationships over the past 20 years, and I can get them into places they wouldn't be able to get into themselves. And I think that's typically why companies are looking for their channel partners. Jen: Well, this is a real treat for us. Typically on the podcast, I'm interviewing channel executives who represent a vendor and they're talking about their best practices, and their triumphs and challenges in engaging a channel of partners to help them achieve their revenue goals. And so, what's so great is you bring the perspective of the channel partner, which is a really powerful voice that many of our listeners need to hear. So I'm excited. This is going to be great. John: Yeah, I've also been on both sides. So I've definitely been that head of sales and marketing who was looking to expand my direct team into places where they weren't able to get into, or to just scale to the market opportunity. So I have recruited and worked with channel partners, and not only in this situation of my own company, but prior to that being a channel partner of IBM and being a channel partner of Oracle, which are two of the biggest that work with channel partners and have a lot of the best practices in the space. So I'm happy to share my perspectives from both sides of the table. Jen: That's exactly what I wanted to dig into next. Looking at your background, you've had these executive leadership positions that you've held over the last 20 years, companies like IBM, like Net SPI. You've worked directly in sales and marketing like you mentioned. So you have a vast amount of business experience, and so I imagine you understand what works and what doesn't when it comes to channel, but also really business in general. Channel is just one aspect of an entire business. I'd love to hear, what are some of the biggest changes that you've seen in channel sales and marketing? John: Well, I think the biggest change I've seen is more and more companies starting with the channel, rather than starting with their own direct sales organization. I think that's just symptomatic of what's happening out in the marketplace, which is, it's very difficult to do direct sales these days without spending a lot of money on marketing. For the most part, in my experience everybody's kind of focused on a handful of executives, and those executives don't answer their phone and they don't respond to emails. They get their insights from their relationships, their trusted relationships. And so more and more, hiring a sales guy just because they have the ability to sell isn't enough anymore. What you're looking for is potentially getting a channel partner who already has those trusted relationships. In the cyber security space for instance, there's a company called Opto, and Opto has relationships with most of the top banks and financial services, organizations and large retailers. So as a result, everybody wants to get their attention so that their products are being represented. What's interesting is that now the channel partner is in power, because of the fact that they have these relationships, and they can try to exact a pound of flesh out of the product or offering provider. So what's interesting is you'll see things like big commission payouts for the direct side being in the 5% to 10% range, and on the channel side being in the 20% to 25% range, regardless of whether or not they're selling at this price or not. So I'm seeing starting with the channel rather than the direct, and also the power of the channel to be able to dictate economic terms, which hasn't been the situation in the past. Jen: Well, working for Allbound, where we believe in the power of selling with partners, I'm definitely biased, but we started our own channel partner program very, very early on. It was one of the first things we did as an organization, and I love my partner leads. I talk frequently about how they're my favorite leads, because like you said, they're coming from a trusted adviser. So when I get a lead from one of my agency partners, that is not just a lead, that is somebody who is coming to us because someone that they trust and work with on a regular basis recommended me to them. So it's the warmest hand-off that you can possibly get in sales. I think that's part of why we're seeing these organizations starting those channel partner programs earlier and earlier on in their business. John: Right. But there's also a lot of challenges in an effective channel program. For instance, you were just mentioning getting those channel leads. Well, one of the things that has to be managed is the channel conflict between the direct organization and the channel. Who has what responsibilities? What account responsibilities? What happens if the channel's not getting the traction that you were hoping to get out of a particular territory? How do you get a channel partner to support all of the sales reps rather than just one or two sales reps? And so these are all things that obviously you need to have executive leadership over. You always need to have somebody who wakes up in the morning caring about whether those deals are being done by the channel or being direct. I've always had situations where I ran sales and marketing and had responsibility for the whole number. However, I always had somebody who was responsible for that channel. To think that that person who has responsibility for the total can also be the person who has responsibility for the channel number, is just not going to work because they can always get their number with the big number, rather than working through the channel. So you need to have deal headquarters, if you will, to make sure that everybody knows what's going on. And you've got to have trust in the partners to be able to share access to your salesforce.com or whatever CRM system that you're using, and also to have content that's relevant to the channel and not just for yourself. So one of the things that companies are struggling with is the fact that they barely have enough content to support their own people, much less what's needed by the channel. At the end of the day, the channel still needs to have content. They might have relationships and that might get them access, but they need to have content to be able to share with their relationships to advance the value propositions that they're trying to represent out there. Jen: Absolutely. They're your volunteer salespeople. They're out there selling on your behalf. They need to be empowered and enabled. So my next question I was going to ask you was, really, how do you determine if and when a company is ready to build a channel partner program? You mentioned a couple of things, you mentioned having a leader who is responsible for that revenue. You mentioned making sure they figured out some of those internal processes to avoid conflict. You mentioned content. So are those really hard and fast signs and if you don't have those three or four things, then you really can't launch a partner program? Is there anything else? What do you think is really the bare minimum for an organization to really start selling through and with channel partners? John: Well, I mean, if you start with a channel partner program, then you don't have to worry about channel conflict. You're just going through the partner. Jen: This is true, yeah. John: So when you hire a person who has that experience, it'd be a different person than you would if you're going to hire the head of an internal sales organization, if you will. The other thing is what are you going to do about leads? Are you going to develop leads for your channel? A lot of companies are looking for both sides. So I remember working as a channel partner for Oracle, and we were a systems integrator for their e-commerce solution, and for a while, that company lived on business given to them by Oracle. But then came to the point where Oracle was expecting them to be bringing business to them. So there's got to be that give and take, if you will. So I would say that, if you're going to start with just a channel, be prepared to use your marketing and inbound resources, and perhaps even some of the inside sales resources to feed the channel, not just looking for the channel to feed you. Jen: That's really great advice. I think about that, and I think about some of the mistakes that I've seen organizations make mostly around being under-resourced. So an organization, maybe that's been selling direct and then decides to build out a channel partner program, that group decides, "All right, we're going to hire this one person to really spearhead this and own it", except that person might be an operations type of individual, or a sales type of person... John: Yeah, typically. Jen: Right. Or maybe marketing but... John: They're moving the paperwork, they're not moving the market. And that's a mistake. I'm glad you mentioned it. Jen: Right. John: I mean, naturally it is important to have somebody who moves the paper because of the fact that these people need to be paid. And if they're not being paid and if it's not worth their while, they won't put the work into it, and that's bad because sometimes you've given them exclusive territories, and they're not making any money on it, and they decide to walk away from the commitment so then nobody's pursuing these opportunities. So you got to be concerned about whether or not the channel's making money, because if they're not making money you're eventually going to lose them. Jen: Are there any glaring mistakes that you've seen executives make in the channel? You don't you have to tell us who they are, or what companies they were. Just wondering if in your experience you've seen any like big failures that maybe, our listeners who are either building channel programs or nurturing them can learn from? John: Well, there might be some people on the line that are familiar with this company, IBM for instance. So IBM pays 20% to 25% commission to their channel partners. The caveat is the fact that they pay 20% to 25% based on a deal that sold at list price. So the thing is that when it isn't sold at list price, and those of you on the podcast probably understand that there's never an IBM product that gets sold at list price. So consequently, these channel partners are making 5% to 10% instead of 20% to 25% because of the market realities that these IBM products need to be sold at a discount in order to be competitively priced. So consequently, they lose a lot of the channel traction that they could be getting because even though the 20% to 25% seems like it's a reasonable commission to be paid, it's not actually being paid, and the result is the channel's not making any money, and they eventually lose some of that traction. So that's probably the most glaring example, other than just flat out, taking all the cherry accounts as in-house, and leaving the dogs and cats to the channel. That's again, not paying attention to whether or not the channel's making money. So you may be able to get somebody interested in it to begin with, but when the results don't stand up to their expectations, you eventually lose a channel, and I've seen that happen on a number of occasions. Then the other thing is that you have to be continually diligent about whose account it is. On the one hand, it's the channel's account, but they're buying your product. And so consequently, you have to have a way of being able to stay involved so that they end up being a happy client. Because when they throw you out, you're going to get the black eye, not necessarily the channel partners. So something that needs to be coordinated is how do you maintain some degree of account ownership and ownership of the customer experience when there's a channel partner involved. Jen: That's a really great point. That's something that we're seeing grow in importance, particularly in this as a service subscription economy that we're in, and where buyers have more choice than ever before to move from one product to one solution to another. Gosh, I mean, making sure that if you're a vendor you have the ability to easily collaborate with your channel partners or vice versa, so that you could ultimately take care of the customer, because that's what's most critical to your business. I think that's really, really great advice. John: This is becoming a complication nowadays, because as customers move towards annual subscriptions versus perpetual licenses for many of these solutions, we're talking about paying commissions off of smaller numbers, or you're paying commissions off of just the first year rather than years two and three, type of thing. Again, this is all related to asking “Is my channel making money?” You can imagine if you got a $100,000 deal for a one year deal, and you're getting 25% of it, what do you get? You get a $25,000 doesn't go very far, but if you can pay them up front 25% of a $300,000 deal for instance, now you've got a bigger hit. However, you don't get your money until years two and three. So you just have to figure out how to do that. So maybe instead of offering 25%, you offer 20%, but you pay the full three years upfront, that type of thing. These are all things that, again, focus on is my channel making money? If your channel's making money, you're going to be successful. If your channel's not making money, you won't be successful. Jen: I couldn't agree more. It's perfect, perfect mic drop. Before I let you go, a lot of listeners of The Allbound Podcast are in their partner program infancy, and they're not the IBMs and the Oracles of the world. They are maybe some smaller mid-market SaaS companies that are really setting out to to build a partner program for the first time. Do you have some tips that you could share with folks like them, maybe the CEOs of those types of organizations? What do you recommend they do to really get started? Maybe it's even things they need to think about. John: Well, I think what you're kind of describing is somebody who's already got a direct sales organization and now they're looking to expand into a channel, because otherwise, if you started with the channel you'd already have it there, so it's a little bit different. So let's assume that there is a direct sales organization, and now you're going to supplement that with the channel. So the first thing I would do is get somebody and invest in that person who is going to worry about the channel. Who's going to work with your inside teams to feed the channel? Who's going to set up the deal center to be able to manage channel conflict? Which accounts are the channel's? Which accounts are the inside team? Who's going to manage that? Who's going to put together the compensation plan that's going to be attractive to the channel, and still help the product company make money? And then the other thing from a customer experience, is how are you going to share ownership of your mutual client? What are the expectations that you're going to have