Podcasts about jenn so

Isn't it curious the only species on the planet that appears concerned about or pursues the notion of “wholeness” is the human? Other highly intelligent and social animals — such as dolphins and elephants — show no evidence of feeling an inner fragmentation, separation from purpose, or impulse to connect with a source of higher intelligence. The comparison might be a bit humorous, but it's a uniquely human feeling to have somehow become separated from the regenerative and creative forces that should naturally flow through and connect us with each other, the planet, and cosmos. Defining wholeness is a challenge: integrating mind and body? The physical and spiritual? The personal and the universal? Or is it found in being joined to something greater? Why is a feeling of separation so common? Perhaps it's the accumulated pain and trauma, personal and collective; technology in many forms replacing human faculties and intimacy; an education system that churns out interchangeable parts for vast economic engines, instead of naturally aware and aligned human beings. In this conversation, we explore these inquiries and more. Aviv Shahar is joined by two next-gen leaders pioneering practical tools and assistance for creating less fragmented lives. Jenn Reilly founded Raising Wholeness, a new paradigm for parenting in wholeness, and Forrest Wilson, co-founder of Light in Action, an “incubator for consciousness” supporting projects and passion on the journey of wholeness.Among their insights:Permission was unlocked in the scientific revolution to separate and favor the exterior objective measure over interior forms of knowing. We need to reintegrate and become whole in ourselves. We're being initiated to give birth to the more universal potential of human life, which says all that happened until now was childhood and youth; we're just reaching adulthood in the universe. In these practical endeavors is the communal and network effect of more people and communities connecting and plugging and playing in the spaces of wholeness. Education is creating ecosystems for happy, healthy and fulfilled human beings to thrive, to cultivate their curiosities, to pursue their passions, creating a more beautiful life. By evolving and developing yourself, you become the best role model for your child. There is something new in the universe birthing itself through us, needing to emerge through the struggle of this time, through contradiction, through being triggered with your child.This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.TWEETABLE QUOTES “There's the pieces of just how we're showing up and then there's also I feel the implications of how we were conditioned and raised in our culture, our society, and even in our home unit and the ways that we are born whole, born into this beautiful being, and in the ways that we've been fragmented through trauma, through just seeking attention, seeking acceptance and we cut off parts of ourselves and there are so many different layers to how that's happening in our consciousness.” (Jenn) “So if you look at conventional reality, if anyone is familiar with startup incubators, what we did was, my business partners and I created an incubator for people who are pursuing the path to wholeness, who are on the journey to wholeness and in that journey to wholeness they have a project, a purpose project, a passion project, and a way that supports themselves financially. That is cohesiveness in the being and becoming a more whole journey.” (Forrest) “The moment we realize our sapiens - ness, we step through into homo universalis. But I wonder personally if that doesn't necessarily, since we are interconnected and nothing is separate in the whole, that does not necessarily cause an upshift for all other species on the planet in the universe, and so what I wonder is that when you speak about the oak tree, when you speak about the other animals in the world, we're the only organism that orients this way.” (Aviv) “I guess just one thing that's still alive in me is that there is something around what Forrest was saying that developmental lens and understanding exactly... Because there's the piece of how we are supporting different developmental stages and that awareness, having that knowledge in your pocket as a parent is so relieving. It is so relieving to know that the three-year-old is still building the neural pathways to hold multiple emotions at the same time.” (Jenn) RESOURCES MENTIONED Portals of Perception WebsiteAviv's LinkedIn Aviv's TwitterAviv's WebsiteRaising WholenessLight in Action

Join us for a terrific episode you don't want to miss...but... bear with us as one of our tracks had some minor technical issues so you have to listen a little more closely to what Janet is sharing, We've included the beginning of the transcript here in our show notes and click the TRANSCRIPT tab for the rest.  Jacqueline: So welcome everyone to week five of our Abba's Heart Book Study that we've been doing this summer. It's just been so much fun and such a blessing to  take a deep dive into the book Abba's Heart. And if you have not read it and haven't been able to join us in past episodes, don't turn off this podcast.You will still be so blessed. Today we're going to be talking about chapters 13 and 14- "Empowered to Serve" and "Walking in Forgiveness." Today I'm here with Janet and Jenn Lozano, and I have great expectation for some really beautiful conversations, so thank you Lord. We are at the end of June, and summer is in full swing.How are you guys? Anything exciting going on? Jenn: I have two kids at overnight camp right now. Woohoo. And because two adult "large" children came home from college, it's nice to have a little breathing space in our house again. Jacqueline: That's awesome. That's really great. Jenn: I don't have to double our recipes at dinner. It's, so far it's, it's just really nice. I miss them, but they're having a blast, so it's, it's  nice. The camp is called Summer's Best Two Weeks, and at home we're also referring to it as Summer's Best Two Weeks. Jacqueline: It's so fun to mix it up, like you swapped out the little kids for the big kids and yeah, how great is that?Jenn: So great. So mom, what's happening in your summer?Janet: Well, our summer started out with a wonderful celebration of our 50th Anniversary, and since then we had a few out of town family guests stay with us for a few days.  Currently I have a nephew on my side of the family stay with us for several days, so I feel like my summer has begun with a lot of hosting.Yes. The opposite of you, Jenn. I'm cooking more than I usually do, but it's been wonderful just to have time to connect with family members  and continue to celebrate what God has done in our lives over the past 50 years that Neal and I have been married. Jacqueline: Wow. And for those of you who have not been a guest in Janet's house for dinner or overnight, she is the Hostess with the Mostess. So she's going all out for her guests. We know that for sure. Jenn: Chocolate's on the pillow. Yeah, exactly. Like we're going high end. Jacqueline: It's a real gift that she has. So speaking of gifts, I feel like these two chapters are really just gifts to me and to all of us listening. Chapter 13 is about humility and just how Jesus came to serve us in humility.Then chapter 14 talks about forgiveness.  Humility and forgiveness are central themes, they're pillars of our faith. It's sort of like what Jesus taught us to be humble and walk in forgiveness. But I love how he not only led by example and teaches us, but that God equips us and changes us and transforms us so that humility and forgiveness can become part of our everyday walk. Find the rest of the transcripts on TRANSCRIPT tab!Support our mission and donate today!Check out Unboound and find other resourcesRelease: June 2023Music by Christian HarperArtwork by Rosemary Strohm at Command-S

This is a SPECIAL episode not only because we FINALLY got to interview our bestie, Jenn, but because this truly turned into an AMAZING conversation between 3 business besties! We covered SO many important & impactful topics surrounding entrepreneurship.Jenn is the owner of All There Boutique, a boutique in Matawan, NJ! We both are OBSESSED with her boutique & are proud customers of hers! Jenn was actually one of our panelists on our besties talking biz panel back at a networking event that we hosted at Ocean Brew Coffee in December of 2022! She absolutely LIT UP the room that night, so we just NEW this episode would be AMAZING.In episode 83, Jenn brought us in on her journey of leaving her career path during the pandemic so that she could pursue her entrepreneurial dream. We dove into topics such as starting before you're ready, the difficulty that comes with career changes, the importance of having a strong support system, living life without regrets, how comparison can creep into our lives through social media & SO much more!This was SUCH an amazing conversation. We just KNOW that it's going to inspire you and get you thinking about these REALLY important topics. As entrepreneurs, we experience some intense challenges that only other entrepreneurs can understand. A huge part of why we created this podcast, is to help other entrepreneurs know that they are NOT alone & that they don't have to do this alone. We want to thank Jenn SO much for coming to this podcast interview with the intention to IMPACT our besties & to let them know they're not alone. Her vulnerability, openness, & wisdom is SO appreciated & highly IMPACTFUL! We just know that you are going to love this episode & that you are going to love Jenn!Let's get to know Jenn real quick before getting into the episode!Jenn was a New York City Big 5 accountant who knew she couldn't put a price on her dreams - she ditched the corporate world & created All There Boutique & let her passion for style & women's clothing take center stage. Originally an exclusively-online shopping platform, she'd herself drive to deliver same-day order turnaround times. Those early days planted the seeds of good-natured business, & an individualized approach to the customers & their lifestyle. Once she proved the concept, she successfully opened a brick & mortar store in Matawan, which is stylishly ringing in its 2nd year already. When she's not at the store, Jenn enjoys Pilates, traveling and trying new restaurants. Go give Jenn some love after this over on instagram! @allthereboutiqueCheck out her website! If you don't live in NJ, she does offer shipping! allthereboutique.comIf you're local, go visit All There Boutique at 347 Matawan Road, Matawan, NJ! All There Boutique is open 7 days a week!We would LOVE to be your bestie over on instagram! Come say hi! @besties_and_business @heyimjessjacobs @stepherhardCheck out the business that Jess mentioned during this convo - flour4purpose.com

Episode Description: Ben Alldis is the newest Power Zone instructor. John Mills joins us to discuss SoulCycle's comeback plans Jay-Z invests in fitness. Dr. Jenn - So much Peloton content...so little time. The Peloton blog has tips for incorporating yoga. Peloton is celebrating Asian & Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Hannah Frankson is interviewing Olympians on IG Live. Angelo joins us to talk about how long people use MetPro. Ad Week talks about how Peloton instructors are becoming their own brands. MSN has a follow-up on Jess Sims stopping her class. Both Pop Sugar and Well & Good spotlight Tunde. Kristin McGee is on a panel at an upcoming wellness seminar. Sam Shepard talks about his love of Matty Maggiacomo. Andrea Barber is now on Cameo if you want a custom message. The latest Artist Collaboration features Usher. All this plus our interview with Jennifer Price!Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!Here's How »Join The Clip Out community today: theclipout.com The Clip Out Facebook The Clip Out Twitter The Clip Out Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Description: Ben Alldis is the newest Power Zone instructor. John Mills joins us to discuss SoulCycle's comeback plans Jay-Z invests in fitness. Dr. Jenn - So much Peloton content...so little time. The Peloton blog has tips for incorporating yoga. Peloton is celebrating Asian & Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Hannah Frankson is interviewing Olympians on IG Live. Angelo joins us to talk about how long people use MetPro. Ad Week talks about how Peloton instructors are becoming their own brands. MSN has a follow-up on Jess Sims stopping her class. Both Pop Sugar and Well & Good spotlight Tunde. Kristin McGee is on a panel at an upcoming wellness seminar. Sam Shepard talks about his love of Matty Maggiacomo. Andrea Barber is now on Cameo if you want a custom message. The latest Artist Collaboration features Usher. All this plus our interview with Jennifer Price! Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join The Clip Out community today: theclipout.com The Clip Out Facebook The Clip Out Twitter The Clip Out Instagram

This episode is especially for women (although the men may learn a little something too). My guest, Jennifer Barrett, a financial expert and author of the new book, Think Like a Breadwinner: a wealth-building manifesto for women who want to earn more (and worry less), shared some important ideas about how we can adjust our mindset to take better care of ourselves, in business and at home. If you like what you hear, we'd love it if you write a review, subscribe on Apple Podcasts and sign up for Quick Tips from Marketing Mentor. Here's the transcript: Ilise Benun When I heard the title of Jennifer Barrett's new book, I knew I had to have her on the podcast and I couldn't even wait to read the book first. It's called "Think Like a Breadwinner," and it made so much sense to me on so many levels that I am thrilled to share this conversation with you. We talked about what that breadwinner mindset is why women are not socialized to take responsibility for themselves, and the role that confidence plays in all of this. That's a thread that is woven into almost everything I'm thinking about and teaching these days. So listen, and learn. Hello, Jenn, welcome to the podcast. Jennifer Barrett Thanks so much for having me. My pleasure. I'm Jennifer Barrett, and I'm the chief Education Officer at Acorns, which is a saving and investing app with about 9 million users and counting. And I'm also the author of the new book, "Think Like a Breadwinner," which is a wealth building manifesto for women who want to earn more and worry less well. Ilise ...and who wouldn't want that? Very cool. And full disclosure. I have not read the book yet. But I can't wait to and I just wanted to have you on even before I read the book, because I love the title. And I loved your TED Talk. And I loved the conversation that we had. And I just feel like there's a lot we can talk about. Maybe after I read the book, we'll do a part two, based on what I found there. But let's begin by talking about the title of the book, think like a breadwinner, what does that mean to you? Jenn Well, thinking like a breadwinner really means making the kinds of money choices that will ensure you can support yourself throughout your life, and maybe others too. And one key element of that is investing to build wealth. And you know, for most women, we have not been taught or encouraged to invest or even really given the message of how critically important that is. So that's a big part of it. And then even, if you step back, I mean, even though more women than ever before are moving into the main earner or breadwinner role, we are still being socialized for the most part not to think of ourselves as breadwinners, as wealth builders. And that is to our detriment. So even if we end up in that role, we often feel unprepared. And either way, we're really missing out on reaching our full earning and wealth building potential, if we don't think of ourselves in those terms, and really focus on not just earning enough to pay the bills, but building enough wealth to support the lives that we want. Ilise I'm inclined to kind of use myself as the example here, and maybe tell you a little bit about my take on this from my past. Maybe you can comment and support it with some ideas, and keeping in mind that my listeners are for the most part, self employed creative professionals. One of the problems I have with a lot of the money, tips and guidance that's out there, especially for women, is that it's all about having a job and negotiating salaries. And I have a big chip on my shoulder about that. So I'm constantly trying to translate it all for the self employed woman who actually is in a position to do more than I think she would be able to do in a job. Do you agree with that? Jenn I would agree, I think that there are still some very real external barriers within corporate America to women, you know, women who are ambitious, and who want to move up the ranks, and especially if we want to do that, and also have a family. So it's not just the socialization that we get, but it's very real barriers in terms of workplace bias in terms of women being paid and promoted less and in terms of policies that really reinforce those outdated assumptions. And I think what you see and what we're seeing right now is that a lot of women are leaving corporate America and becoming solopreneurs entrepreneurs, small business owners, because there's more freedom there. There's more possibility, the sky's sort of the limit. And not only that, but what I saw when I interviewed a lot of them is that we then create the kind of companies that we wish we were a part of. We learn from our experience in corporate America, that's where we started. And we try to do better when we create our own company. So I think a lot of these women led companies are really leading the way in creating a more inclusive workplace culture and a better balance between life and work and will ultimately create a model that I hope the rest of corporate America follows in the future. Ilise So I may have said this -- I am totally unemployable. First, it was because I just don't like other people telling me what to do. Then, eventually, after now, 33 years of being self employed, I'm to a point where nobody can match my salary and the potential for what I can earn, the sky's the limit. I mean, that is the reality if I wanted to focus on that. And yet, here's the interesting thing: in my opinion, after 33 years supporting myself, I'm not married, I have no kids, I have a dog, she's not all that expensive. I have a lot of freedom. And yet, it wasn't until maybe five years ago, that it occurred to me that I really got that I can take care of myself. In other words, I had been taking care of myself for, let's say, 28 years. But still, in the back of my mind, there was always this, "Oh, someone else should take responsibility for x." There wasn't even a person there. But there's this fantasy that someone else is supposed to take care of me. So when I think about my past, and growing up, it was certainly my father who taught me -- I remember very clearly watching him pay the bills, write those checks. He would let me write everything but his signature. And so I kind of learned, and I remember getting my first checkbook. And yet and I still did not get the message that I will be able to take care of myself, even though I was learning some of the practical skills. So respond to that, if you would. Jenn Yeah. And I'd be curious to hear more about what happened five years ago to to shift your mindset around that. But to answer your question, I think and I experienced this myself growing up is, there's a lot of research around how parents speak differently to their girls than to their boys, and the kinds of conversations they have tend to center more around budgeting and spending smartly. I think you can even include paying the bills and managing a budget. And they speak more to their boys about building credit and building wealth. Those are critical skills for everyone. And this is not to play down the importance of being able to manage a budget. But managing a budget is only one piece of it, right? What I'm talking about with the breadwinning mindset is so much more expansive. It's not just about paying the bills, it's about asking yourself, "what kind of life do I want? And what do I need to do in order to afford it?" You know, if you're in a career, it's asking, "what kind of income? What career path do I need in order to make the kind of income to support the life I want?" If you're starting a business, it's asking, "how am I going to bring in the revenue I want to? And how is this business going to allow me to have the life the lifestyle that I want? And how am I going to build wealth on the side in order to ensure that I can cover our midterm goals, retirement, all of these things?" I think when you're self employed, those are even bigger questions, because it's really on your shoulders, it's all on your shoulders, paying taxes, saving for retirement, saving for midterm goals. All of that really rests on your shoulders. And so you need to be that much more proactive. But I think most of us just weren't brought up to think about money that way, to think about wealth building, to think about what is the career path? Or what is the business I want to start that will generate the revenue to support the life that I want. And so it often takes a while before that clicks into place. And to your point, you know, I don't think we're like waiting around for Prince Charming to save us anymore, necessarily. But if you look at the data out there on women and money: women invest less and later and we save less than men. We have more credit card and student loan debt. And we have lower credit scores. I could go on, you know, the gender wage gap is 18%. The gender wealth cap is 68%. So you look at those numbers, and it's hard not to think, "are we waiting for someone to rescue us," because we are often not making the kinds of financial choices that will allow us to support ourselves throughout our lives. So there is I think there is something very deep in our subconscious. And a lot of that comes from the cultural conditioning that we have gotten, which has said women's income is less important, which has said the man will be the breadwinner, which has said the prescription is, get a job, get a career, maybe start a small business, get married, save a little for a rainy day, save for retirement -- but it leaves out all the decades in between. So I would say we shouldn't blame ourselves for that, because a lot of this really is the way that we have been socialized to think of ourselves in relation to money. And it takes a real conscious effort, if that is the way that you have been brought up. And it's been reinforced by pop culture to recognize that and then shift your mindset to believe, "I am capable of doing this, I am a wealth builder, I am a breadwinner, I am a successful business owner," to reinforce those beliefs and take some conscious reconditioning sometimes. Ilise I have so many thoughts. I'm just gonna choose one. Because I've been thinking a lot about the role of confidence in all of this, and to say, "just shift your mindset to become a wealth builder," easier said than done, obviously. And so what I'm thinking about is what's the role of confidence? And in my own personal experience, it's taking actions and building skills, that bring the confidence that build the confidence. It doesn't come from just thinking a certain way. And so that got me thinking, I was trying to remember when I put my first $100, in my Fidelity SEP IRA. I couldn't even find it on the website. It's been that long, but nobody told me to do that. I only had two jobs and none of them had an IRA or any kind of retirement plan associated with it. So I don't even know why, at a certain point, I decided to just start putting $100 a month into a SEP IRA. But I do remember, I had a client, I was doing bookkeeping for him, he was a psychiatrist. And he had Fidelity Contrafund, and I was like, "Okay, well, he's making money at that, I'm gonna do that." And so I just started putting $100 into Contrafund, and for years and years it's been building. Jenn So like, what is that action also? And where is the confidence, like, "Yes, I can build a business and save for retirement at the same time, not all of my money has to go to the same thing." 100%, I agree with you. And I think to your point, when we just start implementing those habits, even if we're saving a little bit, investing a little bit at a time, it starts to build our confidence. So one of the most important things is just to get in the game, is just to start investing, it's less important, what you're investing in. And I always say, if you are feeling intimidated about the stock market, and I think a lot of people, men and women, still are, but you see that more in women than in men, then just to invest in an S&P 500 index funds. That gives you exposure to 500 of the biggest companies that represent more than 80% of the total market value. So you're basically in many ways, investing in the market itself -- one investment in one fund over time that has returned about 10% per year on average, or seven to seven and a half if you take inflation into account. And that is a nice rate of return. So if you do nothing else, start there. And I think, to your point, when you start investing, and you start to see that money growing, it has a really incredible effect on your psyche and your confidence. Because there's something about actually seeing the numbers and seeing your wealth grow, that will increase your confidence, that will increase your sense of security, all of these emotional benefits to it. And we see this in Acorns, too. So at Acorns, people can start investing with their change literally -- we will you connect your card and you use your card and we round up your purchases, take the change, and when it hits $5 we invest that for you. And so people who start there, and there are a lot of people who do start there, invest about 30 to $35 a month on average. So we're talking about around $400 a year but what we find is that they start there, and then after a few months, usually when the market is going up which it has been for the most part for you know several months now, their confidence builds and they start adding more. So they add $5, $10. And then they continue to increase their contributions. I think that's actually the way it works for a lot of people, if we're a little tentative about jumping in. So the most important thing is to just get started and get in the habit so that every time you have a new client, for example, you're automatically thinking, "Okay, I need to take this amount, from whatever payment I get to put toward taxes, and I need to take this amount to put toward my investments." A SEP IRA is a great vehicle because you can deduct those contributions. So it helps you in more than one way, you know, you're already building your wealth, and you're saving money for retirement, but you're also saving money on your tax bill. Ilise Excellent. I want to give you more time to tell us more about what's in the book in terms of the actual strategies that people can use and implement. So what would you say? Where else would you go with that? Jenn So I took the the breadwinning mindset, and I used it as a filter to look at kind of every aspect of our finances. And one place to start is credit. I think anyone who's ever taken a loan out for their business is well aware of the importance of having good credit, in order to get the best terms. But again, the way that credit has been marketed to everyone, but really predominantly to women, since we are tend to make most of the consumer decisions and the household, is that credit is a way to close the gap between the life that you can afford and the life that you want. And that is such a dangerous message. But what the breadwinner mindset would say is looking at credit as a way to get the best terms on the loan that you will want to invest in something that you think will increase in value. So for example, looking at your credit cards as a way to build your credit score, so that when you get a mortgage or business loan, you'll get the best terms. I have some research in the book that shows that if you have the highest range credit scores and can get the best terms, that can save you over $42,000 over the course of a traditional 30 year mortgage loan for an average priced home. That is significant when you think about building wealth and the kind of money that you can set aside $42,000 makes a huge difference, especially if you're able to invest that money versus paying it in interest. Same goes for a business loan. So having a higher credit score actually makes a huge difference. You can also leverage credit cards to actually make money once you are comfortable paying off your credit card bill every month, you can start using credit cards to get cash back to get rewards points. You know, there are fantastic deals on some of these business credit cards. But it's a different way of looking at credit. It's really like you don't want to pay for the privilege of using the card. You want to leverage credit to actually make money and build wealth. So that's one area. The other area, again, is looking at investing from day one as a way to decrease your dependence if you are in a regular job, to decrease your dependence on paycheck. And building wealth on the side is a way to give you that cushion that could allow you to leave a corporate job and start your own business. In fact, last night, I did an event with Luminary and Kate, who is the founder and CEO of Luminary, was telling me that she had been investing for the goal of having a child. They were going through a lot of fertility treatments and she had saved aside all this money and they ended up not having a child. But she had all this money, so she used the money to start Luminary. So it's really thinking about building wealth to support the goals that you might have in the future and to give you the freedom of choice. Right. And that's a very different way of looking at it. Same with savings. I mean, I think we often think of savings and it's been sort of pitched us as like saving for an upcoming purchase like a expensive handbag or a getaway with our girlfriends, which is not to say that those aren't wonderful things to save for too. But savings is so much more than that. It's like having savings is having peace of mind, it's giving you choice. It's knowing for example, if you have savings, if you suddenly get a tax bill, if you underestimated what you need to pay, having that savings there gives you that security that you're going to be okay. If you're starting a business and oh my god -- the pandemic. I mean, some people lost 50 - 80% of their revenue in the pandemic. Having savings allows you to ride those times and so your business will be okay and you'll be okay. So it's so important to just think about all those different areas of your finances as really supporting the life you want and giving you as many choices as you can have in the future. Ilise Actually the last line of your TED Talk is the one that I told you I was going to be quoting you immediately, because it has a corollary in my work. So you said, "There is nothing more empowering than being able to bring the future you want to life. And to know you have the savings and the wherewithal to walk away from any situation you don't want." So I translated that to, "There is nothing more empowering than being able to bring the business you want to life. And to know that you have the marketing in place, and the pipeline, and the wherewithal to walk away from any client or project you don't want." What do you think of that? Jenn I love that. I love that so much. I really do. I think that's so important. And the book is not necessarily written for entrepreneurs and small business owners. But I think the lessons apply. And if you translate the breadwinning mindset to an entrepreneurial mindset, it really is having the confidence that you can do this, that you have the skills that you have the pipeline, and you have the marketing capabilities to weather these storms. And I mean honestly, there's nothing more powerful than being able to say no to a client, to be able to walk away from a client who's toxic. I mean, I've talked to so many people who have businesses and feel like when they're starting, they have to put up with so much. But as they start to build their business, build their wealth, they say, "This is an amazing, this is an amazing moment for me when I can say no to a client who's just a pain in my butt and I don't want to have to deal with them." That's a wonderful feeling to be in that builds confidence. That by itself, I think, can build confidence. Yeah. Cuz think about how you'll show up the next time you're negotiating with a client when you know that you can walk away. I mean, that's the first rule of negotiation, right? Yep, the most effective way to negotiate is knowing in your mind that you can walk away, and it gives you so much leverage in a conversation and negotiation. Ilise Alright, my last question for part one of our conversation. I think a lot of people want to talk about talking about money, because that's something I teach, I have a new presentation, actually, I'm giving a version of it tonight, called "Show Me The Money: Learn to love the money conversation," because I think one of the ways people, not just women, men and women I see, get in their own way is just by not bringing it up in the first place. So do you have any tips from the book or from your own experience about talking about money? Jenn Well, number one is talk about it. To your point, I think that we often feel shame, or embarrassment, or whatever it is, especially when we have questions about money, how to invest or things that we think we ought to know. But in reality, you know, very few people in this country get a really solid financial education. It's not part of the curriculum in most schools. So a lot of people have a lot of questions well into their career. And so there's no shame in asking questions. So that's important. But the other aspect of this, especially if you have your own business, is to talk to other business owners and get a sense of what they're charging and have those conversations. I mean, it's sort of the equivalent, you know, in our careers, when I've talked to other people about what they're earning, what their income is, and boy are those eye opening conversations. And it's so powerful. I was just thinking yesterday about a string and one of my network networking groups about getting paid to speak. I had been trying to decide what to charge and that string was eye opening. The range was like zero to 10, on what people were charging, and it was not necessarily a reflection of experience, or the amount of times you've spoken or your platform. It was really a lot of times about what you asked for. And having read that entire string, now I know this, this spectrum, the range, and I know how to have that conversation, I felt so much better equipped to negotiate the next talk that I was asked to give. That was hugely powerful. I'm thinking of one friend in particular and I include her in the book. She holds these workshops to help others run strong PR firm, to help other business owners with negotiations. But even you know, she did some work for me and she said, "I hope you don't mind, but she's like, honey, I got to get paid. Like I got bills. I'll give you a friend discount. But I got to get paid." And I thought I would never ask you to do work and not pay you. You know, but I think you can have those conversations, even in a case like that where you're working with a friend, and they say, I love you, but I got to get paid. Ilise Well, my take on the friends and family discount is they should pay more because they know how much you're worth and they want to support you. Jenn I told her that too. I said I'm willing to pay full price, more than willing because you're exactly right, they know more than anyone how talented you are and they will want to support that. I completely agree. But I also think it is just so important to remember, you need to get paid, you need to get paid what you're worth, there's no way around it. And there's nothing wrong with saying, "I want to make a lot of money," I definitely want to make a lot of money, I'm very open about it, I want to make a lot of money so I can have the impact I want to have in the world, so I can have the life I want. And, you know, I think a lot of times, we don't talk about that enough. There's this weird shame around saying, especially as a woman, that you want to make a lot of money. And we need to get over that. And I would say -- and then I'll get off my horse about this -- But when we talk about venture capital, I've talked to so many female entrepreneurs, and they tell me that one of the things that drives them nuts when they're raising money is that there's almost this idea of like, it's charity to put money into a female led company right now. It's like, "we ought to do it to help female entrepreneurs." That is such BS! Invest in the company because we will make money and we will make you money. That's why you invest in a company. We're not a charity. And we have every intention of making a lot of money. And so it's even reshaping the conversation around that to like, the reason you should invest in a female led business is because we have a higher rate of success. And we are just as ambitious and talented as male founders. Not because there's some quota to fill, or because you feel like oh, I need to support female founders, but because you actually see the value in what we're doing. Ilise All right, that would be the perfect place to put the bookmark. But I did think of one other question that I want to ask you is: Do you have a favorite female personal finance "guru" that you recommend people listen to or read? Jenn Well, it's hard to read her, but she does have a blog, but my mom is my, she really is my hero. We talk all the time about money and investments. She will call me when she makes a good investment and makes money. So we have that kind of relationship where she says, I'm so glad I can call you and tell you about this money I made today with Baidu or Amazon or whatever.  She has a background and a PhD in accounting. And she actually takes the time to read all these reports that companies put out and look for opportunities. That is not something that most people have the time to do, but I admire her for more than that. She is self taught and really started managing the finances after my parents were divorced. And she got remarried. And has didn't start quite from scratch, but almost and has built a really impressive portfolio in stocks and bonds and in real estate. So I have so much admiration for what she's been able to do. And she also gives just incredibly solid advice. She is the person who takes the time to research everything. And she's at Profpat.com She has a blog, and she writes mostly for people who are near or in retirement. That's her focus right now because she is retired. She was an accounting professor for many years. Ilise So interesting. And just funnily my mother also spends what sounds like all of her spare time reading all those reports and watching the stock market. She doesn't have an accounting degree, actually, so she is also self taught, and I think has been doing it probably for the last 10 years. But that's what she seems to have devoted her life to -- is teaching herself how to take care of herself -- she's now in her 80s. Jenn That is amazing. That's so inspiring. And I think they would get along very well. Ilise Yes. All right. So tell the people where they can find you online, also in your book. Jenn Sure. Well, I'm at JenniferBarrett.com. I'm on all the social platforms and feel free to reach out. And the book is "Think like a breadwinner" and it's available anywhere you buy books. Ilise Awesome. I can't wait to get mine. Okay, so thank you, Jenn. And we will definitely have to have a part two. That sounds great. Transcribed by https://otter.ai  