for your clients, for your channel's clients, and what are the expectations? How are you going to be participating in it? So I think if you take care of who's feeding the channel, who's compensating the channel, and how, and then also, how are you going to manage your mutual client? I think those are the three things that are most important to have a successful channel on your hands. Jen: Excellent. Excellent advice. Well, this has been so great getting a chance to talk with you. Gosh, I could probably stay on the line even longer, and just pick your brain, but I won't. But before I really truly let you go, John, at the end of all of our podcasts, I have a little bit of a speed round of more personal questions, just four simple questions that I'd like to ask you. Are you open and ready for it? John: Sure, sure. Jen: All right. All right. John: They're all related to channel, right? Jen: No. They're actually not all related to channel. They're all related to you. So the first question is what is your favorite city? John: My favorite city is Los Angeles. I like the ocean, and I like warm weather, and it's got a buzz to it. So I'm a Los Angeles type of guy, as compared to all my compatriots who seem to be Silicon Valley guys. So I'm a Los Angeles guy. Jen: Southern California, awesome. Second question for you, are you an animal lover? John: I am an animal lover. We have had cocker spaniels for years, and they live a long time, very painful to see them leave. We just had one that passed in the last few months. And so my wife is now in the process of getting a Saint Charles, I think is the type of cocker that she's expecting to get next, so we'll have one soon. Jen: Aw! Those are so adorable. Will this be a puppy? John: Oh, it will be a puppy, yeah. We always start from scratch and go through all that pain. But cockers are a lot of work, I'm telling you. So if you're looking for a puppy or a dog that is not a lot of work, I would not recommend cocker spaniels. Jen: I don't think I've met a puppy that's not a lot of work. So if anyone out there on the internet knows of puppies that are easy, let me know. Okay, question number three, Mac or PC? John: Mac for sure. Jen: And last question... Jen: What's that? John: The only way I made much affordable, however, is every time I bought one, I bought a share of Apple stock. And so it's been able to keep up. Jen: There you go. All right, my last question. Let's say I was able to offer you an all-expenses paid trip, where would it be to? John: All-expenses paid trip would have to be someplace in the US. I'm a US guy. Where have I not been? I've not been to Charleston, South Carolina. And I think I need to go there. My wife and I have thought about doing that and it's like, it never gets to be the right time to go to Charleston, South Carolina. But if you were going to pay for it, I'd go. Jen: That's the first time that someone has picked Charleston, South Carolina as their destination of choice. So I need to ask you a fifth question which is, what is so amazing about Charleston, South Carolina that I am missing? John: I think it's just the architecture. They've kind of kept their hands on the old, while still having all of the modern conveniences. Jen: All right. John: And it's warm. Jen: And it's warm, and it's warm. Well, lovely. Thank you. Thanks so much for sharing your time with me today John, talking about channel, talking about South Carolina. If any of our listeners would like to reach out to you personally and just connect with you, what's the best way for them to do so? John: Just my corporate email's fine. Its jsekevitch, S-E-K-E, V like Victor I-T-C-H@cybersolutions.io. Jen: Wonderful. Again, thank you so much for your time. And thank you everybody else for tuning in. And I hope you'll join us next week for an all new episode of The Allbound Podcast. Announcer: Thanks for tuning in to The Allbound Podcast. For past episodes and additional resources, visit the resource center at allbound.com. And remember, never sell alone. Intro: Effective selling takes an ecosystem. Join host Jen Spencer as she explores how to supercharge your sales and master the art of never selling alone. Welcome to The Allbound Podcast, the fundamentals of accelerating growth with partners.
Anjali Menon, Head of Growth Operations at Magic, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss integrations with complementary technologies, listening to data, being honest with your community of partners and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast. Jen: Hi everybody. Welcome to The Allbound Podcast. I'm Jen Spencer, Vice President of Sales and Marketing here at Allbound. And today, I am joined by Anjali Menon, Head of Growth Operations for Magic. Welcome. Anjali: Thank you so much. Happy to be here. Jen: I'm really happy to have you. And I'm excited to talk about your career but, before we get into that, I want to talk a little bit about Magic. Because for all the times I've ever thought, "Man, I wish I just had this like personal assistant." You guys are kind of helping solve that problem for me, right? What's the scoop? Tell me a little bit more about the company. Anjali: Absolutely. So thank you for having me, first and foremost. And I'm really excited to be here. Magic is a text-based platform that allows you to, just as you said, get personal assistants on demand. So the scope of what you can ask is really sort of infinite. You could ask for things as simple as somebody getting you lunch, to perhaps helping with your office needs and things that are much more grandiose in scale, planning a significant other's birthday party or something like that. But the idea is that you get manpower on-demand to increase your productivity. We launched in 2015, February of 2015. Actually, when it launched, it just went viral. I mean, we had a massive waiting list and it was really validation that people want personal assistants. They want more time in their day. Jen: Yeah, I'm telling you, it's like as soon as I learned about it, I'm like, "Okay, what should I ask?" Like, "What should I ask for help with?" right? So, it's just such a cool concept. And you're Head of Growth Operations there. What does that entail? I'm starting to see Directors of Growth. I think this I the first time I've seen Growth Operations. What does that mean? What's your role like? Anjali: Yeah, definitely. It's a really interesting one because we are a growth team, first and foremost. But because we interface with operations so closely, just by nature of the work that we do, we're constantly having to fulfill the requests that our clients put in. That's ultimately how we end up with Growth Operations. So under this umbrella branch of what we call Growth Operations, there's a few sort of subcategories. We've got a sales team, which has historically been focused on sort of inbound leads as a main source of acquisition. Then we've got an activation team that interfaces with our operations team quite frequently to ensure that sort of consistent quality of service. And this team is critical because Magic's end product is ultimately defined by the user. You tell us what you want and we deliver it. So the activation has to be really customized. And that's in part where a lot of the operations work comes in with growth. And then the third piece which is pretty nascent in its start, but we now have a B2B and partnerships team as well, so those are kind of the three. Jen: So let's let's dig into that a little bit, you're just getting started with it, but when you think about the plans, this go-to-market strategy for Magic, how important do you believe those strategic partnerships are going to be in your success? What kind of plans do you have in the works? Anjali: This is such an interesting question because partners can add so much value to our type of business. But it's really a matter of finding the right fit because Magic has so many complexities. You can ask for anything as simple as lunch to something as complex as carrying out a whole sale cycle for a business using Magic. So because it runs the gamut of things that you can do, we really have to evaluate what partners make sense for us. But for Magic, like many other businesses, I think success for our customers comes in the form of efficiency gains, obviously, cost savings, and value-add. And partners can add all of these things. Some examples of partners that we're exploring right now are things like verticalized partnerships. So, if we can sit on top of other services that already have domain expertise, it's a win-win for us, i.e., if I already can use a cleaning service that I know is good and I can just recommend that to my clients, then I'm saving them and us time by doing so. Other sorts of partners that are interesting for us are ones that sort of epitomize our values. We have two really interesting values at Magic. Yet, their concepts that are sort of known in the startup community but I'm not sure how widely they're known beyond that. And the two concepts are called yagni and plow. Yagni is a term that means “you ain't gonna need it.” It's one of those things that in the startup community, people will say it all the time. But it's a term that really signifies when we work with you, we want a partnership that understands that we're working under constraints, and you understand that, and I understand that. And we don't go build things that we don't really need at the moment. We'll build them when it's absolutely necessary. So that's something that we might look for as a value in terms of partnerships. And then this other concept is plow, which you'll hear almost every day in our office. And that's a concept, particularly for a personal assistant kind of concierge company, it's the concept that you don't give up. You keep plowing to make sure that whatever the client wants, you try to get. And so we would hope that our partners sort of share those values as well, maybe on these sales or affiliate side for example. So really, I think partnerships are key for us, but they need to align strategically both in what we're doing as well as what our clients needs, as well as, finally, what the partners themselves need. And the reason I emphasize this is because when we went viral two years ago, we had major, major brands coming to us, asking us to do partnerships with them. And we turned most of them down. And the reason is, we had to sort of be true to what our capabilities were, and you've got to be honest with what you can deliver and what the partner expects. And so at that point, we hadn't even really figured out who was our right customer profile and did this major brand make sense for what we were doing. Just because they're a major brand doesn't mean they're a good partner for you. So, I know that's a long-winded answer, but I think, in short, partners are very, very useful particularly for our business. But I think that the key is really making sure that there's alignment on both sides for what that partner can do. Jen: It's very, very sage advice. And it can be very tempting for organizations to just bring on those partners that have me with those big brands. But, if there's not that alignment...and especially for a very quickly growing young company, you got to have that focus, right? So, I think what you're saying you guys are doing is you're definitely going down the right path. I absolutely love hearing it. And those strategic partnerships just make perfect sense. How about integrations? Are you looking at other complementary technologies as a way that they might play a role in your growth goals? One of the things I'm thinking about, just kind of off the top of my head is like different apps I might be in on a regular basis like Postmates for delivering food or supplies or what have you. I mean, are you thinking about technology, and in that respect, for partnership? Anjali: Totally. So, this is such a great question for two reasons. One is because we actually just launched a Magic version for Slack. So this Magic-Slack integration allows teams and businesses to more easily and more transparently use Magic as kind of like an office manager. So Slack has been really useful for us as the first step to growing our business in sort of a different category. And so, I think when we think about these partnerships, for example, I sort of alluded to value being very similar. Slack is one whose whole value prop is to increase productivity with teams, and we have a very similar value prop, it's a Productivity Tool. So there's synergy here. And if we can reach more of our target audience through a medium that allows teams to interact more collaboratively like Slack, that's exactly the kind of thing that's good for our business but even better for our clients. So Slack is the major one that we've been focused on. You kind of alluded to Postmates. And that's a whole other category of sort of partnerships that we'd also be thinking about. Basically these other sorts of niche services that we can kind of sit on top of or that they can kind of sit on top of us, either way. And we can just kind of use them as our clients come in and say, "Hey, I need a burrito." well, the fastest way to do that is through DoorDash or Postmates or something like that. So those are the other kinds of partnerships that we would look at as well. And so, absolutely. That's definitely something that increases productivity and efficiency for us. Jen: I know I can speak on behalf of the Allbound #AllStars, we try to make Slack do everything. So we try to run our whole business through Slack. Things that are important and all of the shenanigans as well. Anjali: That's awesome. Well, what's interesting is with the Slack integration, we're finding different use cases for Magic just by virtue of being on a different platform other than text. Because when you're suddenly on a platform that allows for different teams to interact with one Magic as if they were an office manager suddenly Magic becomes the office manager, and it's booking appointments for people, it's bringing vaccines on campus, it's booking team outings, and suddenly the use cases are becoming very different in the way that they interact with Magic is different too, just by virtue of the platform. So it's actually a key growth initiative for us to be thinking about these other kinds of platforms, because they increase the ways in which folks use Magic, increasing their own productivity. But it's also, of course, then expanding the reach of who can use us as well, which is really good for both sides. Jen: I want to ask you a little bit about some of your past experience. Before you were at Magic, I know you were at Twitter. Before that, you led marketplace operations at TaskRabbit. And marketplaces and partnerships and communities of engagement, there's a lot of similarities there. And you helped launch the TaskRabbit Elite Program. So, let me know how did that concept for that program come about originally? And I'd love any feedback on how it helped really grow the company since its inception. Anjali: Definitely. So, I am proud to say that the TaskRabbit Elite Program still exist today. So when you go to TaskRabbit, despite the business model having changed from one that was traditionally like a bidding system to one that's now more automated with algorithms, the TaskRabbit Elite Program's still maintained. And the reason is because it actually does really impact the business goals and growth. The reason it came about was mostly for two sides. And it's two sides in parts because TaskRabbit is a two-sided marketplace. So, on the client side, when we were back in the bidding system, clients would put in a request for something like, "Hey, I need a cleaner." And it was possible that hundreds of taskers could bid on those requests. And clients would sort of face this paradox of choice kind of paralysis because they wouldn't know who to choose. And so, the concept of the TaskRabbit Elite for clients specifically was, can we give them a sort of value set that allows clients to choose who is the right TaskRabbit for me for this particular job set? And then, on the Tasker side, on the community side, which was the side that I was most closely involved with, we had never created a systematic, defined program that really supported workers in the sharing economy. It was not something we had done formally. And so this was our first attempt to say, "Hey, there are a lot of people hustling on this platform to make it a great one. We should reward them in some way." And so for folks who delivered, who had great ratings, who consistently performed, we thought this is a great way to reward them and get their earnings up by showcasing their work more to the right kinds of people. Similarly, it also helped new Taskers sort of ingratiate themselves on the platform because now new Taskers had a sort of defined path towards something that they could work to. And so, it was possible that within a month of becoming a new Tasker, you could actually become an Elite TaskRabbit when I launched this thing. And so, it motivated a lot of newer TaskRabbits to do a lot of work and get promoted and get more work. So ultimately, it was kind of a win-win for both sides. On the tasking community, it supported them by giving them more visibility and giving them more work. And on the client side, it helped them narrow their choice to the right Tasker for their job. And ultimately, we switched the whole model to actually emphasize that specific point, finding the right Tasker for your job. So now, if you go to TaskRabbit, nobody's bidding anymore. You're just sort of shown the right TaskRabbits for you and you just pick the one that's good for you. It's a much easier process now but that concept really sort of originated with that Tasker Elite program. And the reason it exists today, again, is because both of those sides of the community are still served in the same purpose. So it's been something that was strategic for the company. It ended up ultimately making Taskers more money, which is why we kept going with the program because it was giving them more money and was giving them more incentives to get more work on the platform. And so, yeah, it's something that I'm really proud of because it allowed us to build a community in a way that was very positive for both sides. Jen: To take sort of a page out of Tiffany Bova's book, she talks about making your customer the true north, like the center of your universe, right? And in every decision that you make in your business, like thinking about it from the perspective of that customer. What's going to be best for that customer? Because people ask, "Should I sell directly? Should I sell online? Should I sell through channel partners? Should I do X, Y or Z?" And the answer should be, well how does your customer want to...right? How do they want to buy? How do they want to be served? What's going to be best for them? And ultimately, if you do what's going to be best for them, that will end up being best for the business and for all the business partners that are part of that ecosystem. Anjali: Exactly. Jen: So, it's great to hear. Anjali: A quick side note on that. We actually spotted the problem of clients not getting what they wanted and not identifying the North Star through data. Because I think folks don't know this, but the reason TaskRabbit changed their model is because a lot of tasks were being put into the system, that is to say, clients were asking for things to be done, but then they weren't always choosing TaskRabbit to get them done. And the reason was in part because of bids. It was because a lot of TaskRabbits could put in bids and then people would get so overwhelmed that we would see this long-tailed distribution of tasks that got bids, but then the client didn't do anything with them. So this effort was to give them exactly what you said, that North Star. Jen: We talked to a lot of people, and they're building partner programs, whether they're reseller programs, referral partners, affiliates. But they're not just trying to build a program just to get leads or just for top of funnel. They're really looking, "How can I build a true community for my partner ecosystem?" Maybe it's to get partners collaborating with each other, or to get partners and customers collaborating to get shared visibility and really a shared experience. And I'm just wondering, over the course of your career, whether you want to speak to something from being at Twitter or TaskRabbit or even at Magic now, do you have any advice for people who are setting out to attempt to create a community? Anjali: Yeah, definitely. That's such a cool question because I look at building communities or partner communities or whatever form of community you're building, like a two-sided marketplace because that's the background I come from. So the relationship needs to benefit not only your clients but the partners themselves. So for a business like Magic, that's so dynamic where the scope of what we offer is pretty much sky's the limit, we in particular need partners who understand this and can be flexible enough to work within the constraints of that model. So I would really say for folks who are interested in building this kind of community, define and qualify the ideal folks in the community and how do they fit into what you're building? Because if you can't define that, then you're not in a good position to set up the community and your partners for success. And I think, and again this is what I alluded to earlier, but when we had major brands coming to us, we didn't even know who was a good partner for us and who were our right customers. But now we're in so much of a better position to do that, so we can start thinking about that. So definitely being able to understand who those right partners are for your community is key. The other thing I would say is honesty is everything, be honest with your community of partners. Because then, the expectations are set correctly. Don't over play your capabilities because you think that's what your partners want to hear. You are the partner in the partnership, and for it to work, I think really, really being able to transparently lay out the scope of what you can do, why you're doing it, and why it's important as it relates to your values are all very key. So that would be sort of my best advice. Jen: I think that's some really great advice and such a great way to wrap this up. But before I let you go, I always ask some more personal questions just so folks can get to know you a little bit better. You shared so much awesome stuff with us today, but I'm going to dig in a little bit more if you're up for it. Anjali: I am, of course. Jen: Okay. So easy questions. First one is what is your favorite city? Anjali: Oh, okay, Cape Town, South Africa. Jen: Oh, I have not heard that one yet. So why is that your favorite city? Tell me. Anjali: So, I'm somebody who loves to travel. And I think that when you travel, you can often find places that you can call home, that are often not your true home. And you just know it when you're there. And so when I went to South Africa, I immediately felt this sense of home. Because South Africa is a lot like San Francisco, where I'm from, in the sense of scenery is very beautiful, there's a lot of nature, Table Mountain, a lot of ocean. People love surfing over there, but then the culture was also just very, very friendly and people were very welcoming. And I also love animals and wildlife. So being surrounded by all of that with a very sort of gracious culture, it felt like home. So that's my favorite city. Jen: Well, you kind of hinted at my next question. Are you an animal lover? Anjali: Yeah, I am. Jen: Do you have any pets? Anjali: I grew up with two dogs, Larry and Lucky. One was a German Shepherd and one was a tiny little Pomeranian. And they were best friends. But no, I do love animals. So South Africa made sense. Jen: Great. Next question, Mac or PC? Anjali: Mac. Jen: And my last question, if I was able to offer you an all-expenses-paid trip, where would it be to? Anjali: Well, the next place that I want to go to is Iceland. Because I'm a nature lover. I love exploring. And tickets are cheap right now so it wouldn't cost you too much probably. Jen: Remember, this is a magic land where I have all the money in the world and I can send you anywhere you want to go. But I appreciate you thinking about me. Anjali: Well, in that case, I probably just need the money, still in Iceland, but I'd probably go on some kind of luxury retreat, looking at the Northern Lights or something like that. But yeah, I think if we had all the money in the world, the place would be Iceland. Jen: All right. Awesome. I love the practical fantasy, it's fantastic. Well, I just want to thank you again. Thank you for sharing some of your time with me and our listeners today. If anyone would like to reach out to you personally, what's the best way for them to connect with you? Anjali: Sure. So they can connect with me via email and it's just 0-7, my first name and my last name. So that's Anjali Menon @gmail.com. I can spell that out as well, would that be helpful? Jen: Sure, sure. Anjali: Okay. So it's 0-7-A-N as in "Nancy" J-A-L-I as an "igloo" M-E-N as in "Nancy" O-N as in "Nancy" at gmail.com. So that's 07anjalimenon@gmail.com. Jen: Perfect. Well, it's been great getting a chance to learn a little bit more about you and talking about partnerships and communities. So, thank you so much. Anjali: Thank you for having me. Jen: Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. And thanks, everyone else for tuning in and we'll be back next week with an all-new episode. Male Announcer: Thanks for tuning into The Allbound Podcast. For past episodes and additional resources, visit the resource center at allbound.com. And remember, never sell alone.
Jay McBain, Global Advisor at Channel Mechanics, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss shadow channels and the shift from IT buying power, verticalization (or hyperfocused vectorization), the future of the channel and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast. Jen: Welcome to The Allbound Podcast, I am Jen Spencer, Vice President of Sales and Marketing here at Allbound. And today, I'm joined by Jay McBain who co-founded the company ChannelEyes, currently serves as Chairman Emeritus of the CompTIA Vendor Advisory Council and Managed Services Community. He is a Board member of the Channel Vanguard Council, the Ziff Davis Leadership Council, and CRN Channel Intelligence Council. In short, this man knows channel. Welcome, Jay. Jay: Thanks, Jen, really appreciate it. Glad to be here. Jen: Absolutely. Well, it's good to have you. And especially, really wanting to get caught up with you and what's going on in your world and I'm sure our listeners are also really interested about five months ago, you took on a free agent status. You said, "Okay, I'm leaving ChannelEyes," which was the channel tech startup that you helped co-found. So catch us up, what's had your attention the last year or so? Jay: Yeah, absolutely. I had spent the last while at ChannelEyes as CEO and they're working on some really interesting stuff around predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. And I think in the next three to five years, most of us in the channel will be using computers to help us do our daily tasks...help us with our daily tasks and get us to the finish line faster. And I think now that the company transitions to a CEO that can better position the company with some of the leading CRM players in the market like Salesforce and Microsoft. And who knows, further down the road, to really make something happen. Jen: Great, great. So what are you focused on right now as a channel professional in your world? Jay: That's a great question and I was at CompTIA last week and probably answered the question at least 100 times so... Jen: I'm sure. I'm sure. Jay: One of the answers is I spent almost 20 years working at IBM and Lenovo in different channel roles including channel chief roles. And they were always Americas based, either North America or full Americas, and I never really got a lot of exposure to Europe and Australia and Asia-Pacific. And what I've decided to do in the last five months is work closely. I've been to Australia and going back again working with a very large telco there, I'm working with this great company in Ireland which is where I'm sitting right now in Ireland. The company is called Channel Mechanics and they've really looked at the channel management space and they've done some really innovative things. So looking internationally but also looking obviously to work with some very interesting challenges, which I'm sure we'll touch on on this podcast. Jen: Great. So let's, dig in to some of that. I've followed a lot of what you've been writing about specifically around channel, something that you previously called out, is that a large number of channel programs that tend to get stuck in the exact same place. And you wield it down to two key conclusions. So one, that some vendors will simply win because their product wins. And then two, that other vendors will win because they know how to influence the channel. So I'd like to know, what do you mean by that? Jay: Yeah, this is one of my kind of personal passions and I think it started when I read the book "Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell. He's got this great chapter early on in the book. I think it's chapter 2, about Paul Revere. What a great connector Paul Revere was in 1776 and why that won the day more so than riding a horse through all these towns, and why the other person who left on horseback that night wasn't successful. And this idea of influencers or connectors and super connectors, when I moved to the United States from Canada