What We Covered:00:45– Introducing today’s guest, Jenn T. Grace, who speaks to the work she does at Publish Your Purpose Press 03:25 – How Jenn is helping her clients navigate the challenges of virtual events amidst COVID-19 07:23 – Jenn stresses the importance of being an ally to other queer-ran businesses and queer entrepreneurs 16:30 – The path to benevolent capitalism and equity 21:34 – Jenn shares her values-based approach to business and the benefits of being an openly out entrepreneur 26:31 – Attracting the people you want and repelling those you don’t 29:19 – Advice Jenn would give to her former self and aspiring entrepreneursTweetable Quotes:“The reality is that we work with business owners, people who are speakers, people who are thought leaders. And, at the end of the day, me taking a three month sabbatical is not an option. And that’s the case for most people.” (02:46) (Jenn) “I think as queer people, we’re already an underdog in most of the settings that we show up in, whether we perceive ourselves as such or not. So, I think by helping each other, being allies to other adjacent groups that we can be allies to, that’s the way that we’re all gonna collectively make a bigger impact and a bigger change.” (10:05) (Jenn) “If we can’t have the courage to speak our truth, then we can’t expect others to speak our truth for us.” (12:34) (Jenn) “I find that most successful queer business owners will always make time for someone who is just starting out to say, ‘Let me point you in the right direction. It’s the least I can do.’” (16:12) (Jenn) “There’s so many superpowers and advantages that we do have as queer people.” (19:35) (Jenn) “I think repelling people is a beautiful thing.” (28:04) (Jenn)“So often we fight with our gut. Our gut knows – we instinctively know – what we need to do next, but we fight it with our logic. That’s not actually helping us. Just go with your gut instinct.” (30:23) (Jenn) Links Mentioned:Publish Your Purpose Press WebsiteJenn’s LinkedInJenn’s WebsiteMichelle’s WebsiteYoutube Link

Where did your story start? Before you discovered that self-love was important. I grew up in a very family business-oriented family entered Nero family, my dad was a second-generation business owner and his family and my mom stayed home with myself and then my three younger siblings, probably in high school, I kinda took some left turns, when he and I were not saying I do. I, about a lot of things as you do when you start creating your independence. I went to college, I went to school to be a stage manager, in New York, and then realized I did not want to work with actors. What I actually wanted to do was help people moving through the emotional transition of things. So after a couple of years, I got my BS degree in Family Studies, and then instead of going into social work, I thought I would I actually ended up going entrepreneurship myself, I started with a direct sales company. II started listening to  personal development speakers it and I just, I was a sponge. Give me more, give me more! obsessively listening to the next one, the next one, this is when we had CDs, in the car, we are listening to CDs that you had to plug in and pull back out. And I really became obsessed with being more productive, more efficient, more valuable, to the people around me. It wasn't until 2014 that I really started to look around. Go okay. I love what I'm doing to a degree, I don't love selling products, but I love working with people in the capacity in working with that was a sexual health and wellness educator for those 13 years in direct sales. It's helping women talk about their bodies on a regular basis and helping them break down some of the rules, they've had handed to them from generation after generation about what's okay, what's not okay, what body parts are okay, or body parts, are not okay, what should they all be who likes them, and how much and all of these things that come with physical intimacy. But we are having a lot of emotional conversations about this. Well, so I was well-versed in loving your body and being aware and edge the clinical side of things, all of that. In 2014, when I started getting these days of flu-like symptoms, but no actual fever nobody could tell us what was going on. I was going to doctor after doctor, 'cause it would happen for 10 days and I'd be okay for a couple of days and then it would happen again. And so it was just this weird cycle and I, I was canceling party presentations that I was making money for my family, I was not able to do meetings for my team, and now I was getting distraught because this is something that my entire families household income was based on this, and I'd spent 13 years building this and I realized I wanted to start coaching outside of the team. And outside of the consultants or the clients I had and so, residing in that direction, but it was too late and my body was just shutting down. The first thing was a food sensitivity test, I figured out that soy was mine, archons. If it had even a drop of soy was laid out for a week to sometimes two weeks, sometimes a month. And so I started developing this really huge fear of food. We had to cook all my meals at home, and I was traveling a lot 'cause I was a corporate trainer, for the corporate office, as well. taking big, huge coolers with me everywhere I go because I was so scared that someone would not take this seriously 'cause it wasn't technically an allergy I wasn't gonna have an anyplace reaction and my reaction took 72 hours to kick in, so that's why it took so long for us to figure out what it was because I couldn't I was tracking things, but nothing in this 24 hours was consistent, it was three days later. So, anyway, through that process, I started developing the teeter around, food, and then when the symptoms started kicking in again, about six months later, I was like, What is going on. I'm not eating any soil I'm making my own food. And we figured out there was another sensitivity, but really what it was is my immune system was breaking down because for so long, my body was whispering to me, that it needed attention. I was tired all the time I needed caffeine constantly, the Stat Way to do anything, even I would be up late doing parties but I'd be sleeping if I needed to in the marked by kids were super little, still and I would still need a nap. Aida and I were dragging so my body was giving me all these signals. In hindsight, I can see that. Well, at in the moment, I just saw it as an annoying obstacle for me to be able to keep going, keep working because I had developed this really intense work addiction where that was the only way I felt valuable is if I was constantly producing money producing an impact on other people, and that this lack of what I needed was deep. It was a huge canon of... That's an E-a conversation. I'm not even gonna have the conversation, but what I want or what I need. And so really, that's kind of where that began, that journey of leaving that life behind, and really redesigning over the last six years where my life is going and where it has been.   JENN: There are so many things to unpack there with the... And the money and associates that you need to be working to be worthy. What was that like? What moment di you realize this has to change right now, 'cause I can't go further. TASHA: I was thinking about it before when you started talking today 'cause I haven't thought about this time in my life, in a while, because I have one I had spent later on in my journey, I spend about 18 months in bed where I couldn't do anything and I spend a lot of time. There was 18 months. Just really dissecting like you said, unpacking all these years of the choices I was making, so when I knew that even when I got the list of food sensitivities and then we saw some other things that the hormonal and balances and then we saw some of... Like these little areas that after 15 years, 20 years of really abusing your systems, there's more than one problem, right? There's always more than one problem I into when you've avoided it for that long. So we started uncovering these pieces. And I'm like, "I'm so broken. How am I going to work and do all this? That was my thought, not how am I going to heal how am I going to love my kids, "How am I gonna work if I am breaking? And it wasn't until probably a year and a half later, I mean a solid 18 months later maybe two years even where I was pushing and pushing it, and pushing even after the this, the long period of having literally sometimes a month completely out of commission, that I was lying in bed, I was so used to go to our annual convention and I couldn't fly I couldn't drive, I just, there was no way that I could handle that much simulation we I was wishing so I decided that instead of going, "I would be glued to my computer and watch the entire thing because they do a lot of live streams and I would just work my butt off while they're there, so I could still work and still show up. I was lying in bed and my husband came up, and he's been amazing. Then, the whole thing brought me food and was do T, what do you need? My hands, couldn't type. They started acting up and down my arms and into my hands, and my joints in my fingers and I couldn't type and I just melted down, because it was literally my body saying you need to stop. The last thing that I tried to do was type and it would not let me do it, and I'm like, I can't do anything and he's like, "That's okay, you need to rest, I can't rest I hate to work. And that's when I knew, this is bad, this is bad, that I am pushing so hard still, even with all the evidence, all of the clear as day evidence that I had that I still was willing to put all of that at risk, all of my family and my health long term, at risk because I needed to work and my body. I said, "You're done. And that's when I knew, this is deeper than just having some foods in certifies is deeper than just having a hormonal imbalance and that's really when I started to detect it and it always is deeper. There's always that surface-level thing, but it's not till you work with those crazy shadows that hang out. It is nineteen, for sure. JENN: So, after that moment, what did you do to start changing that?  How did you start that journey? TASHA: Well, I had really, for me it was a lack of spirituality for those 15 years, just a lack of... I leaned really hard into the logical side of life. This makes sense, this is the science, this is the data, this is sex and a lot of that's based and rooted in my childhood, I was gas lit a lot when I was little. And as a teenager, and so in that when you're that age, and you are being told what you know to be true, what you saw with your eyes, or to her with your ears is not true. You've developed this need and in this mechanism to constantly factually produce information because you need to see for your eyes and have someone... We'll see it invalidate that. Yes, that did actually happen. Yes, that is true. And so that was my... What I leaned on and when no matter what evidence was in front of me, I still wasn't getting better, I realized that, that I needed to pull back and started working inside. So we moved from a three-level home to a two-level home and in that process, in an effort to downsize. My husband built me a Zen Room, and it was a separate room. Yeah, he's amazing. A separate room to really tranquil really... A lot of the set wood plank panels on the walls. We look really natural very similar. This was kind of going on in some areas of it. This is definitely, this manifestation wall, which is what we have now, this place for me to go where my role was, I couldn't take any work in there, I still was working but I was drastically reduced in my expectations for what I was producing a mass, and I would go in there and I was told that if I meditated my body would start to call at a little bit because I got into had gone to the point where I couldn't handle White and sound a lot of the time, and then I would get migraines, and I couldn't sleep. And so all of these factors create a lot of solitude. And that's what I needed, I needed to not distract myself by what other people needed or what other people wanted and what other people were saying and doing. I had to be by myself and learned to sit with that and I sit with the emotions sit with the fear. So with the internal desire to go and do and just be... And so that is where I moved into and kind of leaned pretty hard into it and it paid off. It's still pays off, it, it, it's one of the most profound practices that has changed everything. And I was the person that... Any time someone said something about meditating, I'm like, "Are you crazy sitting still have you lost your damn mind?" I couldn't sit still and my foot was constantly moving, if I had to sit and watch a family movie it was torturous because that was two hours of not doing anything and so, to voluntarily sit and listen to someone else. Tell me how the breath are you kidding me? But because of that, and I think it's like 16 journals I now have, in the last five years that journaling process, just letting things be as opposed to trying to fix things, leaning into that being still space, not reflecting too far back, not worrying about things too far in the future, that's really where... That's really where things started to change for me internally. JENN: So what was the first meditation session? Like just 'cause I know I personally and the go go go, masculine full. TASHA: Yeah, I think about head and her Julia and stepping with that feminine space when they tried to make me sit down, I was like... I've been here for 10 seconds, so I was the first a little bit of time, like for you. So what's funny is I actually got introduced to meditation again, so typical and tracks with my history, I was forced into meditation because I, one of the avenues that I saw it out when traditional medicine couldn't help me and that's been the case for a 95% of my journey that I got acupuncture and the first, and I was terribly I used to call myself what I realized now is I'm just really sensitive. I was so terrified if these needles going in my body, but the expert who had helped me with the food sensitivities, it had given me some kind of life back again, highly suggested that I went and did this, and I had a bunch of friends who were in energy healing and those kinds of things, and I saw was open to the idea, especially more the more and more I was seeing that traditional medicine, at least for me, was not actually helping it was just making me run around so I made the appointment. I wait into the acupuncture as the office I'm lying on the table. She's telling me in very short sentences, what's happening, what I'm doing. And then she was like, I don't know, 36 or 38 needles from head to toe some of my belly with a heat lamp. Hi Belle. And I was like, "We this kind of cool. And then she turned on some meditation kind of a flute go kind of music and then left and she's still back in 20 minutes I said. Okay, so she left and within 10 seconds I was like, "Oh my God, I can't move, like I was terrified to make sense, cars gonna hurt myself, right? I was gonna puncture an ARR or something. I don't know how this stuff works. And I realized at that moment that I'm gonna have to sit still for 20 minutes 'cause I'm held hostage, I can't actually move. And that is how I discover meditation because I was lying there on the table listen to the music and then calming my breath down. Because I was so scared about what was happening, that I ended up realizing that this is what meditation as it's being present with what's going on in the moment, it's not about erasing or avoiding the thoughts, it's not about completely clear in your mind, it's about clearing the judgment from your mind, and it's about allowing yourself to just breathe in your moment and feel and see and experience where you are in the now at least that's one of the versions of meditation. And I was like, "Oh okay, I can see where this isn't beneficial. I find it hilarious that I'd have 38 needles in time, my body for it to happen, but that's tractor, so that that mix about that makes about sense, so... So that's how I did it for... So because I was physically held down and I meditated then I was able to see... Okay, I'll listen to a couple of minutes of a guide, Menotti. On for me. Guide. Meditation was the only way that was gonna happen for probably about a year. That's what I did, I didn't have any kind of silent alone meditation. Yeah, and that's a really good point to make up as art where you're at the silent clear your thought sitting silence for hours. That's not where you should start, but that's for me. That was what I thought of meditation, yeah, and why I was so terrified to even get into the space and now I'm like, "I go a good teacher. So yeah, you don't know you. So all of my clients get scared when I suggest meditation. All of them are, most of them are very similar to me. We help the people that have traveled or traveling a similar path. And what I ended up doing was creating a one-hour course on how to make meditation Made Easy. It doesn't have to be this huge process, but there are so many unknowns because there's no one right way to do it. So I created a step-by-step process that I used and that I've given to friends and staff was throughout the years. It makes it easy to do to sit down and do it after you've done these first few things beforehand that you can do over time so you're not having to create the space, decide that you're in the mood for, figure out what meditation you're gonna listen to and actually do it and then know what to do while it does you over a woman. 'cause it isn't just to meditate. It is six, seven, set process. And so that's one of the free courses that I have with my membership group. Oh, that's awesome, yeah. So you say you bring this to clients, the people where are you meeting your clients in their journey right now? You say we all help each other on the past that we were on, which 1% agree. We're all helping transformation even though we're all in the coaching world doing the same kind of thing. JENN: Where are you meeting your clients in their journey right now? TASHA: So the clients, I'm usually working with have identified that something is just not right, something is missing or there they feel like they're looking around going. I don't know how I got here. And I know that this can't be it. There's something more that I'm posed to do here that isn't about taking care of my kids, although if you're a parent, all of us, love our children, but that is not enough because the idea is if you're good enough or being a parent, they will have actually not need you and so we need something that's above and beyond being the partner being the children and my clients have just identified that, and are not sure how to do something about it. And so we go through the five life elements that I discovered in my journey that have really helped me kind of balance out the work addiction or the complete avoidance of going to work. Because you feel like you can only be a caregiver. And so, we navigate through those five areas based on their own personal unification that that something is just not right. I know I'm missing something. Yeah, finding that bond and making sure you are part of that ballot then it's such a struggle to make. I don't know, for me, I'm not a parent, but I still struggle just being a wife, then it's like, "Oh my goodness, I'm a fire wife, so my husband's only home a certain number of day and some... And this month it's five days so I feel like I can't do anything else for me on those five days. He's how... But I realize now that I'm still gonna go to the gym, it's an hour of my day I gonna go swim because I really enjoy the water aerobics with all of my older friends.   Yeah, and it's so important to find a way to find that balance. And it took having a coach, I couldn't do it alone. BOUNDARIES Oh yeah, oh, for sure. Boundaries are a huge part of our conversations because most of us if we're in the situation where you don't have what you want, it's because you did not learn how to establish boundaries in your relationship with other people, or with yourself. And so I would say probably 50% of the conversation we have within each life element as the boundaries and how to ask for what you need but also ask for those people that you're in Eccles with those people that do get to have a say in your day-to-day experience in the sense of you respect their feedback, what do they need from you so that you can negotiate those things, how to have those hard conversations so that everybody has what they need and no one feels like they are. The more we don't need to have that syndrome either. And so having those conversations about boundaries, and understanding and accepting that what we need for ourselves to make us feel good is benefiting the person who we are fearfully taking time away from the... So what are some of your non-negotiables for your day? Okay, so that's a great question. And it's one of my favorite topics because I think so few of us have these... So my non-negotiable is, I go to bed early. One of the lasting health stuff, health pieces that I'm using or still working with is my sleep system, so my body started way, EA 330 in the morning, back in probably almost a year ago, and it's just part of mine system still trying to maneuver it's way back to a healthy cycle. LISTEN TO THE REST OF THE INTERVIEW AT the link BELOW   Yeah, so get out there and see your body with love. Connect with Tasha www.facebook.com/groups/rr.rockstars www.facebook.com/tashaskillin www.instagram.com/tashaskillin www.rulesandrebellion.com

Jenn: Can you tell us about your story of this time that you went from marathoner to getting an injury that made it so you couldn't do any sort of exercising? Lynn:  I went from a marathoner to injured to take about three years off of running to becoming a marathoner. Then back to Marathon. It was really when I started struggling with my weight and the idea of dieting because I was always healthy. I always had this wonderfully healthy lifestyle that I loved, and I didn't have a problem eating, anything because I was always running off calories doing what I do, which is running. And then everything changed.   The first thing that happened was I had both of my Achilles tear. When this happens they leave you immobile, you're not supposed to walk, you're not supposed to run, you're not supposed to do anything with moving them. There's not a lot of movement that you can do.   There are stretching and stuff that I could do, but it sends you into a kind of a spiral mindset.  If you are in the state of mind that I was in, I wasn't even aware of what I was thinking at the time, so I had the fears. It's set into motion. These negative thought patterns, this self-shaming.   I can't run, I can't do anything, I'm gaining weight. And that's when I really started noticing a habit that I had already had but was able to ignore before which was emotional eating.   And then of course over the course of three years, many things happen.   My father was diagnosed with cancer, I started helping them downsize their house and sell their house, move their house. In the meantime, my husband and I also sold our house. All this stuff just happened right?   I was sitting at my heaviest way, incredibly unhappy looking at my life thinking. How am I going to get a handle on it? I've tried these diets, they're not working. There has to be an easier way.   And that was a turning point. I was just so unhappy my whole life was consumed around a diet mindset, a diet mentality, hiding and shaming myself for emotionally binge eating and drinking, and I was like Something's got to change here.   And that was when I decided to make the big change to starting the inside journey, which once I opened that door.  I was never able to close it again because it's like the light goes off and change begins to happen. I was in a really bad spot I was beating myself up, I didn't realize how much my inner critic was just talking shit to me all the time, I was, I was self-medicating with wine in the evenings and paying for it. Regretfully, the next day because it just is a depressant, right? And then I would eat the wrong things, and all this and then I would restrict myself and on Monday I'm starting to diet. I'm going start a diet again and that was my pattern, and then I fall off the wagon. Because we all know, diets don't work, they don't work, there's no reason that anyone should be on the diet. When I really hit that bottom, which is different for everybody, I knew that I couldn't do it alone, and I'm going to be completely honest.   Nobody that wants to move out of that mindset can do it alone. They have to find a mentor, whether it's you, whether it's me, whether it's somebody else out there that's not even involved in dieting, it doesn't matter, you can't do it alone.   And so I found my first mentor, and I signed on with her for a year and so within the first two months, but I outgrew her. I was already looking for other mentors and she was great while I had her, and I continued my whole year with her,  I just was adding other mentors on top of it. Because the momentum that was behind it just brought so much joy to me.   And you just have to find the right fit for you. I have plenty of mentors. I feel like a lot of that fear comes from feeling unworthy, because of what stigma whatever you want to call it, has put in our mind. If you're struggling and you're on diets normally it's either to gain weight or lose weight. You feel like your body is not enough, you can't show up. I know for me that it was really hard like I can invest all this money in these diets anymore.  But when it came to actually heal those internal struggles, I was like, "How is it that I will spend 200 on two days were food of this fake magic food. But I won't spend 200 work on inside stuff, right? And I truly believe this, is look at what culture has done to us. They have programmed or self-trust out of us, so they have created these women that don't believe that we can trust ourselves so why should we trust that inner-voice telling us our intuition telling us. This is the right move working from the inside is the right move, do it, and it's still so strong inside of us, but then it's like 10000 or 5000 on a program. I shouldn't trust that this is the right thing because that 66 billion diet industry is telling me that's the right mindset, but what they're really worried about is that bottom line they want the money, they don't care about your health, they care about their income. When we have not trusted our intuition inside, we struggle on the outside. It was an in trusting yourself. And we have been trusted ourselves with what is being told. That's very important for people to understand.   Yeah, we just... It's one of those things that was taken away from us by well-meaning caretakers at a very early age because by the time you're eight years old, your core beliefs and identity around them have already been formed. That's a pretty heavy right? So before that, you're being told You're not old enough to do that, you're not strong enough to do that, don't do that. And so we've already begun to lose our self-trust at that point. But then it just keeps piling on, because our belief system around that is also in motion, so we're kind of proving it to ourselves. That we can't trust up. Women are just naturally higher intuitive women like few and beings yeah, and so for us to go through that and client and find those things is natural and then, of course, something happens, someone tells us something that makes us doubt ourselves. Just because your cosmic doesn't mean that you can't be assertive. One thing that I always tell the women that I work with is right where you are right now, this is where you're supposed to be. Yeah, so it didn't have to start in your team is starting right now. I locked in mine away in my 20s, after having in my life forever, I was raised very cosmically and then I shut it down. And then I found it in my... Like the four days, again, but it happened when it needed to. And once you tap back into that to you can... It's like all that miss time doesn't matter because you, it just like catches up to you and you can just roll with it faster. Than You Ever Thought Possible. So I believe that you come back to your truth. You want to call it is a spiritual practice, or whatever. We source collective consciousness. When you come back to it, it's right when you need to, so that you have the capability of moving into this intuitive age, at a higher pace, so that people like you and me can help women that are listening, to these podcasts move into this new age with more ease flow understanding. JENN: So how did you start opening back up to that, what were your truth. Dipping your toe in the water?   Lynn: So when I came back to it, my very first mentor she was into Abraham hit, I was like... So is that... So if anyone wonder Abraham is it's Ester, HIC which taps into the collective consciousness. And she was like, Even if you don't, the message does it, the medium doesn't resonate with you, the message is on point.   And so I looked over some Abraham, he YouTube stuff 101, and I was like, "This is right on, I'm getting it, but very quickly. I moved from Abraham Hicks 'cause I believe Abraham "hexes a wonderful place to really start.   And so it's like this really nice momentum. So, I dip my toe back in with her. But within three months, I was like, "I need more, I need to go deeper. And so that's when I really started getting involved on a much more cosmic level reading much deeper literature, on it, hiring mentors that were into more of the ancient forms of healing and on wisdom, and such.   And so now, I believe this is such a big part of the process. When people ask me in interviews, they'll say, "Who are you?   That question always gets on me I'm like, "Are you trying to ask me what I do for a living because that is so different, like, I make cosmic being, I came from somewhere, I'm in this physical body in this one lifetime, and I'm gonna return to there wherever there is this is not my only life, but it is my only time in the physical bodies.   So a big part of my program, I really like to get women in touch with that because there's so much that comes along with the understanding that this is my one body in this one life we're meant to be enjoying food and join beautiful art, beautiful clothes traveling reading, extravagant like A... And relationships. We're supposed to have a beautiful relationship, and so I go through relationships, toxic relationships beautiful relationships raising your vibe understanding your true vision getting to know that what this body came here for because we all came here with a cosmic purpose. And a lot of the times we don't know what it is. And through my program, yes, it's about getting away from the diet but it's also embracing a more... So who you are as a person, who you want to be and being that person now. Yeah, so while anti-dieting is a big part of my message. It's really embracing who you are on a deeper level. You can't destroy that road is already established, you have to create a new road, and you have to really focus on it with intention. And build that road up. So it's just as established as the former Road, right? That road is never going to go away, but you can divert your attention and your focus and build that new road. So it's established and use it the whole time, right? But a lot of people, this is one reason why I work. They go, Okay. I'm going to establish this road in diet, where their previous behaviors are still that highly established Road. So they're trying to change it from a part of the brain where that's not how you, your bringing work. So it's always in this continual argument. Habits are there to help us, but sometimes are getting in the way. I won't go into brain science. It will go down go as a way to tap but it's like we have this continual we're trying to change it all the time. Through logical brain. I should be able to do this, I should be able to do this, but it's a habit. He tried to change a habit with your logical brain. Your reptilian brain is always going  win. But I'll give you a little piece of advice here. The best way to get out of that logical brain and make the decision when you go... Let's say you're like... I need to get up and go to the gym tomorrow I'm going  to the gym it's going be awesome, and when you're laying in bed and it's really cold outside and you're like, "Oh I don't want to get the brand that's your YOU.” Everything will come together, held out. Oh yeah, so I, I... I've been working from street level where I need to be at the top of the Empire State Building. Yeah, so I will just open that all up, and give you... Everyone, such great momentum to really begin to let go of these identities that have been created around diet culture because they're so ingrained in us. Oh, that I believe that I am working on a podcast episode right now I'm calling it DNA that we come into this world already. Predisposed from our mothers, the into the diet culture because we know they can fetuses can hear and they can feel the mother's emotions and the mother releases cortisol, and all this stuff right during uncomfortable times, during fear when she's being ridiculed for the weight that she's gaining during pregnancy. Yeah, and then after giving birth, like the first things I gotta lose this baby weight? The baby feels all this. We fill out this... We here at we watch it, it's like, we come into this world already. Okay, this is gonna be our identity. Yeah, once and for all the power that they hold that they too, everyone is a cosmic being, and when you tap into that line, everything becomes possible. It starts with the connection.   JENN: I am going to ask you my favorite question towards the end, which is somebody only walked away with one nugget, from this time to be... Well, for more time together. What would you want them to take away?   LYNN: I would want them to take away that this one like that they had here is so valuable and important that seeking happiness, should be your primary objective and not a toy, time in struggle or worry. So finding the right coach for you in the right program, get some support. Yeah, I get support. There are lots of free. My group is open and find group, find women that are like-minded and resonate and latch on time, don't waste time around negative especially right now in the monks may Ray time that we're going through taking advantage of this time as a pause to really get in touch with what you desire. That's one of the first lessons we go through in my 10-week courses vision and I can ask a woman what she doesn't want, and she could talk to me for an hour and a half, but you ask a woman what she wants and it's like, "Oh I don't know. Or because they can't do overwhelmed with struggle and have created this momentum behind struggle, but they don't know how to get out of it, and that's what people like you and me, or here for. Yeah, let me take you down, I'll show you how to get out of this whirlwind less momentum and change that mindset so that you can always be having happy thoughts. Yeah, let's address it, let's address those shadows and now paste. So again, your only job here on the earth is to get aligned. Yeah, you too and in... But find the right person. I love that, yes, and it's so true. Just don't do it. It's mental health, or any kind of health it's... You don't wanna do it alone. Oh, and we were put on this Earth to do shit alone. Yeah, we came here to have relationships. And whether it's for 30 seconds or 30 years, everyone comes into your life for a reason, for those important time. I've had connections where I'm like, "Oh I'm going know this person for a really long time. And it lasted for three hours, and I'm like, "Oh okay, well, that was good, but it's a over. Yeah, what I need to change my momentum and I'm like, "I don't. I wasn't sad about it, that wasn't happy about it, I was just like, Okay, he went with the flow. Everything they don't have is a result of your habits. I'm going to leave you with, and say it again, everything you have and everything you don't have is a 100% reflection of your habits.   You can find Lynn Louise the Cosmic Valkyrie www.thecosmicvalkyrie.com https://www.facebook.com/thecosmicvalkyrie/ Instagram: @thecosmicvalkyrie LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/thecosmicvalkyrie/

Let's Talk about Erectile Dysfunction... On this week's episode of the Lunch and Learn with Dr. Berry we have Dr. Jennifer Miles-Thomas, she is a Diplomate of the American Board of Urology and is also board certified in Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery. As we continue the push the message and focus on men's health I wouldn't be truthful to the audience if I didn't stress the importance of sexual health. I talked about this before but as an outpatient clinical specialist, one of the top 2 reasons why men would come to see me for an appointment was either someone was dragging them to the office or erectile dysfunction complaints. Sexual health refers to a state of well-being that lets a man fully participate in and enjoy sexual activity and there is a range of physical, psychological, interpersonal, and social factors that influence a man's sexual health. I talked about this before but as an outpatient clinical specialist, one of the top 2 reasons why men would come to see me for an appointment was either someone was dragging them to the office or erectile dysfunction complaints. Dr. Jenn walks us through her decision to become a urologist, one of few African American women to hold the title, and we get into the importance of sexual health, opening up about erectile dysfunction and all of the different treatment options associated with the disease. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and share the episode with a friend or family member. Listen on Apple Podcast, Google Play, Stitcher, Soundcloud, iHeartRadio, Spotify Sponsors: Lunch and Learn Community Online Store (code Empower10) Pierre Medical Consulting (If you are looking to expand your social reach and make your process automated then Pierre Medical Consulting is for you) Dr. Pierre's Resources - These are some of the tools I use to become successful using social media Links/Resources: Dr. Jennifer Website Dr. Jenn's IG Urology Care Foundation Mayo Clinic Foundation American Urological Association Social Links: Join the lunch and learn community – https://www.drberrypierre.com/joinlunchlearnpod Follow the podcast on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/lunchlearnpod Follow the podcast on twitter – http://www.twitter.com/lunchlearnpod – use the hashtag #LunchLearnPod if you have any questions, comments or requests for the podcast For More Episodes of the Lunch and Learn with Dr. Berry Podcasts https://www.drberrypierre.com/lunchlearnpodcast/ If you are looking to help the show out Leave a Five Star Review on Apple Podcast because your ratings and reviews are what is going to make this show so much better Share a screenshot of the podcast episode on all of your favorite social media outlets & tag me or add the hashtag.