in 2009, I looked at the market and looked at the millions of people that participate in the channel and I didn't have 15 years to catch up to the relationships that I had in Canada at the time. So I kind of boiled it down and said, "What is this influence and how would you measure it?" And in 2009, I generated a list of the top 100 most influential people in the global channel and I did it again, actually, about 4 months ago on my blog. And seven or eight years had passed and it's interesting to see people have changed positions and everything else. But it's a very analytical numeric way of assigning scores for people's influence. And just to give a quick synopsis is back in 2009, I figured out that there are 16 magazines that channel people read. There's 150 trade shows globally that channel people go to. There's thousands of vendors. There's dozens of distributors. There's bloggers, thought-leaders, associations, analysts. When you look around this web of influencing sites, what people read, where they go, and who they follow, it's across different mediums but they're all available. So I took and read every magazine. I wrote down every name of everyone in the magazines. I went to most of the trade shows in my first year and took note of who the keynote speakers, and the advisory council, and the board members, and all the key people at these events. I did the same for peer groups. I did the same for the associations and analysts. And as I came around, I came to about 1,000 names. But what was more important to me is how visible they were across multiple different communities. In our channel, it's so wide and diverse. But more importantly, it's decentralized. Channel partners don't have the time to go and read 12 magazines. So they tend to focus on one community and at most, maybe two to get their information to reinforce their expertise and to really peer network. And we look at these organizations, there's about 30 of them in North America that they're a part of. And I was really looking at how many people influenced in more of these 30 communities. And really, for me, reach was more important than maybe... that's all I could find out on Google. I couldn't find out how important they were in each community but I could definitely measure their reach. And so, I just added this really simple spreadsheet, and I just started adding check marks beside each name every time I saw them more than once. And after 1,000 names and thousands and thousands of check marks, I just sorted by whoever had the most check marks. And interestingly enough, in 2009, Larry Walsh, who was long time CRN editor, kind of patriarch of the channel, but he ranked number one and I didn't know who Larry Walsh was but I knew I had to go meet him. And then, all the way down the list I wanted to meet. And as I met probably 20 to 30 of the top 100 people, the other 70 came rushing to me. Not because I was important but because they sensed that I was doing this and talking to these important people and maybe I was important. But to a connector, they don't want to be left in the dark. So it's really important to them to know what's going on and to be able to kind of stay on the inside of things. So it was kind of really fascinating and over the last seven or eight years, I've written a lot and I've studied the level of influence that people have in the channel and there's a direct correlation between people having a high influence and carrying their company to great new heights. Jen: I think that holds true, regardless of what sort of industry or what segment of the market you're in, especially from that leadership perspective. I think it's also interesting, we talk to a lot of folks who are not your traditional type of channel organization, not your traditional enterprise IT company. Maybe they're a small or more mid-market size organization, software company, ready to kind of build a channel. A lot of folks are looking at an agency-based program. Upcoming on a future podcast episode, I'm going to be interviewing Pete Caputa from HubSpot who's now at Databox and has assured us that he's building the agency partner program to end all partner programs. And so when I think about influence, I think about an individual like that. So would you say that this concept of influencing the channel is just as strong in the evolution of where channel is going? Is it even more important than ever? I mean, what is your take on it because looking at 2017 compared to 2008, not that much time has gone by but there's been a lot of change in that time period? Jay: Well, there absolutely has, and some of the things I wrote about later last year, I call them shadow channels. But I've got this personal belief that your average vendor, their channel program is going to grow by at least 5X in the next three or four years. And the reason really goes back to the customer buy-in journey. And people at HubSpot know this very, very well but over the last 10 years, 90% of all IT decisions 10 years ago were made in the IT department. Makes sense, CIO. And today, it's flipped completely where 72% of all decisions are made outside of the IT department. It's now the VP of sales and marketing, operations, and finance, and HR, and all the way down the line that are making big technology decisions that are business decisions. And what's happening to traditional vendors is sometimes they're not in the room. Well, most cases, they're not in the room. When a VP of marketing like yourself is making a technology decision, a lot of times you don't have the person who's fixing your printer in the room. Jen: Wait, wait, hold on. Jay, I'm the person who fixes the printer here, so should it be someone else fixing... Jay: Oh. Jen: Just... Jay: That's right. Startup life, you know. Jen: Startup life. Yeah, I know, I'm sorry, I had to insert that. I had to insert that. But no, no, I agree with you 100% what you're saying, right? So I buy technology all the time and we do have someone here who's responsible for overseeing all technology and he has a zero influence on what I choose to buy to run our sales and marketing team. Jay: Right. And so, in the sense of if you put yourself under traditional vendor's space and you're trying to install traditional hardware, like you're selling software or other services, and now you need to get in front of Jen Spencer and, you know, who are you using to influence you. You might have somebody from HubSpot or Marketo in the room. You probably have somebody from your industry in the room that's a tech expert on your industry. In some cases, this could be accountants. They could be legal firms. They could be digital agencies. In your case, it might be a digital agency in the room. You could also have other ISVs in the room that play in ecosystems like a Marketo or HubSpot or Pardot or whichever one you play in. They're going to be in there because they know how to drive more leads for a company specifically like yours. You may have a startup in the room that's built with piece of technology and you're going to be one of their early customers so they want to make sure it succeeds. But you look at the five people in the room and it's not the printer person. It's not the person that installed your phones. So in other words, it's not the IT department. And so, if you're a traditional vendor spending all your time trying to recruit MSPs and solution providers and VARs from days gone by, guess what? You just missed out of a technology decision because your influence isn't in the room when it was made. Jen: Right. Jay: Now put yourself in the shoes of...let's talk VP of marketing and let's talk ambulatory care...healthcare clinic, midsized, 50 doctors, in the Northeast U.S. And in the room with that VP of marketing, again, it's probably that person from Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot, whatever it is, Eloqua, probably somebody that is an expert in healthcare driving leads for midsized clinics who's had success in the past, with five other clinics of the same size and scope. But these five people are different five people than what the IT department would have in the room. And so, you're not talking about routers and PCs, and you're not talking about, traditional licensing and everything else. You're talking about driving more leads or you're talking about a marketing problem. And to be relevant, vendors either a) need to train their current channels to be valuable to the VP of marketing in the clinic, which is less likely to happen. It's more likely that they then have to go and recruit and nurture these five other types of partners, and you call them alliances. You can call them whatever you want but the incentive is different, the way you manage them and measure them is different. The entire relationship is different. But the point is, there's so many more rooms that you have to be influencing now that your channel program is just invariably going to grow. Jen: So, you call these “shadow channels”, and when I think about like shadow marketing, shadow IT, usually, it's a very negative connotation to it. There's work going on that's outside of your viewpoint, that is in most cases negatively-impacting whatever the core function is. But what you just described doesn't sound negative, right? So are these shadow channels, is this the future? Is this a good thing for these organizations? Jay: Yeah, well, there's good and bad. And depending on the audience that I talk to, is which one I'll start with. The good news is businesspeople are now making business decisions around technology. All companies are becoming technology companies and all other professional organizations and industry, association, everything else, are becoming technology-based just because that's the way world works. All 27 industries now are pretty much 27 tech industries depending on agriculture, fisheries, or whatever they do. You know, that's become such a big role. So, the world has changed. And the reason it was called shadow IT or rogue IT is back in the day, where 10%, and then it became 20%, and then 30% of decisions are made by these people who have no idea what's going on with technology and they don't understand security and they don't understand backups and disaster recovery and they're not of the adult in the room which, you know, the CIO or IT department would claim to be. And so they were rogue, they need to be stumped. Well, the fact of the matter...and these are Gardener numbers, by the way, 72% of all the decisions today are now made outside of IT, so it's no longer rogue or shadow. It is literally the new normal. And the prediction by 2020 is that 90% of all decisions will be made outside of IT. So in 10 years, there's been pretty much a 180-degree turn in terms of where the decisions are made. And this isn't changing. And businesspeople are making business technology decisions and that's the way the world should work. It's been a big boom for SaaS companies. And it's been pretty hard for technology companies and hardware companies, specifically, because they're trying to still find their place in these conversations when these decisions are being made outside of their normal feasibility. Jen: It makes perfect sense and it's a good opportunity for consultants, for people like yourself to let you go in and really help some of those organizations along this evolution of the way that channel and selling today, tech buyers today has definitely changed. I want to ask you now about another topic that you've written about, that you spoke about. You talked about channel vectors or vectorization. And you said that verticalization is being replaced by hyperfocused vectorization. So I'm hoping perhaps you can clarify what you mean by that. And then, I want to explore, what today's executive needs to consider as he or she is scooping out plans to grow through channel over the next 5 years, because there are a lot of these organizations that maybe they've hit $10 million in annual recurring revenue and they're looking at, "How do we get to $100?" And they're looking at channel as a way to do that. So what do they need to know from this new vectorization perspective? Jay: Yeah, it's another example of me making up a word and then all of a sudden... Jen: I love it. Jay: It's really good for Google SEO if you actually make up your own word. It's actually pretty cheap, first of all. But all kidding aside, let's go back to the healthcare VP marketing in a midsized clinic. And you're looking at the 5 people in the room and 10 years ago, for an IT provider, it was okay to say, "Hey, I got to move from being a generalist to a specialist." "Well, what are you going to do?" "Hey, well, I'm going to specialize in healthcare." "Well, that's fantastic." So what they do is they go out and read HIPAA and HITECH, and, they get a couple people certified, and they can talk their way out of a paper bag when it comes to patient records and compliancy and even some legal. But again, the world in this journey has changed things for them. So if you're that VP of marketing at a midsized clinic and you have somebody in your office that says, "Hey, I know a lot about healthcare." You're like, "Well, that's great. That's one of the vectors. What would be even better is if you knew not only healthcare but midsized clinics, so the sub-industry. The fact that you put in a solution for a 500-doctor firm probably doesn't have a ton of relevance to me because I don't have those resources. So that's another thing. The fact that you installed in Colorado may not be as relevant as it is in New York because of the different statewide bureaucracy and everything else. I mean, there's just that 50 different systems in 50 different states. So if you start asking these questions, there's actually five vectors. And as a VP of marketing in a midsized clinic, you're not going to ever get that perfect person who has all five. "Listen, I've just done the last five clinics exactly your size, just down the street. I've just done your competitors. They're the guinea pigs. I know exactly what to do. Here's my price. I can get started right away." That would be perfect. That doesn't work. So all you only end up doing is, "If somebody knows healthcare that's better than not knowing healthcare." I put that in quotes, air quotes. But that's one vector. So, flipping it aside, "I want somebody who knows my business. I want somebody who's been successful in my sub-industry. I want to know somebody who's been successful in marketing. I don't care if you put in an accounting app, or I don't care if you put in an IT solution. I need the drive leads. I need you to be focused on my line of business. I need you to be focused on my sub-industry. I need you to focus on my region." So these are the types of things that you push back on. And if you can get two or three out of five, it's much better than just getting that generalist in the room who might have one out of five, or