#lunchlearnpod Download Episode 113 Transcript Episode 113 Transcript... Introduction Dr. Berry: And welcome to another episode of the Lunch and Learn with Dr. Berry. Dr. Berry Pierre, your favorite Board Certified Internist. Founder of drberrypierre.com, as well as the CEO of Pierre Medical Consulting, which helps you empower yourself for better health with the number one podcast for patient advocacy. And this week we have a doozy, of course, this is men's health month. And I thought, no other topic, right? If I had to choose one topic that really hit home and hammer home when we talk about men and ways that we can work on getting them to see the doctor more, know the topic shot to the top of my mind as well as my read my mind than sexual health. And today we're going to be talking about those big two letters, ED - erectile dysfunction. And I thought it get, you know what, I do have some experience taking care of patients with ED, but who better to really educate the community and really expand the knowledge base of the Lunch and Learn community than urologists. And I was very fortunate for this urologist coming on the show, this is Dr. Jennifer Miles-Thomas. She earned her medical degree from Northwestern University school of medicine. She cleared her undergrad degree in biology at Virginia Commonwealth University. She did a general surgery internship at John Hopkins and completed a urology residency as well as a separate fellowship and female urology and neurology at the James Buchanan Brady Urological Institute. Dr. Jenn Miles-Thomas is a diplomat of the American Board of Urology and she is also a board certified and female pelvic medicine and reconstructive surgery. So again, I know that may seem like a mouthful, but you know, short and sweet Dr. Jenn is absolutely amazing and she is crazy smart, right? If you had to think about what does all that mean? That's probably just me as those who send in this podcast. She is absolutely brilliant and we're in for a treat. And I could tell you during this interview if I wish you could see some of my facial expressions that I was making during the time when she was really explaining and educating me through Lunch and Learn community members. The different ways and treatment modalities associated with erectile dysfunction. So you guys are in for a treat. Remember like always, if you have not had a chance, go ahead and subscribe to the podcast, leave a five-star review and comment for the podcast as well as make sure you tell a friend, tell a friend, tell a friend to just share podcasts. Especially because I know someone has someone in a family member, especially male, right? Who has not seen a doctor in years. And I hate to say that you're partly to blame, but if someone's not seeing the doctor in years and years, seeing the doctor regularly, that's something that we, we need to address ASAP. If someone is not going to a doctor, especially in male, right? And you're also not going to the doctor, is going to be very difficult for you to try to convince that man that he needs to go see a physician as well. So please take the time to listen, again, we're talking about sexual health, we talk about few things as well, especially associated with Dr. Jenn as far as what she does on the size, especially from a business standpoint. You guys are gonna want to stick around for that. So again, leave her five-star review. Let me know how you feel. And again, thank you for all that you do. You guys have a great and blessed day and let's get ready for another amazing episode here on the Lunch and Learn with Dr. Berry. Episode Dr. Berry: Alright, Lunch and Learn community again you just heard this amazing introduction from an expert that I definitely think is needed, right? Especially in this month of men's health month. And I have always joked in the past, but I really, I kind of say half-jokingly, a lot of times when I get men to come in my office to see me on an outpatient visit, right? This was this field, right? It was one of the main reasons why they would come, right? Like there are usually two reasons. One, family member drags him. Two, got some sexual issues, right? And of course, obviously I could talk from an internist standpoint, but I figured, you know, let's get an expert to come in and help educate us and you know, kind of get us mindset ready for the month and really show us, you know, why this is such an important topic, right? Even though we kind of say jokingly, right? This is actually an extremely important topic for men, right? Because again, like I said, it is one of the main reasons why I would get him to come see me in my office, right? So again, first of all, thank you for joining the Lunch and Learn community. Dr. Jenn: Oh, you're so welcome. Thank you for having me. Dr. Berry: So, Dr. Jenn, I told them about your amazing bio and just give the audience just, you know, let's say for some reason they skipped the introduction and they want to know, like, who's the person on the podcast this week? Right? Like, tell us something that may not be in your bio. And it says like, hey, you know, this is why I'm who I am. Dr. Jenn: I live in a very interesting life. I am a urologist who is a female, who is African American. So there's only really a few of us across the country. (Yeah. That is so true.) Yeah. What else is interesting? I'm married with three children, so that's a little bit different. Sometimes it's hard to balance a high powered, stressful career and a family. And I've recently gotten into extreme sports, so I've been snowboarding and I just finished a triathlon this past weekend, so I'm kind of all out there. Dr. Berry: Oh Wow. That's okay, alright. I love it. Okay. That's how you started the show, right? This type of show about to go on. Right? (Exactly.) So Lunch and Learn community, we talked, you know, if you caught the most recent episode, if you caught the live streams, you know that June is men's health month and you know that I have made it a point to try to call out my male listeners and my male friends and family members to really stress the importance of health awareness and why we're dedicating a whole month for that? Cause that's always the big issue, right? Like why am I getting home on this specific topic? And why is men's health month so important? Because really it's killing us. Right? And I've talked about it before. The top 10 leading causes in the world, men dominate those categories, right? Why? Because, you know, we're just not taking care of ourselves. So I wanted to get on Jenn to, again, in urology. And like I say, I don't know if you realize it like, especially when you think about urology is usually not one way you think about. But female urologist, right? So just the how like that subcategory namely African-American is, you know, this is a gem that was actually, you know, we're finding here to be able to kind of talk to her, which I'm definitely excited for. So Dr. Jenn, if you would just kind of give the Lunch and Learn little bit introduction on, you know what actually is the urology? Just so you can kind of get in the same mental ballpark of where we're at. Dr. Jenn: Yeah. So it's interesting. So a urologist is a specialist who also a surgeon who works with the organs of the genital-urinary tract. So in English, what does that mean? That means it's a doctor. I know. So that means I’m a doctor who deals with problems of the kidney, the bladder, the testicles, the prostate, the penis, in men and women. So sometimes it's medical therapy and sometimes it's surgery. We do both. But those are the organs we take care of. Dr. Berry: It is really kind of interesting. I'm an internist. For those for some reason is the first time catching a show, I'm an internist so I practice in the hospital. But what made you say, you know, urology is the field for me? Dr. Jenn: So the real story is I thought I was going to be like the female version of Ben Carson. So I was going into med school, but I do neurosurgery, right? But sometimes that's very hard and I'm a big quality of life person and sometimes there are things you just can't fix. And after a couple of cases that were out of everyone's control emotionally, I didn't know if I could do that every day. Sometimes you'll see a 30-year-old who has a bleed and they'll never be the same and some things you can fix them some things you can't. And I said, well, I know I really want to focus on the quality of life. So one of my friends, of course, who's male was said, hey, you should do urology. And I was like, Oh yeah, that's a bunch of old men. Like, why would I wanna do urology? This is real talk. Okay, why would I want to do that? Right. So I did a rotation like we do in medical school, and every time I went into the room, the wives would be, are you going into urology? Let me tell you about my problem. And I was like, well, what's going on here? Like why are these people asking me? And I didn't know at the time that there weren't very many female urologists. So probably when I started they were probably less than 5% in the country. Now it's like seven and a half percent. But I mean, I've been out for more than a decade. Yeah. There are not that many female urologists. There are quite a few residents who are coming through. The classes are more 50-50 which is great. But still, I mean there was definitely a need. So I decided to go into it and I love it. I would never do anything different. This is who I am and what I needed to go into. Because urology, it's one of those fields where it's very technical, it's very surgical. But what you're talking about on a daily basis is what people don't want to talk about. It's what they're afraid to mention. They don't tell other people, they don't even tell their wives or their husbands really what's going on and you're able to give them back that quality of life. So for me, every day it's a gift. Dr. Berry: I’m glad that you touched on that way because I can tell you I've had plenty appointments where the guy comes in for a very vague reason and you know right when I'm about to try to get out there and say “doc, doc before you leave”. Once I know I get one of those, hey doc before you leave, I already know exactly the direction go. It's so taboo that even when they come to see, you know, their regular outpatient clinical doctor for your checkup, it's very tough for them to even come out and say it, which is mind-boggling. Right? Because you would think like, hey no, that issue. If I'm having problems with that area, right? Like I want to make sure like that's the first thing I'm putting down on paper. (Yes.) Nope. They'll say, no, I had a cold and that's why I'm here. I definitely, and I love that you get that even on both friends. Right? Because I would figure it with women, it'd be a little bit more open. So I interested to hear that. Even on both sides, some people are very secretive on, you know, letting them know like these are some of the problems I'm dealing with. Dr. Jenn: Exactly. And I think it's a little bit different because in my world I just directly ask. So it's not that you have to wait and say, okay, as I'm walking in the door and kind of build up the courage, I'm just going to ask you how your erections are, how many times you get up at night, how are your erections? It's just regular, you know, it's a Tuesday. Why not? Dr. Berry: I love it. That's okay. That's fine. Okay, we like that way. Direct, no sugarcoating. This is why I'm here for it. Clearly, this is why you see me now. Now especially for urologic standpoint is that a lot of the different reasons why someone may come to see you just, I obviously we're talking about sexual health. I like this is what are somebody like the common issues and complaints and that you may see it as like, oh, I'm coming to see you for this. Dr. Jenn: Sure. So it's not just erectile dysfunction. A lot of times we'll see people for kidney stones, we'll see people for kidney tumors or bladder cancer, a lot of prostate cancer. Sometimes people will just have blood in their urine or bladder infections or they'll have like testicular pain or especially for women incontinence or leaking during the day and having to wear pads. So we see people for a variety of reasons. Dr. Berry: And obviously, has definitely, something that from your logical standpoint, I think it's a very interesting, right? Because a lot of times I think when we think of surgical specialties, we tend to think that they all they do with surgery. Right? And very interesting to understand like, no, there's a lot of clinical and you know, even psychosocial if I would like to stretch it issues kind of centered around some of the stuff that people are coming to see you for. Dr. Jenn: Exactly. Urology has one of those fields where you can operate and do very large major cases. You can do a lot of bread and butter, common cases. And then as you get older and closer to retirement, there are many things you can just do in the office. So it's one of those professions where you can do it throughout your career. Dr. Berry: Obviously, we wanna, you know, we’ll hit home because this is definitely, you know, the reason why someone's listening to at least this week's episode. Right. So let's talk about sexual health, right? And I know we alluded to it, but like how important is it, right? Especially from the men and women with obviously is men's health month, we'll give them a shy, we'll definitely bring you on. We need to talk about the women because I definitely don't want to make sure you eat them out. (Okay.) In that regards. But especially for men, like I like how important is sexual health for them, right? Like what is some of the like, oh, before I came to see you this house for a little bit after you take care of me. Like this is how I'm building now. Dr. Jenn: So regardless of what's on the news where people say sexual health is very, very important. Why? Because it's part of you. I mean, we're all animals. We all have the same instincts and when something doesn't work or it's change, how do you feel about yourself, you don't feel the same. So it's not that people fall into depression, but they just, they've lost a part of their life, a part of their relationship that was very, very important to them. This is psychological. This is physical. A lot of times with sexual dysfunction, there may be other things medically going on at the same time. So sometimes it's like the red flag of, Hey, where else do we need to look? What else could be going on at the same time? So I'd say this is very important and I think people realize it's important, but there's such a taboo about talking about it. I mean, of course, our popular media has changed and sex is a lot more out there. But when people are talking about their own personal sexuality and health, it's still taboo. Dr. Berry: Do you find the conversation a little bit more difficult because you are a female urologist when you're in your office or is it by the time they come they see you like they've already kind of cleared that hurdle? Dr. Jenn: So it's funny. So I would say that it's generational. So the Millennials, they don't care. They just want their stuff fixed regardless. Any boundaries whatsoever, everything will tell me what they did, how they did it and what they want to do in the future. They don't really have an issue. The kind of middle age, I would say like 30 to 60 takes a few minutes just for going to comfortable. But then they realized my personality is like, Hey, this is, this is just what we do and we're going to just say it and I'm going to ask you questions and we're going to help fix the problem. They get very comfortable. Over 65 or 70 sometimes it takes them a little while because first of all, they're from a generation where they didn't really talk about sex the same way that current generations do, and sometimes they never were really educated about their body or what was normal, what's not normal, what things should look like, what they should feel like, what are other signs? So after probably one or two sessions, then, oh, they open up about everything and sometimes they'll bring their wives. So we all can have the same discussion and figure out what's going on and how we could help. Dr. Berry: Okay, alright. Let’s make it a group appointment. Dr. Jenn: Yep. I have quite a few group appointments. It's okay. Dr. Berry: So speaking of a normal, what's not normal, right? Let talk about, you know, EB - erectile dysfunction, right? For Lunch and Learn community who may have been living under a rock and you know, we haven't seen one of those thousand commercials. Right? What is it exactly? Dr. Jenn: Okay. So the technical definition of ED or erectile dysfunction is, it's the ability to attain or maintain a penile erection sufficient for satisfactory sexual performance. So what does that mean? That means if you have difficulty either getting or keeping an erection that's good enough for you is what ED is. (Very subjective.) It is. So some people have don't have erections but don't care well, you know, that's perfectly fine. Other people, it takes them a little bit longer to ejaculate or they ejaculate too early and that's fine for them and that's fine. But anywhere in the middle, it's all based upon your own personal satisfaction. Dr. Berry: It was interesting. Do you tend to find common reasons for why that may occur? Is there a couple of things I get they, everyone who follows in this category always seems to have ED or what does someone have some of the causes that you've seen kind of work that are associated with ED? Dr. Jenn: Well, the biggest cause, especially in America is diabetes. (Okay. Alright.) Yeah. So diabetes, like I kind of explained it to people. Well you know what as it affects the small blood vessels and the small nerves and it's kind of interesting because if you relate it back and you say, you know how sometimes your fingertips will tangle or your toes will tangle or they're a go numb and you don't feel them. That's because those little small blood vessels of the small nerves aren't getting what they need because the sugar control is out of control and it's damaging. The same thing with your penis. It basically has really small nerves and sometimes if things aren't going to work it's because your blood sugars have been too high. So you really have to work on getting your blood sugars under control in order to get back some of this function. And when you kind of make it like that analogy, it makes sense. It's something tiny and small and diabetes affects the tiny small blood vessels. Dr. Berry: I love that, especially cause I know for Lunch and Learn community members like we've talked about diabetes and we've talked about all of the effects of diabetes. I even wrote a blog where I said I don't even wish diabetes on my worst enemy just because of all of the different things it's associated with. So now we know, you know, especially for as again, if you're diabetic and you're just blowing it off as just a sugar disease, now you can see, especially from a man, right? Cause we're talking to them in this men month, right? This is another reason why you should take care of yourself. Right? Because you don't want to have ED, you don't want ED to take care of your diabetes. So that's, okay. I love it. Dr. Jenn: Exactly. Now, other things we have to think about too, we’re learning and associating a lot more with heart disease. Because again, it's the small blood vessels that are feeding the penis. So if someone has early onset erectile dysfunction, like their thirties and forties we're also working with cardiologists to screen them and to make sure that they don't have plaques or cardiovascular disease because the small blood vessels are usually affected first. Dr. Berry: Now is that something that comes up just while you're asking a lot of your questions, like, hey, do you have this, do you have that? Do you have this? And then it you just kind of seeing this correlation kind of growing? Dr. Jenn: Yes, definitely. So of course when you're seeing a patient and you have their medical lists, do you know what medications they're on? You know their past medical history, but if someone who's never been in the system, and it's just coming to you for this, this is what we screen for. If you look at the major academic centers, most of them have men health clinics and it's usually an internist or urologist as well as a cardiologist because we're finding that these overall health syndromes, metabolic syndromes are being diagnosed with people first seeking care for erectile dysfunction. Dr. Berry: Wow. Okay. Alright. So again, if you're listening, if you're paying attention, especially for, let's say you have a family member or friend who you know, is suffering from some of these other diseases and it's very difficult to get them to come to the doctor, right? This now you have another weight in, right? You don't want to, hey, you know, you'll take your blood pressure. This can also happen, right? Cause again, usually two reasons. Usually, a family member is forcing them to come to the doctor's office or they got some sexual issues, right? So again, this is another way that we can kind of like start pushing them in back into the doctor's office and getting them right. Again, they're aware of just everything that's kind of going on. Thank you. Thank you for that. (No problem.) So when they come to you and you know what you do your screening and they're checking all the boxes off for ED. Of course, I'm pretty sure by the time they've seen those thousands of commercials. Right? But what are some of the treatment options that are out there? One, what we'll talk about the common ones, the one that they may not even know about? Dr. Jenn: Yes. First of all, of course, I have to say this disclaimer and this warning, everything that you see on TV or can order on the Internet isn't safe for you. (Yes. And then the gas station.) The gas station attendant does not know more than your doctor about your erectile dysfunction. That's all I got to say. But honestly, the FDA did a recent crackdown and urologist across the country got a notification. Some of these medications, I wouldn't say medications in quotes that are available over the internet that thought excellent results in work actually have controlled medications and them like generics and Viagra and Cialis and things like that. And so we get updates and kind of the names of over the counter medications that we need to look out and screen our patients for because yes, everyone knows the names of these brand new medications, but honestly, they're expensive. So people try to find other things that will work instead. But unfortunately, things that aren't controlled by the FDA or go through a rigorous screening process, things that are like natural types of products sometimes aren't always in your best interest to use because they do have active ingredients from drugs that are controlled and there are always potential side effects. You don't really know what you're taking. So I just want to put that warning out there. But the first day and for treatment option is to kind of divide and see what's your actual issue is. So I get the question all the time. Is it my testosterone? Do I need testosterone? (Yes. Let’s talk about that.) Allow me to tell you about testosterone. Testosterone is important for men. So it's actually made by your testicles. So a signal from your brain goes down to your testicles and says, hey, we need more testosterone floating in your bloodstream. When you have normal levels of testosterone, you have a libido. And what's libido? Libido is the desire to have sex or to engage in like sexual activity. Now if you give someone testosterone, you will increase their libido. But that does not mean that they'll get an erection. So you have, when you come in and say, I have erectile dysfunction, can I have testosterone? If your testosterone is low, just know that you may have a libido, but that doesn't always mean that your erection will change. Okay. So what do we do for actual erections? Well, the way I practice, we always go from least invasive to most invasive. I first want to make sure there's nothing medically wrong like there is not a tumor or something else that we can see what's going on that may be causing a problem. But if there's not in the first thing we can try as oral medication, and it's the ones that we know in medical lingo, we call them PDE five inhibitors. And basically what happens is when you get an erection, your brain puts out a signal and the nerves basically send and this transmitter that says, hey, I need blood flow in. And as the cylinders fill in the penis, it cuts off the vein. So you don't draw that blood back out. So your penis just fills and then it stays that way until your brain says, oh, I'm done. And then it stops feeling and it slowly gets smaller as the blood drains back out. So that's actually how an erection work. Now the other thing that's important is an erection is different than orgasm or ejaculation. They are controlled by different nerves. So one set of nerves gives you the erection. The other set of nerves allows you to ejaculate during an orgasm. (So actually problems in different sections.) Exactly. (Okay.) And also you can have an orgasm without having an erection. So that's why we have like a real conversation when we have these things. Because I mean, how would you know that unless you actually asked? It's not like you can just Google it, right? Probably can, but I haven't tried to. It's best if you actually just talked to someone. Dr. Berry: Lunch and Learn community, please talk personal. No Google. Dr. Jenn: So after the medications, there are other things you can do too. So a lot of people know about the medications, some of them are more expensive. But the good news is a lot of generics are now in the market. So yes, there are much more affordable. But let's say you try to medications and they don't work or you don't feel good or right when you're taking them or they don't work well enough. The next one, there's actually a little insert, it looks like a little tablet that you can put at the tip of your penis and it has medication that causes the blood to flow into your penis. That's an option. (Oh Wow. Okay.) There is also an injection. So you know how there are when people have diabetes, there are these little pens that you can inject the insulin. Well, there's a little kind of a little injection that you can inject on the side of your penis and also we'll put medication directly into your penis and cause you to have an erection. Dr. Berry: So let me stop you there. Right? (Okay, good.) When I had my diabetic patients, they're not get drilled and I gotta have that discussion where I'm saying, hey, you know what, the pills not working no more. You have to start injecting yourself and I know the face and the fight against once I have to go that right, like how does that conversation when you're telling the person like, hey those bills aren't the thing for you. We got to start injecting yourself and only if you had to start injecting directly in your penis. Right? Like what is that conversation like in the office? Dr. Jenn: So I get the same response kind of wide eyes like oh that's not going to happen. And then the next question is does it work? And when I say yes it works and people are very happy that can do it, they set out at least try it. Now we don't just send somebody home with the needle to stick in their penis. Like that's not what we do. We actually have nurses. So you come in for an appointment and we have to dose the medication because we want you to be able to get an erection. But we don't want you to have it all day, right? So we have to make sure you get the right dose of medication. So we actually have, it's called ICI, we actually have nurses who would just come see you as an appointment, we'd give you a test dose, we'd make sure you get an adequate erection, and then we also make sure it goes down and usually we have your partner there with you because sometimes people mentally can't do it and sometimes their partners are able to do it for them. Or once they see it they say, oh, it's not as big of a deal as I thought it was going to be. It doesn't hurt as much. I had never even heard that I could do that. So it was a little bit weird. But then once you do it and then you get a great erection and it works, people are happy. Dr. Berry: Okay. Now is there, especially, I'm tripping on this injection thing. Is there something like an office right that reverses it or is it just kind of like supposed to go down on its own over time? Dr. Jenn: So it's supposed to go down on its own over time because the medications aren't long acting. They're shorter acting. (Okay.) That's why we do the first trials in the office because if it doesn't go down then we give you medication to make it go down. Now there's also another option that you can have and it's called a vacuum erection device and what it looks like kind of, look at him. Dr. Berry: Lunch and Learn community you could see my face right now. I am learning just as long as relating, I'm like, okay. Alright. Again, I’m an internist, by this time, I'm referring them to the urologist. I don't. Okay, so now I'm processing right with you. Dr. Jenn: Okay. So if vacuum erection device looks like a little cylinder, and what it does is at one end of the cylinder near the base of the penis, it has like a little, I don't know, think of it as like a little rubber band and you can basically like squeezed a little cylinder. And what happens is it's a vacuum, so it draws blood into your penis and then you roll down the little kind of rubber band on it and that rubber band prevents the blood from flowing back into your body. (Okay.) So this is something that's, it's a little bit less spontaneous, but still, there are no needles, there's no medication. That's something natural and you can do it on your own and it does work. All the vacuum erection device. And then if none of that works, there are penile prostheses. So a prosthetic is a device that we surgically put inside of your penis. And usually what we do is we have a little pump that looks like a little squeeze pump that we put next to your testicles and all you have to do is squeeze that pump and then your penis would pump up because we actually have a reservoir with like saline or water in it that fills those little tubes. So if nothing else works, that's a guaranteed way to get an erection. Dr. Berry: Now is the stepwise approach for this patient, right? Is that the end? I'm like, this didn't work, this didn't work, this didn't work. Alright, let's go to the prostheses. Or is it kind of patient dependent when you're kind of deciding like, all right, which route we're gonna go end up mean? Dr. Jenn: So typically it step-by-step, but it's patient driven. So if I see a 30-year-old who's never tried a drug, we're gonna, I'm gonna let them know that there is the option for prosthesis, but that's not what's recommended. So you try to do minimal to get the benefit. And then if you fail or you're not willing to do it, you can move on. But a penile prosthesis, that's the end. That's what we have to offer. It does work, but you can't go back. So once you have the surgery that means that the medications won't work. Injections won't work. You have the surgery. So that's why it's the last thing that we do. Dr. Berry: You mentioned 30-year-old because that gives pressure someone to my own community. It was like 30 because I know they're probably thinking this is a quote-unquote old man's disease. What some of the age ranges that you're seeing with patients with erectile dysfunction that even someone in Lunch and Learn community might be surprised by like, oh my God, they're that old dealing with this problem? Dr. Jenn: Yeah. So from young in the thirties, twenties and thirties sometimes I've seen college kids who everything was fine and now situationally with the new girlfriend or whoever, I'm just not able to get an erection and we kind of work through what's going on because remember, this is all controlled by the brain. There's something going on in the brain that's prohibiting it from making that message to get an erection and there are actual sexual therapists. These aren't like woo on TV people. These are real people who say, okay, let's break it down. What's actually going on in your life that is causing you to feel this way, is causing your brain not to secrete the right neurotransmitters for you to actually have an erection. And it does help. I've seen people who couldn't ejaculate, couldn't have orgasms. They meet with these therapists and they're like, my eyes were opened and things are all good now and it's real. And you just never thought you'd be talking about your sex life with someone, but you know what? It's quality of life. Either you can stay the way that you are or you can get it fixed and since there are people available to fix it, that's what you do and you move on. And you keep doing live in life. Dr. Berry: Exactly. Oh, I love it and tell you I'm loving this conversation guys. I wish you get to see my face during some of the parts so you can understand. It's a learning process for it all. And it's real because these are real-life conversations that we're having on a day to day basis. Again, if you have to scare, some of your friends or family members to get it into the doctor's office, to get this taken care of, please do so. Right? Cause it, it, it needs to be done because this isn't something that, again, I know you see that thousands of commercials and I know we're going to ask Dr. Jenn where should someone go look, right? Cause I know where it, we're saying don't go to doctor Google. Right? We already know, Lunch and Learn community members you all googling when I tell you don't Google, you're going to Google anyway. Even when I tell you don't go to YouTube and watch that surgery beforehand, you're going to do it. They were like, we just know how you all do now. Is there any viable sources that you will say like, hey, if you got to like read up on this subject, like read this website, like is there anywhere that you would point on to? Dr. Jenn: Yeah. So for urologists across the US we have, it's called the urology care foundation. So it's ways to educate patients on urologic conditions. So it's the legitimate source of information. It's not a company trying to sell you anything, it's just the real deal of this is what you need to do and it's written in plain, straight forward English and that would be urologyhealth.org. So Urology is U R O L O G Y health dot org. The other sites that are good and give straightforward information would be mayoclinic.org or webmd.com. Those are actually good, straightforward information and someone who wants a little bit more detail and are like, okay, I've read all that. It's kind of generic but I want more detail. Our Actual Association for Urologist has a great website too for under education and it'll show you what all the guidelines are. So like if you're hearing this from one person, you're not sure, you can actually see what the published guidelines are and every few years, every like four or five years, we all get together and we revise them and say, this is what the data shows us, this is what standard of care is, this is what you should be offering, this is what you need to think about. And that is auanet.org and that's for the urology association and that's the standard of care. So those are ones that are just straightforward. You can get the real deal information with no bias and understand why this has happened. Dr. Berry: And Lunch and Learn community members, just like always, all of these links, especially if you're driving, you're at work, wherever you're at listening to this, all these things will be in the show notes. So you know, I definitely want to make sure we're pointing you in the right direction. Because it's important to hear it because I know you guys, you guys are gonna want to follow up to make sure we not talking crazy. So we've got to point you to the right direction to make sure that doesn't occur as well. So again, I've done thank you for that, right. Because this is again, this has been very eye-opening, mind-blowing experience. I'm learning, I'm out to go to the website right when we're done, just don't make sure I can educate my patients, and of itself with such an important topic at hand, this is a portion of the podcast that I love, right? Because you know, I bring a guest on to really educate our community. But I'm just kinda selfish, right? Cause I also bring them on, right? Cause I really want to promote them right. And you know, say what, how to cause most of the people I kind of see and follow them. I'm shadow following them one way or the other. So I like to see people who are sending out doing some stuff, right? Like, and whether it's medicine, not medicine, doing some stuff is always something that I love to see out of our physicians. So this I like to call it, it's like our promo, our promo appeared. Right? Dr. Jenn, obviously we know you're amazing urologists. Is there anything that you do that someone in Lunch and Learn community may be able to benefit from or any books or whatever? This is your time, right? You tell us what you got going on and anything going on and let us know how we can continue to support you. Dr. Jenn: Well, I told you I'm a big quality of life person, right? So a lot of times what I see, especially with patients in medicine, is that a lot of times people don't search for answers because of money. Medicine is getting more and more expensive and the way that the insurance companies are moving, they're pushing more and more of that onto the patients. I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. Those insurance companies are really the wealthiest ones in the game. So they're going to determine what we do, (keep that money to themselves.) Exactly. Exactly. So what I do is I actually talk about money. I talk about money on Instagram and online too, and kind of help people figure out how to get a debt, how to build wealth, and how did it get their stuff together. Because if that's one less thing you have to worry about, think about your overall mental health. If you're no longer stressed about having to pay bills if you're no longer stressed about, how am I going to rob Peter to pay Paul, things like that. I think I'm just a person who has a lot of tough conversations and sex and money are the two things that people don't want to talk about in public. (I love it.) So that's what I talk about for sure. So on Instagram now, it was kind of embarrassing because I do put some of my personal life out there on Instagram. So on Instagram, I'm doctor, which is Dr. Jenn, J. E. N. N. M. D. That's probably the easiest place to kind of follow me and kind of see what I do. I put some of the pictures of me out and about doing some of my extreme sports on there too. Dr. Berry: Then that's what I want to go see doing extreme sports. I want to see that. Dr. Jenn: Yeah, well the snowboarding was interesting. I only did the before picture. Right. So it's all good. But yeah, that'd be the best way to follow me and my links to my website. It's drjennmd.com. All that stuff is on Instagram too, so you can kind of get a little picture of my life and how I really role. Dr. Berry: I love it. So we need to talk to Dr. Jenn. Get our messages together and get our sexual health together. Get our money together. Let's get all that. Right? And it’s 2019. We're halfway through the year. Definitely no time like the present especially for a men's health month and making sure we are getting all of our ducks in line, especially when it comes to sexual health and the importance of sexual health and the massive education lesson that we got today. Definitely thankful for Dr. Jenn. Thank you. Dr. Jenn: Oh, you're so welcome. You're so very welcome. Dr. Berry: Yes. So before I leave, how I was like answer this question. How is what you're doing helping to empower men especially when we talk about sexual health? What are you doing to really empower this and get them to make sure that they’ve taken better care to sexual health? Dr. Jenn: I'm asking the questions and I'm educating them because as we know, knowledge is power. If you don't know, you'll get left behind. There are a lot of people out there that have resources that are getting things fixed and done. There's a lot of small little things you can do to change your overall quality of life, but if you don't know what to ask or don't know something is available, you're going to miss out. So I think my role is really to ask those hard questions and educate my patients. People I see, people I come in contact with, that's what my role is to educate. Dr. Berry: I love it. And for those who may know, again Dr. Jenn obviously being a urologist, being African American and female, obviously there's you know, proponent of women's health that really goes into a lot of care to and of course, and I kind of pick and hold there on this episode, really talk about the men, but she will be, I'm going to beg her, we'll be coming back, right? Because I definitely wanted to hear about a lot of the women's health-related amongst sexual health and all the urological problems that I know they got. Right. Why? Because trust me, if you think I'm referring fast when it comes to men talking about sexual health and all the things you best believe once my women patients say like, hey Dr. Pierre, like this is happening. I'm having problems urinating. Anything that goes on in that area, is okay, alright. There you go. So we'll definitely make sure she comes on to really educate us on woman side as well too. So again Dr. Jenn, thank you for really taking the time out to educate Lunch and Learn community. I know this extremely informal cause I'm still like, okay, I'm still thinking about the pump. I was still thinking about it. And you have a great day. Thank you. Dr. Jenn: Alright. Thank you so much. Download the MP3 Audio file, listen to the episode however you like.