none out of five. Jen: I think that's such a good kind of point to make and maybe even to end on here, because we've talked about how the channel is no longer just a channel. It's no longer just kind of a one-way street or even a two-way street. I mean it is a complete ecosystem. The story you just spun about healthcare IT, about being able to plug in to Salesforce to really put that on steroids to make it work for somebody to do their business, I mean that is absolutely our present and our future of the way that sales ecosystems are growing. And organizations that embrace it, organizations like Salesforce, organizations like Microsoft, that embrace that type of channel environment are reaping the rewards of it, the benefits of that in addition to their partners as well. So I love it. I'm glad you invented the word vectorization. I'll have to start using it. Jay: Great to participate. I've actually wanted to do this since you started. But one of the key things is you asked me to look forward five years. Jen: Yeah, absolutely. Jay: Vendors need to look at the toolset that they're using. And many of the tools that they're currently managing the current triangle of gold and silver and bronze partners they have the same program they built 20 years ago, they need to refresh their tools. If they're going to grow their channel by 5X, they need to seriously look at a tool like GoalBot, take collaboration to a completely different level. They need to look at a tool like Channel Mechanics. They need to look at new, fresh thinking around how to do this because if you try to force-fit your old ecosystem, your old infrastructure into this new world, it's going to be very, very difficult. And many vendors are now realizing that and looking for those right SaaS companies and others to plug together, to kind of manage these new channels, measure these new channels and set these new channels. And in the end grow with these new channels. Jen: Absolutely. I mean, it's that old saying that, "What got you to where you are today may not be what's going to get you to where you want to go tomorrow." And so, I agree wholeheartedly with that assessment. Thank you so much. I'm not going to let you go just yet, though, Jay. So since you said you listened to the podcast, you've been excited about being on it, then I'm going to ask you some other questions. So you already know this is coming. Jay: I know it. Jen: Okay. All right. So, yeah. Well, I'd like to ask some more personal questions just so we can kind of shake things up and get to know a little bit more about you as a person. So first question I want to start with is what's your favorite city? Jay: Oh, that's a good one. I have traveled to 27 countries now. All of that spent on vacation, one of the blogs I write is "Rollerblades and Red Bull," the idea is to get to every country in the world. Right now, it would be tough to say the absolute but I would say Prague. Jen: Prague, awesome. I haven't been there but I've heard amazing things about it. So I heard it's a really beautiful city. Jay: Very, very difficult to rollerblade in, by the way. Jen: Okay, I won't try that, at least not the first time I go. Okay. Question number two, are you an animal lover? Yes or no? Jay: Yes, we have...we just actually...we had two dogs and one cat. And they were all 13 or 14 years old and we lost them all within 6 months. But, we're kind of in that mode now. We've got two young daughters as well I've got two daughters in college. But we're thinking about the family pets now and looking at different breeds so very excited to rescue some new pets. Jen: Oh, good. Well, you have to keep us posted. We love pets at Allbound. Our pets have an Instagram account called "Allbound Critters." So when you do have a new pet join your family, you have to let me know so I can give you guys a shout-out there. Jay: Will do. Jen: Okay, next question for you, Mac or PC? Jay: Well, being a 20-year IBM and Lenovo guy, the answer's going to shock you, I'm 95% Apple. So from iPhones to Watch to the laptop I'm on right now, everything, except for real work, is on an Apple. When I talked about analyzing the thousands of people that run this industry and running all these AI and macros and heavy, heavy lifting, I have one super-powered, liquid-cooled, top-end gaming machine at home that I do serious work on. But everything else is Apple. Jen: Everything else is Apple. All right. All right. There you go. And last question. Let's say I was able to offer you an all-expenses paid trip, where would it be to? Jay: That's a good question. So back to visiting every country in the world, the next, probably Middle Africa. Jen: Oh, what interests you about Middle Africa? Jay: A) that I haven't been there. Jen: Okay, yeah. Jay: I've been to most regions... You know, when I see the weather report that has 50 or 60 cities, most of them...well, almost of them I've been to. So now, I'm in the mode of, "I've got to go to dangerous places now." You can't go to the Middle East. A lot of Africa is off-limits. But it gets much harder to travel once you've knocked off the easy ones. Now you've got to start knocking off ones that have government warnings, or can add a little bit of risk. So that's what entices me about going to Middle Africa and maybe at Uganda, or Kenya, and help build schools or do something good for the world. Jen: Sounds wonderful. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for joining me, for sharing some of your time with us, especially calling in from Ireland where I know it's late at night. If any of our listeners would like to reach out to you personally, what's the best way for them to connect with you? If folks want to talk about going to Kenya with you, or they want to talk about fixing their channel, how should they reach you? Jay: Absolutely. My website, my blog that most of what we've talked about today, is jaymcbain.com. It's jaymcbain.com. There is at least 50 ways on there that you can contact me through every social and my cellphone and everything else. If you just want to hit me with a quick tweet. It's the letter "J" mcbain, M-C-B-A-I-N, so jmcbain. Hit me there and we can go from there. Jen: Perfect. Well, thanks again, Jay. Thanks, everyone else, for tuning in, and catch us next week for an all-new episode of The Allbound Podcast. Announcer: Thanks for tuning in to The Allbound Podcast. For past episodes and additional resources, visit the Resource Center at allbound.com. And remember, never sell alone
Kyle Burnett, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Allbound, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss the birth and growth of the partner portal, navigating channel tech, integrations, SaaS partner programs and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast. Jen: Hi everybody. Welcome to The Allbound Podcast. I'm Jen Spencer, Vice President of Sales and Marketing here at Allbound. And if you're a regular listener of the podcast, you know I don't typically sound quite this froggy. I'm getting over a cold, I actually sound way worse than I feel. And I'm actually in a pretty great mood, and one of the reasons why is today's guest is none other than Allbound's own Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, Kyle Burnett. Welcome, Kyle. Kyle: Hi Jen. I think your voice sounds awesome and after this, we're going to karaoke because I think you've probably got a pretty good voice for it right now. Jen: Oh my gosh, I think if I do that I'll have no voice at all in the coming weeks. After this podcast, I think I'm going to go on a vocal rest. Is that what artists call it? Vocal rest? So this is going to be super fun. Typically on the podcast, we have folks in sales or marketing and always with a channeled focus, of course. But I want to add your voice to the mix because there's a pretty big role that technology plays in the channel. And, also I think you're pretty awesome. Kyle: Well, thank you. Yeah, I think it's gonna be a fun topic, too, because technology in every sector of business is kind of at the forefront. It's hard to turn on news and not see stories about technology, technology companies, what they're doing, what's trending. And what I do love about your podcast is you're a great resource and support for sales and marketing people because it's not the headlines that you see every day. Technology winds up being the focus. So it'd be kind of fun to swing this back around a little bit and see if we can really focus on the cross section of those two. Jen: Absolutely. So let's just dive right in. I want to start with a Channel Partner word that I honestly kind of have a love/hate relationship with. It's the word "portal" or "partner portal," and I can explain a little bit later on why I have this love/hate relationship with it. But Kyle, can you put on your professor hat for us here and kinda walk us through the birth and the growth of the partner portal? Because every person who I have on the podcast, almost all of them...they either have or want to have or talk begrudgingly about their partner portal. Kyle: I'm sure. Yeah, I'm kind of like the wiki on that, and I think that sometimes the word's so loaded and we can take pieces of it and maybe think about it positively or negatively. But I think if you just back up the story and where the portal came from, it's really no different than every other portal that exists on the internet. You know, pre-internet, how did you communicate with partners, with business partners? You printed and mailed things to them, newsletters, for example. And you had to print and mail other collateral and information that you needed them to have - data sheets, board papers, case studies - whatever you needed your partners to have, and that was print and mail. Pretty soon that turned into digital files that are online, so instead of sending a newsletter you can email a newsletter. Instead of sending files, you can email files or links to files. And pretty soon you start aggregating that into one location online into, well, a portal. And now you can actually switch and have that be more of an on-demand scenario where partners can come and get it when they need it. And it pretty much just follows the history of the internet in general, having information that you wanted to share and how do you just get it all congregated, aggregated to one location so that it's there on-demand, and that's kind of where the portal came from and actually where it just ends to where it exists today. And I think to hone in on the love/hate piece of this, what we don't like about where portals exist today is that still implies that it was the portal that came in 1997 when the internet started to really take off. It feels like it got left in time, vs. software, which is ever evolving, changing, and growing. And I think that's kind of where Allbound sits is right there, and where a lot of companies, you know, what they're looking to in the channels to try to figure out how to actually use technology and how to actually use software and they still call it a portal. And so we look at that and we want to address that and say, "Wait, are you thinking the portal? Or are you actually just thinking software?" But that's where it came from and it's, to some degree, better or worse, where it still largely sits today. Jen: So, when I think about why I have this weird feeling about partner portals is, I love the idea that organizations are investing in making a resource, allocating a resource for their partners, and providing their partners with the location to go to to be able to access information, I love that. What I hate is that I feel like portals are this place where marketing collateral kind of goes to die. And the other thing is I don't think I've ever talked to anybody who says, "Oh my gosh. We have the best partner portal ever. It's amazing. I love it." It's like, not to follow this house or room theme too much, but it's like this room. And there's all this furniture in this room and artwork, and none of it really goes together, but it's all there. Is it better to just to have the room? Would it be better not to have it at all? And so, that's where my conflict, I think, comes into play. Kyle: Well, maybe there's a bunch of gothy millennials who have moved into the channel now and they really like this idea, and they like the idea that there's this really dark portal that's like a cemetery of marketing content and so they just want to hang out there and smoke some cloves. Maybe we're onto something. Maybe we should keep going with the portal because it'll become trendy and cool again. But you're right, it is that feeling that it is a wasteland. And to some degree, it's kind of true. It's like you put content up there, you make it accessible to somebody. And that's great. The first time they go get it, they pull it up, they're like, "Awesome, great. This served this need that I have right now." But it does become very transactional. And it kind of lives and dies by the need of the transaction. And it doesn't really take on any other life form of its own. It just sits there, it just waits. And that serves its purpose, but that is, in scale and in scope, a very limited purpose and that's painful for the business-minded marketers, such as yourself, that actually want to invest your precious resources in something that's got a bigger, longer, more valuable life span than just transactions. Jen: And there's this other piece about it that kind of leads me into the next question I want to ask you about, and it has to do with technology. And I want to ask you about integration. But before I do that... So, the other way that portals are used, besides just to hold content, right, it's almost like a place to go to then access other systems. So maybe I go into the portal and then I can access a lead or deal registration system, or then I can access a marketing campaign type of system. And I start thinking about from the user experience perspective, like how do you make sure that you're able to maintain a consistent user experience? Or are you leading someone through this portal and they're, like, literally going through this magical kind of realm and then they end up in this other system? And how can they cleanly get back to where they started? And I think that's one of the other challenges that I've seen come into play besides just the content piece. Kyle: Yeah, it's like they need a treasure chest map, a crayon to help work their way through it. But when we invest in technology, especially in the channel largely for two reasons. I think the other challenge is that the channel leaders are looking to bring systems together and perhaps portal is kind of this place where they start to think, "Well, I've got a portal. Can I also add this there? Can I also add that there?" But if you simplify it, back up to, like, two commonalities there, one is, they are looking to simplify process. And they're also looking to speed up and simplify their own lives and that of the lives of their partners. And so, once they move beyond, "I've got content," and things to share with them, they do start to say, "Well, I also have this process. I've got this." So it starts to balloon out from there and it's tricky. I mean, as a person who likes to build systems and tie systems together, I know that it's very easy to engage in that scope creep and engage in that idea creep to go, "Well, just one more thing, just one more thing, just one more thing," but that is how most people's portals and systems were built, was just one more thing over a couple of years, over a couple of different regimes, over a couple of different technologies. And pretty soon you do have, as you've alluded to, that house of horrors and rooms and things tied together and no one even remembers why they got added on and why that was put there. It just becomes very weird when the guest shows up and is not quite sure how to navigate it. So it can definitely become legacy very quickly. And those challenges exist, but that was born out of great intentions, and that was born out of great promise and it was born out of great opportunity, but it does need to be revisited. It can have a very limited lifespan if you're not careful. Jen: So, when you're working with a customer and you'll come into the conversation because there are systems that need to communicate with each other, at their core, what are some of those challenges? You mentioned aligning different processes. Let's lay it out there. Like, what are those processes that the majority of channel teams are looking to overcome by integrating their systems? Kyle: That's a good question. So, what I think is consultants...what you always like to do is focus on the business objectives. You really try to back the story up and say, "All right. So how is your business? What's the state of your business? What's the size of your business? What are your objectives to help grow that business? What are your metrics where you gauge?" You are trying to back that up to the investment they're looking to make and the resources that they need to accomplish their job and then what would they use to measure success, what constitutes success. Well, the ROI of business technology using channel is pretty much about simplification of process and maximizing of their limited resources. So that's definitely a commonality. And the problems that kind of prevent you really trying to help focus on simplifying that is that they have lots of systems, they're disconnected, there's too many features. In the channel it's really easy to say, "I also need this, I also need this, I also need this." So if your feature list gets really long, that's a challenge that channel chiefs face. Then, because there's the waft of technology kind of takes together those repetitive feature sets or competitive feature sets, then you get different technical stakeholders of each of those systems, and you've got all of this that you're trying to maximize and make the most out of with budget constraints. And that's quite a challenge. And it's a lot of a challenge for somebody to face who, inside of their own channel, has kind of their own core values in what they do and what they bring to the channel. And it's probably not navigating all of those problems to achieve this technical outcome when really they're like, "I'm here to lead people and lead teams towards business objectives, not figure how to get this system to talk to that system and get past the people who own those things." So that's quite a challenge. And that's actually a fun one. What I really enjoy and what my team really enjoys as technical consultants is working with smart marketers and smart business people to analyze what they've got, and just sit down and draw it out, and draw up the process, and draw up the flow, and keep focusing on kind of their core business objectives and their metrics for success, and really focusing in on the ROI that they need off of their investment. And that ROI more often than not, is simplified down in terms of that it takes less resources to accomplish the processes that they need to show that what they're spending then works. Jen: I know when you're integrating systems, you're typically integrating with an organization's CRM. What is the typical use case that you're looking at? What type of data are organizations needing to move from one place to the other? So, what's kind of standard? And then maybe can you share something really cool that either you've seen someone do or that you're anxious to see someone do? That would be kind of neat to hear. Kyle: Sure. I think that really what the channel's trying to accomplish is the same thing that direct sales is trying to accomplish. And sometimes we lose track of that. We lose focus of that because of the disconnect, because instead of my sales people being right across the aisle, and instead of us all being in the same break room, we're in different locations. Well, big organizations have lots of sales teams working across cities, across countries even. So it's actually not all that widely different, except that technology hasn't really kept up with that style of relationship. So CRMs haven't kept up with that. The cost of growing through your channel, doesn't align with the way that you can scale a CRM with your business. They figured out the CRM price point based off businesses scaling, and the market teams to be okay with that. That doesn't carry over to the channel. And so I think what winds up happening is the channel is kind of stuck there needing, essentially, a lot of the same CRMish functionality, specifically since they're sharing leads and registering deals back and forth and co-selling with partners. Whether that happens on one side or the other, leads being referred in for the supplier to be working through to a successful sale, and then just kind of reporting back to the partner where it is, or asking them out, letting the partner work and report it back in. Either way, they just need this collaborative effort going and sharing of information along the way of "Where is this? How is it going? How can I help?" CRMs haven't really helped with that when you're having people outside of your organization performing those activities with you. So largely, what channel teams that we work with need is, they need the ability to collaborate with their partners on prospects from gathering them, to educating them, getting them up to speed, moving them along through the process, converting them to customers and then supporting them after they become customers, and keeping that relationship alive with all three of those parties involved. And that's what they're trying to solve for with a handful of different systems, and not necessarily the resources in house, not necessarily the descriptions that they needed the technology to help with that, and possibly not with the technical resources they need. So that's what we see. And when we get to come in and help with that, it is to help them understand what it is that they've got now with tools they could be using now and how they could augment that tool set and fill in some of those gaps and really leverage a handful of different technologies to accomplish what they've got, some of those technologies they already have, and maybe some of them they have and don't even need. It's a fun discovery process. But you process-flow that out with them and it really helps them wrap their head around this data that's moving between systems and between organizations that is largely invisible otherwise. Jen: And I threw two questions at once, which is annoying, so kind of the second part of that was just if you have any kind of anecdote, like anything really nifty, like a really cool example of something that you're seeing folks do with integration or what you'd like to see someone do? Kyle: Oh yeah. So I guess there's kind of a positive and negative I'd throw at that, which is that technology, where it sits today and where integration sits today, gives all of us this idea that it can all be done. I think we were visiting a client here recently and they were talking about their technology being "not Hollywood-ready." So they have opted to focus on selling into businesses because businesses understand what the reality is of technology right now, vs. the rest of us who go watch a film and just think that Iron Man could build his suit very quickly over the weekend to be ready for the aliens coming in. So we have this expectation that everything is horribly complex and really terrible and really important and all of these, like, superlatives, all of these really strong words, but then can also be really accomplished very simply and just, "I'll get this system and talk to that system and do that," so there's a lot of magic inside of there that should just happen. So I think the work implies that the best thing is when they have this realistic understanding that anything is possible, but also understanding what you really need to be doing and focusing on that. The things that I really love is when we see simplicity, something as simple as tying together your marketing automation system - and I won't use the word portal - and tying in your channel software that you may not even need to necessarily have APIs talking to APIs and moving a ton of data back and forth, because there just may be simple stuff that you can do with existing tracking technology that your marketing automation system already does. Like, if you can track all of your leads and see that they're visiting a page of your website, why can't you track your partners and your partner's leads using the same existing technology? This is already there. It's been proven out. It works really well when you have really smart, skilled marketers using that technology. That can permeate through your partner software and through your partner relationships and actually give you all of those great data points that you use in direct sales, you can use it in your partnerships and your indirect sales as well. And so I get super geeked by working with teams to tie some of this stuff together and find these really elegant, simple solutions that accomplish what you need with what you already have. It doesn't mean you have to reinvent the wheel. It doesn't mean you have to invest in new R and D. It doesn't mean to buy more software. Sometimes there's just really, really simple answers, and you feel really good about it when you stumble upon those working with your customers. Jen: It's such a good message about simplicity, and technology's so funny because most of us have these pretty powerful tools at our disposal, and yet, because they are powerful and they're complex in their nature, we can very easily overcomplicate them. And, I'm just kind of laughing in my head because one of my team members was working on a project, and it was taking her like a lot longer than I anticipated it was going to take her. But then when I checked in with her on it, I looked at what she had been doing and she had overcomplicated it for herself like times five, there was a much simpler path from A to B than she had taken, because the technology was so great, because the technology was awesome. But she missed it, and I saw how very, very easy it is for even sophisticated sales and marketing and channel professionals to follow down that path and start overcomplicating a system that's already kind of there and alive and working for them. Kyle: Yeah, we talked a lot about giving people too much rope. I think that's probably an analogy you use when raising kids. You're like, "Give them too much freedom and what's gonna happen?" So it's kind of the same thing, that just because you can add more features and just because you can do more stuff doesn't necessarily mean that you should. I think the flip side is a really interesting scenario is watching what Apple's doing. And I'm not a fanboy, so when I say this, this is with a ton of objective respect. I love that they're hitting delete on things. I love that they're removing items, that they're removing stuff. That simplicity is hard. I mean, can you imagine that have to happen within that organization to convince everybody that it's a good idea to keep deleting ports on the machine and keep throwing stuff away? And yet, they keep selling, they're selling strong, new things keep going, innovation keeps happening and people keep going with it, and come to find out, you didn't necessarily need it after all. You could get away with less. That's hard. I mean, they're in a fortunate place to be a market leader and be able to drive that, and that's hard for a lot of people kind of in their daily lives to be able to sell that, I think because aren't we kinda bred to be with the idea that more is better? Jen: Right. Kyle: Everything about us is about "consumption of more," you know? And I'm not trying to get down that little societal rabbit hole, but we think that way. We think, "Oh, well, like, let me go look at a chart and line up this software and look at features. Well, they have more check boxes on the left, so it must be better." But really? I mean, can you make use of all of that? I think that's one of the challenges that the channel faces is the idea that they've been told for so long that they need more. You can't even make use of more. You can't make use of most of those things that are fullest. It's the same reason why Apple can delete all these extra ports, because most people weren't using them or didn't need them anyways. And it kinda goes the same with feature sets on software, feature sets on need. I've got this little joke around here that my ideal keyboard would have half of your keyboard with a big delete button and then there's just a couple of letters on the other side. I don't even need uppercase letters. I don't even want the shift key. It's known around here. It's like, if someone says, "I deleted something." I just like cheer and hand them some stock. "Here you go." Jen: Oh, I think we'll have a Kyle keyboard in your future. I can see it. Kyle: Yeah, and I'm not some minimalist. Don't get me wrong. I'm not some minimalist, right? You know me, Jen. I've got too many cars and projects and objectives and things I'm trying to do in life. I keep on top of working. I have no business doing all of that. So I'm definitely guilty as the rest of them of acquisition of things and the features and ideas. I throw out ideas, I use our prospect pages in Allbound and I'm like, "Dang it, I really need this other feature," and I go into our Slack group to talk about it and the thing jumps on me right away, it's a bit quiet. So, I'm as guilty as the rest of them. It's most definitely a decided practice that you engage in over time to question what do you really need to really focus and really accomplish what you want? And the focus to grow applies from top-down, and it applies to every aspect of business, and less is a really, really beautiful thing. And so it totally geeks me when I get to work with clients and we get to focus in on some of that, of removing extra needs and removing things that may have seemed like a good idea but actually, in the end, wind up just being something else to own, extra baggage, extra weight, extra responsibility that doesn't really generate value. Jen: I was about to say, "I have one more question for you," and I'm looking at my question that I wrote down for myself and there's multiple question marks in that question, so I guess it's more than one question. But one more area I want to cover, it's specifically about SaaS companies, because there are a lot of SaaS comp