  EPISODE 14 – HOW TO GET FREE PR FOR YOUR BUSINESS Why hello and welcome.  Welcome to Episode 14 of the Small Business Made Simple Podcast. Now my business philosophy is that business is simple but it’s definitely NOT EASY – and there’s a massive distinction which I know I don’t need to tell any of you about! And a lot of it is about consistency and commitment.  For those of you who follow me on social or listened to Episode 1 of this podcast will know that at the end of 2018 I committed to doing 52 of these – 1 a week for 52 weeks.  So far so good! But now I’m putting it up a notch.  I have a great little Facebook Group I’m building called Like Minded Business Owners – I’d love you to join – just search Like Minded Business Owners on Facebook!  I know we all belong to lots of groups on Facebook so I’ve been pondering what I can do that’s different – so, again, I am making the commitment to go, at least once a week to help YOU my listen and those in my world with their biggest challenges or those burning marketing and social media questions. I’m going to go live every Thursday.  So if you’d like to connect and get social on social – head over and join my group.  I would LOVE you to come over and say HI! But onto today’s episode.  Today I’ve got a special guest.  Her name is Jules Brooke and she is coming along to talk to us about how you can get FREE PR for your business.  PR stands for press release – so basically Jules is going to tell us how we can get in newspapers, online blogs, or even on TV!  I 100% guarantee you it’s not as hard as you think.  I write for a couple of magazines each quarter and I got those gigs simply by reaching out to them a little while ago – now they just keep coming back and back for more! Big, small, micro, medium – whatever, FREE PR is a fabulous way to not only build your audience, your customer or client base, but also to set yourself up as the expertise in your industry – whatever that is. Jules has some really practical tips and tricks so if you haven’t done much PR in your business or haven’t tried it as a marketing strategy – then listen up – you will be inspired to do so! But first, of course, our Discovery of the Week. THIS WEEK’S DISCOVERY! This week’s discovery has come just in time for me this week! As mentioned just before, I have a guest coming on to chat today.  So, I needed a transcript for my Show Notes – which incidentally you can get a www.socialmediaandmarketing.com.au Normally I use www.rev.com they will transcribe your videos for you and then allow you to have captions on your video – which is becoming more and more important – just saying! Rev costs about a $1 a minute – pretty good really and a fabulous service. But that’s not my discovery. Today I used www.otter.ai to do my transcription.  It’s FREE so I thought I’d give it ago so I could recommend it to you all. It was super easy – I just uploaded my audio file and it didn’t too long at all to transcribe.  About 2 or 3 minutes (but my NBN was playing up a little!). Was it as good as Rev.?  No, it wasn’t.  I certainly had to go through and correct some words and phrases and it did take a little time to make corrections. Would I use it again – absolutely – but probably on shorter videos – like ones for social media rather than for my Podcast. So, if you need some video transcription – go to www.otter.ai or www.rev.com and have a look.  Transcription of video and audio are becoming more than more important in our digital marketing lives.  So well worth a look at both! HOW TO GET FREE PR IN YOUR BUSINESS Just before I bring Jules on – I wanted to tell you a little about her.  I have known Jules personally for about 3 or 4 years now and I can tell you, hand on heart, she is probably one of the most passionate people I have ever met about their business. I love Jules because I think she’s a little like me – go hard or go home.  Be 100% on something or don’t bother. She’s a real go getter.  Jules founded HYOPR in 2008 after the GFC made funds even tighter for already cash-strapped small businesses. Having run her own small business and specialised in small-business PR for many years, Jules had seen the power of PR to transform and grow businesses first hand. She also knew that many small businesses had incredible stories to tell, that the media is desperate for new content all the time and that PR is a process that can be taught. With this knowledge, Jules has set out to empower small businesses to manage their own PR. I know you’re going to love this episode with Jules – so let’s get into it. Jenn Donovan So, thanks, Jules, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today. For those out there who don't know you, can you tell us a little bit about Jules Brooks and what handle your own PR is all about? Jules Brooke   I sure can. Okay, so I, I basically fell into PR myself in about 2003 when I had a little baby and I got a job from someone, which was to do with PR, and I didn't have a clue how to do it. But I really needed the work. So, I kind of taught myself how to do it. And then on the back of that I set up an agency and we specialized in small businesses and start-ups. So, I did that for about 2003 whilst running the agency until about 2014. And then I thought, you know what I just want to focus on Handle Your Own PR. So, I gave my agency away to my business partner, who have been helped me found Handle Your Own PR, and she gave me this one. And at the time, she said, I think you've made the wrong decision. It was great. I was like, I haven't because I love teaching people how to do PR. So, on the back of that in 2017, we launched a PR platform, which is really unique. There isn't anything really like it in the in the world, particularly targeting small business owners. A platform called Handle Your Own PR (www.handleyourownpr.com.au) and what you do is you can go on, you choose the media that you want to contact. So, I've got categories and subcategories, so you choose who your target market is. And then you choose whether you want TV, radio, print, or whatever. And then there's a template on there so that you can write your media release. And then you actually get to see the journalist’s names, their phone numbers, their email addresses, and you choose who you want to send it to. And you can send it from the platform, it goes from your own email address. So, all the answers go back from the journalists to you. But it's a really easy way that you can send out and then do your follow up. So, it's all in one platform. And it's less than $400 a year. So that has always been my focus to make things affordable for small business owners. And then I started training people and I've got two or three different coaching programs. Now, almost all of them include journalists that come along that you can pick their brains about what's the best angle for my story, or what's the best way for me to get it out there. And they work with you to come up with the angle, and then they edit your media release. So, you still learn how to write because I think that's really important. Even people that can't write, and I can't tell you how many people come to my courses saying they can't, write. It's only four or 500 words really for a media release. So, we just help you get that hook and help you understand what the media is looking for. So that's kind of what Handle Your Own PR is. And I've got, I've helped people do over 650 campaigns now. So, it's pretty exciting. And at the PR accelerators, which is my sort of main focus, we have a 90% success rate. So, everyone is getting published and 50% of them are getting on TV. So pretty exciting. Jenn Donovan Yeah, that's really exciting. So, I guess Jules, when you talk PR, what is PR? What does PR look like? You know, as far as getting your message out there? And why PR as opposed to every other piece of marketing that we could do - all the other marketing channels? Why is this an important one? I guess a lot of small business owners don't really look into. Jules Brooke I think that is a really, really good question. Because a lot of people confuse PR with social media as well. But the kind of PR I'm talking about. So, PR stands for public relations. But the kind of PR I'm talking about is getting yourself featured in the mainstream media. So, it's talking about getting yourself in magazines and newspapers, on radio and on TV and in blogs. So, it's not about getting yourself an Instagram influencer.   And the reason that I think a lot of people don't think about it is they think Firstly, that it's going to be really hard to do. Yeah, and I also think that people are intimidated by the idea of contacting the media, and we all have that kind of thing where we go little old me, like you wouldn't want to talk to a little old me. But the reality is that journalists are desperate for people to send them stories. We have a whole lot of journalists that come to our events, and one said that the journalists these days have to come up with seven articles a day. So, you do that by yourself, you have to have people give your ideas. Jenn Donovan Yeah, that's incredible. And I guess that was probably one of the biggest things that you taught me about PR, was that they actually they want to hear from me as much as I want to get contact with them.  Which you kind of almost think of these people is all my little superstars, you know, that superstar, they wouldn't want to hear from me, they write the x, y, and z or they're on TV. So that was a really big learning curve that you'd actually given me myself. So yeah, right. Thank you. Jules Brooke  And in terms of why PR is so good. It's because firstly, it's free. So, there is no money that exchanges hands, if you can come up with a good story, a magazine or a newspaper will run it and you don't have to pay them to do it. So that makes it very attractive if you've got a small budget. The other thing is that the other two things really are that you get that third-party endorsements. So instead of like with an ad, where you have to basically say aren't I great or isn't my business great, come and use me, this is somebody else saying, look at this great business, we found, or here are some great tips from an expert that we found. And on the back of that you get that third-party endorsement and people straight away go, Wow, I must go and check this out. There's none of that kind of have a shonky feeling because people feel that the media have checked you out first, and that you must be a leader in your field. And the other thing to go back to leader in your field is that positions you was being an expert. Yes. So you know, if you manage to write an article, for instance, if you wrote an article about you know, five things that small business owners are doing wrong when they use their social media channels, and you send that to a small business media outlets, they would love that, and they will run it for you. And that gives you credibility straightaway. Yeah. It's a beautiful thing, really. And there's a lot you can do with it afterwards. Jenn Donovan  Yeah, absolutely. repurposing marketing. Now, that's, you know, very sweet, very sweet piece of advice there. And so, I guess, Jules, is PR for every business? Is there any businesses that you've come across that PR just won't work for? or, conversely, is there any businesses it works exceptionally well for it? Jules Brooke  Look, the media really wants to talk to business owners. So, whether you pay an agency, or you do it yourself, in the end, you are the person that they want to speak to, because you're the expert in your particular area.  The kinds of businesses that I myself, it difficult to help people, if they're in a franchise, because what tends to happen in a franchise that you would; the way that PR works is that you send people to a website for more information. And if you're a franchise, you normally are going to send it to captain's news or, you know, whatever the name of your franchises, so therefore, you're benefiting everyone in the group and not just yourself. That can be a difficult one. And the other one is party plan. So even though you might have your own website for Jeunesse, or for thermomix, or whatever, you are still building the brand, and it's very hard to get those customers to go to your website and not just google thermomix and go and find whoever their local person is. So, they're probably the two that are hardest, but there is always a way to spin a story! Jenn Donovan So, I guess on that for people who might be listening today who haven't got to the stage yet, where they have a website, they might have their social media channels, but they don't actually have a website or they've even perhaps they have one that they're not happy to be seen. Because it needs updating and that sort of thing. What sort of advice can you give those people who might be listening? Jules Brooke Well, I would tell them to have a website. To be honest, I there is no other answer, I would have to say that these days, if you're in business, the first thing that people will do is Google you. And so, you have to have some kind of a web presence. So, the media won't send people to a Facebook page, or, or a LinkedIn profile, they will always want to send someone either to a bricks and mortar store, or to a website. But also, the journalist is going to Google you and they want to see what it is that you do, and all your potential customers do. So, my hint there would be it's 500 bucks, probably to put together a pretty simple website put together the website before, really you do very much marketing at all. I mean, really, websites are crucial these days, I think you've got to have a professional presence out there. Jenn Donovan  Yeah, I do totally agree with you that, unfortunately, you know, some people, it's just not in their budget and that sort of thing. But if they want to get their name out there if they want to, because obviously PR has the advantage of really growing business name, and you know, your profile and your expertise really quite quickly, as you know. And you are totally right, that if you're missing that element of a website, then perhaps you know, that's not making you look like the expert that people perceive you. Jules Brooke I've worked with some people that maybe just have a splash page, which is really just a single page under your domain. And ideally on there, you would say, you know, website coming soon, or we're fixing it up. If you're interested, you know, leave your email address. And that's one way of capturing people. So, you can market to them later. Yes, you've got to have some kind of a web presence, I think. Jenn Donovan Yeah. Okay. So, what makes a good PR piece like before you gave a really great, you know, headline about social media and that sort of thing. So, what are the elements that you're looking for? Because obviously, it's not written about me, if we take Social Media and Marketing Australia, my business, it's not about me, it's about you know, giving my expertise for free in the PR. So, what are the elements that make a really good PR article that we will be picked up quite quickly? Jules Brooke  Well, you actually said it perfectly, then. So, it's not about you, I think the biggest trick with PR is to realize it's not about you, it's about their readers. So, if you can give them something that adds to their knowledge that adds to their day that makes them laugh, that makes them cry, any of those sorts of things, then they're in. One of the things that we've just heard recently is how badly the digital media and looking for videos, which I didn't realize, so there's a little tip for you.  If you can send them a couple of minutes of video, that is information that is useful to their readers, they will apparently gobble that up. So, I'm about to start promoting that myself and see whether it works. Jenn So, you heard it here first guys!  Heard it here first! Jules The other thing that's really crucial to PR, particularly if you've got a product is your photography.   You won't get PR without a good photo. But the flip side is that I was speaking with the editor of a very influential magazine the other day, and she said, If I get a good photo, I'll find the flipping story. Like I'll work with you to get the story because the photo is so important to them. So that's the second thing. And then other than that, it just remember that if you're writing, you are not writing a letter to a journalist to ask them to write a story for you. You are really writing as if you are the journalist, and you're offering information to people. So, everybody is an expert at something everybody knows something that other people don't know. And I think one of the things that I say to people is if you go out to a barbecue or a party, and you tell people what you do, there will be those same three question questions that keep cropping up, the people always ask you take those questions, turn the question into a headline, and explain the or answer it underneath. And that's a really good way to get started. So, offering tips and advice is the easiest way to get coverage. And your chances of getting picked up become nine out of 10. You know, it's really, really probable that you will get picked up if you can offer some great tips for people or something they don't know. Jenn Donovan Yeah, okay. Excellent. Now, heading back a little bit, you did actually talk about a PR article, I think you said it was around five or 600 words. That is that kind of the norm of what you're looking for? Or what they're looking for? Jules Brooke  Yes, yes. So what you want to do is whether you're trying to get the journalist to write the story, which is what would happen in a newspaper, or if you are doing your own kind of tips for people, you want about four or 500 words, it needs to be very punchy, your first two or three sentences need to say what the whole media releases about. So, there is no point getting waffly at the beginning and then getting into the details, spin it all around, and put the detail up at the top. But you want five or 600 words, you want to get very quickly to the point and then you can expand on it underneath. And you need to make sure that all your details for how people can get to you by your website are down at the bottom. And that's pretty much it. Jenn Donovan Yep. Okay, beautiful. So, I talked to my audience about you know, whatever marketing they do to look at what the return on the investment is. So, I guess to do an article or to get on TV or to get in a newspaper or an online blog type of thing. What's the return on the investment? What do you generally see with your students and people who you have contact with, if they get that exposure? What sort of return on their investment today, I know the investments free, other than time? Jules Brooke There is a time investment. And normally a small amount of it, you know, like you might need to do something like sign up to our website for the contacts. But I mean, you could also research them if you literally have no money. So, the return on investment is huge. And I've got I've just been tracking all my students recently. So, the sorts of things that can happen. We had one person who got an article in Mamma Mia, she got 1000 extra likes on Instagram, within an hour of the article going out. We have a girl that was working with me today has had a whole lot of articles. Last year, she had a 23% increase on her social media following purely from the PR. She's also had each time she does an article, she gets at least two inquiries from new customers who will contact her saying I read this article about you, you know, where I get people at my accelerators from articles that I've original articles that have been written about me, you can often get speaking requests. So, one of one of the girls, who's had quite a few articles published now said that somebody had looked up Australia and expert on branding. And because she'd written so many articles, they contacted her and asked her if she would go to America to do a talk for them. Jenn Donovan  Wow! Jules Brooke That sort of thing can happen for you. If you start writing regular articles, the media will start to know what it is that you do, and they will come back to you for comments, because you are the expert in your field. And I had one other woman who was a business coach. And she did one article. I'm not actually sure where she got it in. But she said she got 16 new business inquiries that month, and that is the only thing that she did differently. Your customers will find you.  They will go looking for you if they like the sound of what it is that you're writing. Jenn Donovan Yeah. Yeah. Great. Very powerful. Yes. Well, it definitely sounds like it can be most certainly. And I guess you know, for anyone who's listening, I often talk about, it's not about the numbers. It's not how many likes you get and things like that on social media. But I guess the difference with what we're talking about today is they're qualified likes, they have literally engaged with you and now they're starting to follow you. So, it's not like running a competition where it could be Joe Blow who's decided to, you know, when the bars or something like that - qualified leads, possibly. So, it is a little bit different. So, if anyone's out there saying but Jenn you always say it's not about the likes, but genuinely engagement.  What Jules has just spoken about them is slightly different because they are highly qualified, because I've already had some sort of touch point with you. Jules Brooke Yes. And I couldn't agree with you more, having 1000 likes from people in India is of the next best thing to useless like they need to be your customer. By the way, let me just go back to how do you write a media release two other things, I forgot to say, if you're writing blogs, or you're writing articles for LinkedIn, then you're already writing what could be a media release. And if you actually sent that off to the media before you publish it yourself, it may get picked up, which means that you'd be able to use that article in your blog or in your social media, but with the extra cachet that it's been published by someone. Jenn Donovan I guess on that point, Jules, is that an important point - that it has to be original content, that it can't be necessarily something you've repurpose, or that you are intending to repurpose? Jules Brooke  You could repurpose it, but you'd need to rewrite the heading and change some of the words because the reasoning behind that is the Google only will value something one. So therefore, if it says the same thing four times is only has value once. So, each media outlet wants that Google ranking. So therefore, they don't want something that's been published somewhere else. Having said that, in my handle your own PR Facebook page, I've had three people in the last two weeks, talk about getting the same article picked up six times. Yeah. So even though it's not great for the media outlet, they don't know, and they do it, it's fantastic for you, because then you get six backlinks into your website, from other people publishing those articles. And unless they asked for an exclusive, there's no reason why you wouldn't just send them something that's already been published. Jenn Donovan  Good. Good point. Good point. And just before we wrap up, this has been really invaluable. So I hope this is kind of sparked something in my audience, perhaps someone who hasn't thought about using PR, or perhaps someone who thought that, you know, PR was, you know, for bigger places, is there any sort of tips or tricks that we haven't managed to cover so far that you think is really important? Jules Brooke  Um, well, I guess for me, I would just say, regardless of your size, so I have people, I teach people to do PR that have Kickstarter campaigns for a start-up. And that doesn't even exist yet. And that works really well, if it's a really interesting one, right the way through to big business, but I think everyone should be doing PR. And the other thing is that if you are spending a smaller amount of money advertising in a local paper, what PR will allow you to do is go to, you know, The Sydney Morning Herald rather than the Ennisvale Weekly, or whatever. So you can think really big things in review, think women's weekly, one of my girls managed to get a 12 page, or she has a business called the called the be kind project and she pitched it to women's weekly, and they did the 12 days of kindness before Christmas, featuring her business, because she pitched it. So, if you are in regional areas, and you're targeting women, women's weekly is another terrific magazine to go to and they look for those kinds of stories. I would just say think big and think of a magazine that you dream to be in or a newspaper you dream to be in and then approached them. Jenn Donovan  All right, that sounds great. Great. Dream big dream big. I think you know, my tagline to these podcasts is there's no point in dreaming small. So, you get that one on the head. That's great! Alright, Jules, thank you so much for this interview. It's been fantastic. I hope everyone has got something out of it. And really encouraged to, you know, try PR in their business. And of course, all the links will be in the show notes. Guys, if you want to get in contact with Jules - well, I guess I should ask you Jules, what's the best way for someone to get in contact with you, Jules Brooke  the best way is probably can email me on jules@handleyourownpr.com.au, you which you will be able to stick in the link. And the only other thing that I was going to say is we do have a trial on our platform. If anyone wants to give it a go that it's just $1. So, you can have two weeks to play. But you do need to cancel within that two weeks if you're not happy. Otherwise, we're going to subscribe you for a year. And I've also got a free webinar. So, I'll give you the link for that. And maybe you can say if people want to know on a half hour little thing on why they should all be doing PR. Jenn Donovan  Beautiful. All right. Right, Jules. Thanks again. I look forward to catching up with you in person again shortly. But yeah, thank you so much for coming on and providing such awesome value to my audience today. Jules Brooke  My absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for asking me again. Wasn’t that awesome?  I hope you got some real value from it and you’re encouraged to see how getting some PR for your small business can help attract more clients or customers. Jules mentioned that she has a trial of her $1 for 14 days on her platform.  If you’d like to take her up on this offer and I definitely think you should.  If you’ve never done PR when I think this will give you a real insight into just how easy it can be. There’s a link in my show notes at www.socialmediaandmarketing.com.au that you can go to, to get the link or go to www.socialmediaandmarketing.com.au/pr   JULES’ OFFER - $1 FOR 14 DAYS – CLICK HERE So that’s it for Episode 14.  I hope you’ve not only enjoyed this episode.  It’s been great to have Jules on.  If you have any questions about winning free pr – just head to my Facebook group Like Minded Business Owners and ask them in there.  I’m sure Jules would be happy to answer them! I’ll be back next Thursday with some more marketing know-how and another discovery. If you’re liking the podcast – please head over to where you listen and leave a rating and even a review – those things are GOLD for podcasters like me!  I’ll be eternally grateful, and it helps others find this podcast and enjoy the free training, tips and tricks too.  It could be the best gift you give them! If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave me a DM on Instagram at @smallbusinessmadesimple.  The DMs seriously make my day! Or, of course, pop into my Facebook group. Catch you next week, happy winning free PR, …... …….. and remember small business peeps, as my opening song says, there’s no point in dreaming small!