STEVE: Welcome, everyone. Today I have a very special guest. I'm very excited. I actually have only met her only two weeks ago. It was pretty cool actually. I felt an immediate connection. Anyway, this is Jennifer Goodwin. How you doing? JEN: Good. How are you? STEVE: Fantastic. I'm doing really, really well. I was scrolling through Facebook, it was about two weeks ago, and ... I don't know if I've told you this yet, but I was scrolling through Facebook, and I saw an ad that you had out. It was ad for vets. I can't remember exactly what the ad was saying, but it said something like, "Hey, here is a way for vets to launch their businesses online." I immediately was like, "Whoa, this is so cool. Someone's going for this market?" I didn't know anyone who's been going for that. It's such a needed thing, being in the military myself. How did you even get into that? JEN: Absolutely. I grew up very patriotic. I didn't realize until this year that the veterans were my ideal client. How it happened was, I was always trying to help veterans that were, military guys and gals that needed help with the internet marketing and getting themselves to the next level. Most recently, I was volunteering at a local homeless veteran shelter where some guys and gals were in transition. I said ... Well, a little back story. Three years ago I was on a motorcycle, my first ride, and I was life-flighted off the highway. STEVE: Oh, my gosh. Three years ago? JEN: Three years ago. Twenty-five, 30 minutes into my first ride with a friend on Highway 95. We were set at 70 miles per hour. Road debris came out of everywhere. An 18-wheeler had blown his tire, and we couldn't avoid one of the pieces. It flattened the back tire. Needless to say, I took a nice, pricey helicopter ride to the trauma center, so I actually lost my business. I was down for a lot of time. Financially, physically, emotionally, I had to go through that trauma. I had a lot of time to think through in recovery, and I made a few decisions about my business when I got back to it, which I really just got back to it full-time this past January. I decided that I was going to partner with the right people and never sit on my ideas and make sure that I was launching all the things that I had written down in a book and that were collecting dust. One of the other pieces was that I was going to give back. Even though I was sort of starting over, I knew what I was doing. I had 15 years in the business. I was relaunching, but I still wanted volunteering and giving back to be part of that. I was literally driving to a veteran center in Jacksonville, Florida and just camping out in the chow hall every Thursday and saying, "Whatever you have, just bring it to me. Just bring me your website needs. Bring me your resume needs. You got a new computer and you need to know how to run it? Just bring it to me." Even some of the staff there who weren't veterans would say, "Hey, I'm going for this other job interview," and so I just made myself available every Thursday. It didn't feel like work. Then fast forward a couple months. A friend of mine that's pretty well-known in the veteran space, he's on the History Channel and got quite a following on social media, said, "I've got four veterans that need, like, yesterday." Just working through those clients, it just didn't feel like work. It just felt so easy, because they're so loyal. They're so grateful. Usually what they're inventing, we're writing about, is something I believe in, so I re-branded my business to be all about serving veterans. STEVE: That's incredible. I love that. I've noticed that a lot of the people that I interview, they never ask permission to go do something like that. You just showed up. You just sit down and every Thursday ... How long did you do that before you went to that re-brand? JEN: I only did that for a couple months, because I actually ended up moving out of the area and haven't found a new local shelter to go help with. Let me see. I believe I started ... January, February, March. Probably about two and a half months into that I re-branded. I was also talking with some coaches. Actually, one of the coaches I was speaking with, a female coach, she was a veteran ... or she is a veteran. She said, "Jen, I got my start helping my fellow Army soldiers, starting their businesses when they got out." I said, "This is my ideal client, the more I think about it." I said, "Is it that easy?" She said, "Yeah." Literally, within 24 hours ... I couldn't even wait to re-brand everything. I went to the team and to the social media images, and I started changing it all up. The first batch was a little bit rough and amateur. I just wanted to get camouflage in there. STEVE: Yeah. Yeah. JEN: That's probably one of the ones you saw or maybe one of the newer ones. Yeah, it was pretty quick. STEVE: Yeah. That's incredible. It's interesting that that's the way it worked out. I remember when I went through basic ... I'm obviously business-minded. I really enjoy it. It's my obsession a little bit. I was going through basic training, and it's hard at certain points. One of the things that kept me going mentally and emotionally was talking about business ideas with all these other guys. I ended up having it, and all these guys that would sit around, and we would just talk about some different strategies. To this day, I still talk to some of them, and they're trying to do business stuff. It's definitely clearly an awesome market. A lot of them are go-getters. Anyways, that's super cool. That's fantastic. JEN: Yep. STEVE: One of the things I've noticed too, though, is that immediately ... You were doing the same thing with me. I was blown away with that, "Hey, do you need help with this? Do you have VAs for this? I have teams for this." You are an absolute master with VAs. How did you get that way? JEN: Thank you for saying that. I love helping people. They ask me, what's my agenda sometimes, very few, but I say, "I just like getting a break from the paying clients, who are so demanding." It's like a break to just pull away and just go help people for free with no expectations, so thank you for that. I have been an entrepreneur my whole life. My father was an entrepreneur, made some money in the door and window business. Very early on ... Well, not too early. I guess my late 20's, because I went and got an architectural degree, a drafting degree, from 26 to 28, but as soon as I came out of that, I worked for someone else for six months, and that was it. I had worked for people previously, from 16 to 28, but I knew at that moment I did not want to work for somebody else, and I couldn't work for somebody else. It just felt like my soul was in jail. STEVE: Yeah. I like that. JEN: I left the corporate world, and I was working for an engineering company, and I co-advertised. I didn't even think you could do this, but I rented an exhibitor space at the kitchen and bath show in Orlando, Florida, way back when, and shared it with one of my competitors. I was turning away 95% of my lead. I was so lucky, because what I was providing was CAD drawings and artist renderings to interior designers and kitchen designers. They didn't have anybody that was serving them. Usually people that were drafts people were going to work for architects and engineers, and so the designer industry was left hanging. I filled that void. I was turning away so much business, I knew back then that I had to learn how to scale my business and learn how to use the software that was out there that was going to help me scale my business by leveraging the tools and the people. Very early on I started to outsource to other drafters and just caught the bug of outsourcing and marking up the work and being the middle man really. I was outsourcing right away. I ran with the CAD services for about four or five years. After teaching myself everything on the internet, everything that I could at that time ... The internet was much smaller then. STEVE: Yeah. JEN: It was easier to master. I re-branded into Internet Girl Friday, and I've been doing that ever since. Again, I did lose my business for about two and a half years, but I've been back at it now, and I have virtual assistants and developers. It's great, because in my mind that's the only way to scale your business, is to have a team to support you. That's what we're doing. STEVE: Yeah, and you clearly have that. It's so fascinating, though. I wish I could pull up the text real quick that you sent me. It was a long list of stuff that you were asking me if I needed help with. I was like, "Man, she's got the hook-ups." JEN: Yeah, I would say, if it touches the web, we can do it and mean it. People come to me and say, "Well ..." I have friends that, you know how the friends and family never know what you're doing with the internet, and they don't get it. STEVE: Yeah. JEN: I have a friend that called me. I said, "Listen, I've got 20 minutes to talk. What's up?" He said, "Sounds like you're too busy and you can't take on my work." I said, "No, I have a team for that. I can do it. We can do it." I'm hiring people all the time. There's no shortage of people out there that want to work, whether they're US-based or they're offshore. There's hundreds of thousands of workers out there that ... You can go to Fiverr. You can go to so many different sites and get people to help you in your business, and I take advantage of that. STEVE: That's amazing. When I was in college, that's really when I started getting the bug for this. Well, that's when I started getting traction, I should say. I always had the bug. I went and I started hiring these different VAs. My buddy and I, we were building this Smartphone insurance business, and we went and we hired out this guy. He was just like, he wasn't very good. We paid him $500 to build this really small thing. It wasn't big at all, and we got it back and it was awful, like, "What the heck?" That's why I started using click funnels, so I could do it on my own. Then another time came up and another time came up. I was like, "Man, I'm really striking out with these VAs." I'm curious how it is that you actually go find good ones, because that's a skill in and of itself that I don't think people realize you need to have. Not all VAs obviously are built the same. What process are you taking up? What are you having them do? How are you vetting the VAs for your vets? JEN: There's a couple different ways. I hate to say this, but I don't like the big outsourcing sites. I think it's really hard to find that needle in the haystack, and you have to spend a lot of time sorting through people that are really just looking at the dollars per hour; right? They're like, "No, I can't make anything less than $8 an hour." They overbid. I just don't like those sites. I never had great luck with them ever. STEVE: That's totally the opposite than what everyone else says, so that's interesting. JEN: I've done it for 15 years. If I had an army of 100 virtual assistants, do you know how much money I'd be making? If it was that easy, I would have just hired a team of people from there, but I've spoken to people for 15 years from those big sites. What I find works for me is I enter a couple of virtual assistant groups on Facebook. Whenever I have a need for somebody, I post the job on my blog post, and I'll send a link out to the virtual assistant groups and say, "Hey, by the way, this week I'm looking to talk to people that have skills in ..." whatever skill I'm looking for that week. That's worked out well, because I only get a handful. I might get 10, 15, 20 applicants. It's totally manageable. I have a forum on the blog post. I'm not going to field emails or phone calls or be scattered. I want them to just dump their info into a form, and then I can go back and look at, and I can say, "All right. I'd love to talk to these three out of 10 on Skype," or somehow. They say, "Hire two and fire one." Try a couple people out just on a small ... I work through baby steps when it comes to hiring a virtual assistant. Let's take one tiny task, not, "Oh, I found you. Here's all my money. Here's all my tasks. Talk to you in a week." That will just go wrong every time. You want to start with, "Can you contact me on Skype," because that's a requirement. That's my office. If they tell me they don't have Skype, they're out. It's that simple. You have to work my way in my company with my tools. I'm flexible, but you have to show up in my time zone. You have to speak my language. We start at the very beginning and make sure that those pieces are there before moving on to, "Okay, here's how you get into my project management system, and here's where you find your first task." I work closely alongside them and say, "Stay with me right here on Skype. Tell me, 'Jennifer, I'm starting Task A right now, and I plan to be done in 15 minutes, and I'll ping you back when I'm done, so you can review it.'" It's really micromanaged in the first week. As you get more comfortable and as they're trained a little bit more, then they can work on their own time. I literally do that every morning for about two hours, Monday through Friday, from, roughly, 9 to 11 every day, which is a lot of time when you think about it. I'm also mentoring virtual assistants, so I'm not paying the ones that I mentor that I identify in the group as being really smart and might have come from 15, 20 years of past corporate experience, so they have skills. They just don't realize how to translate them to the internet. Again, I love helping people, so I say, "Come on in as an apprentice. You can follow along. You can invite your friends to sit in your house and watch. It doesn't matter." I've hired people from that group as well. STEVE: Wow. That's fascinating. If the person is good, they might have friends that are good. Might as well bring the friends along and train them too. JEN: Yeah. I tell them, "Listen, I'm looking to build teams, so if you already know someone ..." I had this conversation just last night with one of Filipino VAs. She's amazing. I said, "I'm about to hire a few more, so if you know anybody ..." She's like, "Well, actually, I do have three assistants, and they work in my house with me. It's my goal to help these single moms that need some more income to get going." I said, "Great. Let's ramp them up." Yeah. STEVE: Awesome. That's fantastic. That's amazing. Eventually, what started happening was I was like, man, I literally have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on VAs for stuff that was not very good work. I was not happy with it. I started going through, not the same process at all. That's genius. I'm going to have to ... That's absolutely incredible. I'm going to have to think more about that and try and figure out how I can do that too, or I'll just ask you, hire you to do it. Do you have a particular freelance or VA site, I guess, that you like more than others, Fiver, Freelancer, Upwork? JEN: I love Fiverr. Actually, this morning before this podcast, I was looking on Fiverr for a virtual assistant but only because in the virtual assistant groups that I'm in on Facebook, I saw someone saying, "I'm not getting any traction as a VA on Fiverr. What am I doing wrong?" I clicked on the link which took me to their Fiverr account, and I said, "I'm willing to try you out. Contact me on Skype." Again, that's my first requirement. I use Fiverr for other services. If my dev team is too busy with some bigger projects, and I need to knock out some quick keyword research or a quick image, I can go to Fiverr and I can find it. It's just like any other service where you can see the ratings, but for some reason they have, they've made their user interface so easy to navigate and quickly see, "Oh, wow, they've had 200 projects. They're five stars on all the reviews for all those projects. I'm pretty sure they're returning good work, and it's dollars." Who can't lose $5; right? We spend that on a coffee sometimes. It's different from going to the big sites like Upwork and saying, you have to put your whole job description. You have to say, this is 30 hours a month or 30 hours a week, whether it's permanent. They make you jump through so many hoops before you even find someone. Then you might get a thousand applicants, and you have to sort through all that. It's too much work, where you can go to Fiverr and just browse really quickly and click on someone. You don't even have to click on someone and contact them, but you can just put your mouse over their little portfolio image, and it shows you how many jobs, how many stars. Very quickly you can jump into having an assistant or a vendor. I know there's a lot of controversy with using offshore vendors versus keeping it in the USA, and I do keep most of my work, 99% of my work, in the USA. Even my Indian development team is in the USA, strangely. When you're restarting, which is the mode I'm in now after the accident, you need that payroll break; right? You want to have assistants so you can scale your business, but you can't go out and afford the $25-an-hour United States VA, so it does help to go offshore. I do like the Filipino virtual assistants. They are super-smart, super-talented. Their English is perfect. They are very friendly and very accommodating. There's no language barrier like I've experienced with other countries. They're extremely affordable. Here's a little trick that I've done. I've gone to Wikipedia and typed up, "Countries with the lowest hourly rate," and it's mind-blowing and scary that there's some countries or areas of their countries where 50-cents-per-hour is the minimum wage. STEVE: Oh, man. JEN: That's not saying you can just go there and find a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants have to be a booming industry in a certain country for it to be valuable to you, but the Philippines are great. STEVE: That's incredible. There's a workaround that I have found that helps. I did a whole podcast on this actually earlier, because it's a frustrating thing to go through. The biggest things I've learned from Russell, you got to have people. The biggest things I've learned from my own things, you've got to have people. Otherwise, you as the entrepreneur get bogged down. You can't handle all of the tasks. This is definitely valuable information to hear. There was a workaround that I, to using VAs that I was figuring out too. Do you use Freelancer.com much? JEN: I have, but, again, I didn't use it much. STEVE: Yeah. It's a little bit challenging. There was one feature that saved my butt on a lot of different things, and it was the fact that you can post contests. That's actually pretty cool. I needed all these different images made, or I needed a tee-shirt design. I basically said, "Hey, I really want to motivate people, so here's the prize is $100 and everyone submit your work. I'm just going to choose one guy." It was fantastic. I got 80 or 90 submissions, and the whole week during the contest, I could talk back to them and say, "This looks good but change this." "This looks good but change this." I could rate all of their work, which was public to everyone else. All the work, the freelancers started pushing towards a different path as they watched my comments to other people. That's really the only trick I have for VAs. I haven't done anything else that you do with it. It kind of works, but what you do is a lot cooler, actually. JEN: I don't know. The contests sound pretty cool. I remember seeing them on Topcoder years ago when I was looking to build a software, and someone said, "If you don't have unlimited budget to build the software, present it as a contest." I thought that was fascinating, where they have a contest for one part of the software and a contest for another part. Then they have a contest at the end to put all the parts together. I thought that was fascinating. STEVE: That's incredible. Hey, there's a lot of people obviously who are trying to get into this space who want to do what you're doing. I know you alluded to it before, but what would be the first step to getting a good VA? JEN: I would definitely check out the virtual assistant groups in Facebook. It's a close-knit community. People can vouch for other people. There's some names at the top that know a lot of the VAs in the industry, so they actually have requests for proposal boards that you could sign up to and submit your work. Then you know you're getting a qualified VA, or you can find me and I'll point you in the right direction. I would check sites like FreeeUp. That's with three E's, F-R-E-E-E-U-P.com. STEVE: I've never heard of it. Awesome. JEN: It's new. It's getting a face-lift. The site is only about eight months old, I think. They've got some big plans. Nathan Hirsch, who's out of Orlando, Florida, he's doing very well with it. You can get VAs as low as $5 and up to $50 per hour, depending on what skillset you require. Check out the Filipino ... I can't remember the domain names off the top of my head, but there are a lot of Filipino virtual assistant sites out there that you can just Google it up, and it will pull up some of the top ones. They really are a great crowd for your everyday administrative stuff. I'm literally teaching my VAs now how to set up some of the beginning integrations of click funnel. STEVE: That's awesome. JEN: I have a checklist, and they can go through and connect the SMTP and the domain and do some of the basic setup. Then I can take it from there and build a funnel. STEVE: Fantastic. Just because you mentioned it, how are you using it with click funnels? I went through and looked at your site, and it looks fantastic. It's very clean. HowToGoVirtual; right? Dot-net? JEN: That's the academy site that we're launching. The services site, where all of our clients go through is InternetGirlFriday.com, and we're just like any other entrepreneur. We have multiple different sites. What happened was, I needed to get all of this information into other people's hands. I've got 15-plus years on the internet. Of course, you want to package that up and provide it online as a video course or some type of academy environment. I created a class to teach people the four steps of getting your business website launched, because you know how customers get confused about the internet. The internet is so big now, and there's so many steps, and the algorithms. They get approached by so many vendors. "What should I be paying for," and I said, "I've got to find a way to simplify this." Back in 2010, I think it was, I came up with a 12-step plan. Just a way to categorize everything you do on the internet came to 12 categories. That's it. I just wanted to show people, "Okay, Step 1 is your research and your keyword research and your competitive analysis. Step 12, at the end, is analytics." Everything falls somewhere in between, so that they had something that they could follow along. Not that every strategy goes in order, but the first four I call, "The foundation." You've got to do your keyword research if you're going to launch a website, and your competitive analysis, and you have to know what people are looking for, what your target market is looking for. Step 1. Step 2, building your website in a blueprint first. I think that's so important, because you need to get the SEO and the keywords that were revealed in the first step into your website. If you just hand your website over to someone, they might make it beautiful for the humans, but they're neglecting what robots need to see through Google. STEVE: Right. JEN: That's Step 2, build the blueprint. Step 3, build the website. Step 4, connect it to the search engines and some directories. Now you've got your foundation to go offsite and do all your marketing with whatever strategy you're deploying. I package that up into a course. I'm glad that I had the time off that I did, because when I came back to it, there was click funnel, and it was like, "Ah." Finally there; right? The funnel isn't new. The strategy isn't new. It's a little different, because, again, the internet is bigger and more complicated, but a sales funnel is still a sales funnel; right? We didn't reinvent the funnel. We just put the software together in one place, like Russell. All the steps that you used to have to do, you used to have to literally build a landing page, usually in HTML, because you needed it to be a certain way. If you needed a green check-mark versus a red check-mark, it was all piecework. Then you'd have to go to the next step, and you'd have to connect your email responder. Everything was daisy-chained together. It was so overwhelming, that most people didn't launch, because there was so much work. Even me, who has a team, knew how to do it for so many years, I could never launch, because it was overwhelming. STEVE: Yeah. JEN: ClickFunnels comes on the scene and it's all in one place. I don't use the term, "All-in-one" lightly. I don't give credit to many softwares. It's not an all-in-one where you're billing and all your other things are in there, but for the funnel it's all in one. Everything is literally in one place, and it's been so exciting to set up and to get going and to see that now I can literally wake up at 3 am, have an idea, and within two hours, have it going and some ads going, and it's launched. That's the exciting part. My clients are excited about it to. STEVE: That's so cool. That's so awesome. I remember when I first started putting things together for ... It was an artist actually that built the first site/funnel four or five years ago. I remember spending two hours ... No, it was two days, two full days, trying to make WordPress act like a squeeze page. JEN: I know. STEVE: It was the most hellish thing. It was awful. I remember just settling with something. I can't remember what it was. Neither of us liked it. I'm not a coder or programmer. I can read it. I can edit it, but I'm not at all a programmer, at all. I was like, "This is terrible." I almost gave up on the internet a little bit, because it was so hard. Then when click funnels came around, I remember I saw the presentation that Russell gave mine. I probably shouldn't have done this, but I didn't talk to my wife about it. I immediately bought it, and I started using it and building for other people. I was like, "This is the craziest thing." Now I dream in funnel editor. It's the funniest thing. JEN: Same thing, yeah, because back when you were creating your old landing page, which, again, is just one tiny piece of the whole funnel, I often went back and forth to, "Gees, I've got to hire a developer just to create a landing page page template in my WordPress?" Then that never got done. Then you go over to the third-party platforms that are providing fully landing pages. You're like, "I don't want to spend another $50 a month just to do this one piece, because by the time I'm done with the whole funnel, I'm spending a thousand dollars a month just to get it all connected. Yeah, it's been such a blessing, and I'm so excited. STEVE: I think my record so far with sitting here next to Mr. Russell Brunson, I think the fastest we put a funnel out is 45 minutes or something like that, a full one. It's like there's no way. He and I will still sit back and be like, "I can't believe we have this software," and he's the CEO of it. We'll be like, "Man, look what we just did. Look what we pulled off." He's like, "This little change used to cost me 10 grand. We're going to do it in 30 minutes." JEN: I remember testing my first webinar funnel, and I didn't have it completely set up, but at some point I got my reminder email, and I said, "Oh, look, how cool is that? I'm already getting the emails automatically." I didn't even set up the email, and I clicked on the link inside that said, "Your webinar is starting now." I clicked it 20 minutes late. When I did click it, it went right into the webinar that was playing, at the 20-minute mark. I said, "This is magic." STEVE: Yeah. So cool. I know I said we'd keep it to 30 minutes. You are amazing. I can't believe all the stuff you're pulling off is incredible, manager and builder of teams. I'm looking at all these sites right now. It's absolutely incredible and just crazy impressive. Where should people go if they want to follow you, learn more about you, even obviously use some of your services. JEN: Yeah. If you go to InternetGirlFriday.com, then you can find my social media, which is everywhere. We have Periscope and Instagram and YouTube and all that, and follow me on any of those. We're very active there. InternetGirlFriday.com is the service's site. You can contact me there. You can say, "Hey, I don't need to hire you, but I have a question," and I'll be glad to help. STEVE: Awesome. I appreciate it so much. Thanks. This is spur-of-the-moment, but this has been awesome. JEN: Sure. Thank you. STEVE: All right. Hey, we'll talk to you later. JEN: Okay. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get one of today's best internet sales funnels for free? Go to SalesFunnelBroker.com/FreeFunnels to download your pre-built sales funnel today.
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