Jenn Marie Jenn Marie helps small businesses share their authentic selves online. She focuses on personality-driven content marketing that helps her clients start conversations with their customers and prospects. Jenn and I talked about: how her diverse business background prepared her for internet marketing work how her work in experiential marketing informs her branding expertise the confluence she observed about 10 years ago of experiential marketing and influencer marketing her first online marketing customer, Idaho Beef, a cowboy/firefighter/fence installer whose well-established personality she moved it to the internet how that work led to her work with less-well-branded clients how she helps folks understand what their brand is - "It's what you do, not who you are." how she sees the relationship between content strategy and branding strategy her focus on content marketing, which she has to explain to clients to differentiate it from SEO, paid ads, etc. her answer when clients see her plan and say,"I can't write that much." - "I can." how she moved from writing 3,000 to 4,000 words per day herself to employing, editing, and managing a team of six content writers with varying skills (experts in blog writing, copywriting, clickbait, translation, etc.) how branding and user experience/UX work together how her journalism background helps her stay focused on answering customer questions, instead of marketing-oriented concerns her approach to conversational content: "Don't sell. Just talk to the consumer." her take on purposeful content: "Every piece of writing has a point." the shift in conventional internet writing style from generic "blah blah blah" writing 15 years ago to the current focus on emotionally powerful content that inspires action how the Amazon Marketplace style guide helps content creators master web/UX writing the origin story of her branded business name, Jenn Marie Jenn's Bio Jenn is the founder of Jenn Marie Writing & Marketing, a boutique content marketing provider that crafts branded content for solopreneurs and online businesses. Her background is a mixture of print journalism, experiential marketing, and e-commerce. In addition to 18 years as a freelancer, Jenn has also worked in sales supportive roles for Dell, Microsoft, and Amazon. She loves helping individuals find their voice through words and is currently working on a Patreon-funded passion project where she tells the stories of underserved communities through eBooks. Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkTlxF5C-MY Transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. This is episode number 36 of the show that used to be called the Content Strategy Interviews Podcast. I'll do a separate post on the rebranding. But, branding is kind of an appropriate thing to talk about because today I have with us an expert in branding. Jenn Marie is kind of a typical content strategist, in the sense that she has a really diverse background. She's been a model and spokesperson, she's been a freelance journalist, she's done technical support work as well as technical sales and pre-sales and she's written poetry. So, she's a word nerd, a word person like all of us, with a lot of diverse business experience. I'm gonna let Jenn tell you a little bit more about herself. Jenn: Hello everyone. So, thanks for the wonderful introduction. Wow, I don't know where to start. As you said, I do have a bit of a diverse background and my explanation for it generally is I did whatever I needed to make money. I've always been the type of person that I do things that I enjoy. I've been fortunate enough to be able to have multiple jobs that I've enjoyed. Jenn: So yeah, I started off ... my first job was ... what was my first job? I think my first job was telemarketing. So I was on the phones,

Jenn Marie Jenn Marie helps small businesses share their authentic selves online. She focuses on personality-driven content marketing that helps her clients start conversations with their customers and prospects. Jenn and I talked about: how her diverse business background prepared her for internet marketing work how her work in experiential marketing informs her branding expertise the confluence she observed about 10 years ago of experiential marketing and influencer marketing her first online marketing customer, Idaho Beef, a cowboy/firefighter/fence installer whose well-established personality she moved it to the internet how that work led to her work with less-well-branded clients how she helps folks understand what their brand is - "It's what you do, not who you are." how she sees the relationship between content strategy and branding strategy her focus on content marketing, which she has to explain to clients to differentiate it from SEO, paid ads, etc. her answer when clients see her plan and say,"I can't write that much." - "I can." how she moved from writing 3,000 to 4,000 words per day herself to employing, editing, and managing a team of six content writers with varying skills (experts in blog writing, copywriting, clickbait, translation, etc.) how branding and user experience/UX work together how her journalism background helps her stay focused on answering customer questions, instead of marketing-oriented concerns her approach to conversational content: "Don't sell. Just talk to the consumer." her take on purposeful content: "Every piece of writing has a point." the shift in conventional internet writing style from generic "blah blah blah" writing 15 years ago to the current focus on emotionally powerful content that inspires action how the Amazon Marketplace style guide helps content creators master web/UX writing the origin story of her branded business name, Jenn Marie Jenn's Bio Jenn is the founder of Jenn Marie Writing & Marketing, a boutique content marketing provider that crafts branded content for solopreneurs and online businesses. Her background is a mixture of print journalism, experiential marketing, and e-commerce. In addition to 18 years as a freelancer, Jenn has also worked in sales supportive roles for Dell, Microsoft, and Amazon. She loves helping individuals find their voice through words and is currently working on a Patreon-funded passion project where she tells the stories of underserved communities through eBooks. Video Here's the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkTlxF5C-MY Transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. This is episode number 36 of the show that used to be called the Content Strategy Interviews Podcast. I'll do a separate post on the rebranding. But, branding is kind of an appropriate thing to talk about because today I have with us an expert in branding. Jenn Marie is kind of a typical content strategist, in the sense that she has a really diverse background. She's been a model and spokesperson, she's been a freelance journalist, she's done technical support work as well as technical sales and pre-sales and she's written poetry. So, she's a word nerd, a word person like all of us, with a lot of diverse business experience. I'm gonna let Jenn tell you a little bit more about herself. Jenn: Hello everyone. So, thanks for the wonderful introduction. Wow, I don't know where to start. As you said, I do have a bit of a diverse background and my explanation for it generally is I did whatever I needed to make money. I've always been the type of person that I do things that I enjoy. I've been fortunate enough to be able to have multiple jobs that I've enjoyed. Jenn: So yeah, I started off ... my first job was ... what was my first job? I think my first job was telemarketing. So I was on the phones,

Sweet Potato Soul100 Easy Vegan Recipes for the Southern Flavors of Smoke, Sugar, Spice and SoulBy Jenné Claiborne Suzy Chase: Welcome to Cookery by the Book podcast with me, Suzy Chase.Jenné: I'm Jenné Claiborne, and my cookbook is Sweet Potato Soul.Suzy Chase: I'm not even going to ask you the obvious first question, if it's difficult to be a vegan from the south, but I did want to kick things off by asking you about cooking on your own when you were in elementary school. I thought that was so interesting.Jenné: Yeah, well, my mom didn't like to cook, so she got me some cookbooks. I found the recipes that I liked and got started, and it was great for me. I loved it, and my mom, it was good for her, too, because she got to eat well. We didn't have to eat out at restaurants all the time.Suzy Chase: What was the favorite thing you made when you were little?Jenné: It was Szechuan chicken, so long before being vegan, Szechuan chicken, and I loved it, because it had all these different ingredients that, to me, seemed so exotic. We had to go to the specialty grocery store. We went to the Asian grocery store to buy everything, so it was a lot of fun. All the measuring out, a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, and using the wok and making the sauce, and it was just so fun. And really, that was the only recipe that I can even remember making. I don't remember making anything else. That might be the only thing I was into.Suzy Chase: So, my mom passed away a few years ago, and one thing I long for is sitting at our kitchen table talking while she cooks. That, to me, is home. Talk about when your love of food and comfort in the kitchen began.Jenné: Like I said, my mom, she's not a big cook. However, my grandmother is, and so is my dad. So, I have those memories and those moments with those two where they're cooking, and we're sitting having a conversation, prep, and cooking, maybe I'm not. Maybe I'm just watching. So, when I was really little, my first exposure to being in the kitchen was when my grandmother moved down to Georgia and we all lived together. She was the main cook in the house, and just I was always in the kitchen with her, always helping her. Or she would give me little side projects to mix things, or even if it wasn't side projects, she would just let me do my own thing on the side, so I could say, "Oh, I'm gonna mix this flour with this baking powder, with this sugar, with this whatever."Jenné: It would never be edible, ever, but she always let me be creative and let me get my hands dirty and be in the kitchen with her, and the same with my dad. It's funny. My dad actually was raised vegan, and he grew up eating vegan. He was in his 20s when he met my mom. He always blames it on my mom, the fall, he says.Suzy Chase: The fall.Jenné: He's back now, but it took a while. So, the type of cuisine that my dad was making is all plant based, so I learned how to cook that way from him, and I remember hearing stories about ... It was foreign to me eating so many vegetables and tofu and things like that, but he would tell me stories about what he was cooking and about the ingredients, like tumeric, and, "This is the tofu, and this is when I used to work at the vegan restaurant. We would make this ice cream using this."Jenné: So, I've always been surrounded by food and by stories in the kitchen.Suzy Chase: What is your soul food philosophy?Jenné: My soul food philosophy is that any type of food can be soul food. However, being a black person from the south and just from the United States, it's definitely the traditional foods as well, the candied yams and mac and cheese and all those things, collard greens. So, that's the base point. Those are the celebratory foods, the things that when I think of my family, those are the foods I really want to eat the most. However, my grandmother, when I was a kid and still now, she always said that you put soul into everything you're cooking, and I started noticing that even though we weren't eating the stereotypical celebratory soul foods every single day, we were eating homemade foods. We were eating lots of fruits and vegetables and grains and beans, and she was preparing it all in that same style with the same essence. So, soul food to me isn't just the cannon. It's everything that you make with soul and love and all those things.Suzy Chase: In Sweet Potato Soul, the cookbook, you explore the history of southern food. Now, what's the difference between soul food and southern food?Jenné: Well, southern food is a regional blanket statement. So, I would think of southern food as encompassing soul food, and encompassing creole and Asian food, but soul food, specifically, is the foods that black people invented from our circumstances living in the south as enslaved individuals, a lot of us. That food was very much influenced by European cuisines, African cuisines, Native American cuisines. Yeah, I mean it all has come from that, but the difference is really that it was created by black people in the south, and so you'll see if you're in the south, everybody eats collared greens. Everybody eats mac and cheese. Everybody eats a lot of these foods, but there's a certain way that it's made when it's soul food or when a black person makes it.Jenné: I don't know if there's an actual thing, like a big difference that you could pinpoint if you did a blind taste test, but certainly the person who's making it would tell you otherwise.Suzy Chase: I didn't realize the term soul food became popular in the 60s.Jenné: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Me, too, until I started researching, which is another thing that I think is interesting, and I like, because now, 21st century, 2018, I look back at how this term is fairly new, but this cuisine has been around for hundreds of year, but the cuisine has been changing over and over throughout all these years, and now it continues to change. I think part of the fact that the term is so new, it makes me feel like there's even more freedom for change and metamorphosis. This is a very ... It's not the type of cuisine that has to be set in stone and the same all the time.Jenné: Even for me, when I'm thinking about soul food, I don't think of being vegan and making vegan soul food as something totally new and different and exotic. I think of it as going back to the roots, right? So, our ancestors ate far more plant based diet than we do today, and even my grandmother, who is still around today, ate a more plant based diet when she was my age or really younger than me, actually and so did her grandparents and her parents and such.Jenné: So, I think of soul food now as just going back to its plant based roots and reclaiming that the 60s and the 50s were a time when soul food was starting to become more fried and more heavy and more industrialized, relying more on packaged foods to prepare the soul food. Before it was just all homemade everything, and then, of course, the industrialization of the food system in the 50s had changed all American food, including soul food. So, now, we're just taking it back to pre-term soul food.Suzy Chase: So, describe how many things, other than food choices, shifted in your life after you became vegan.Jenné: I see. Okay, so after I became vegan, the food was obviously the main first thing that shifted, and I've always loved food, so it was really east for me to shift that, because I was in the kitchen. I was experimenting more. It was like a new adventure for me, and all I wanted to do was cook. All I wanted to do was grocery shop. We'd be at the farmer's market and buying new recipe books and things like that. But, a couple, I wouldn't say it really happened right away, but eventually, within the next year or so of being vegan, it started shifting my other consumer choices.Jenné: So, the clothing I was buying, I no longer bought clothing made with animal products, leather and wool and things like that. I have since started buying ... Actually, I've since buying all fast fashion, so I'm a lot more mindful of making sure to buy thrifted clothes, and I'm just a bit more eco-friendly. And of course, a lot of the reason people go vegan is for health reason, and for me, within a couple of weeks of being vegan, I noticed the health differences.Jenné: And before I was vegan, I was vegetarian. I thought I was very healthy. I realized I wasn't very healthy, because I think I just got used to my face line being whatever. And once I became vegan, I felt so much better. I didn't even realize that I wasn't feeling that great before. So, that happened almost immediately. That wasn't my main reason for becoming vegan, but it certainly, once I started feeling that shift so early on, I realized, "Okay, this is worth changing my lifestyle for."Suzy Chase: So, what kind of shift did you feel? Did you have more energy? Did you sleep better?Jenné: Those things for sure, but the thing was I have always, not any more, but I had always had digestive issues. From as early as I can remember, I was in the doctor on different medications, gastroenterologists. My parents were always trying to figure out what is going on with my gut. We knew that I was very sensitive to dairy, so I didn't eat things like pizza. I did eat some pizza, but very little cheese. I didn't eat ice cream. Dairy sneaks in everything.Jenné: So, basically, without knowing it until I became 100% vegan, I had just been suffering from dairy my whole life. Like I said, in and out of the doctor, all sorts of digestive issues, and everything, and that was influencing all areas of my life. I was more moody when my stomach was not feeling well. I had less energy. I couldn't sleep as well. I didn't feel my optimal self, but I got to a point where I thought, "Well, this is just my stomach. I'm just faulty. I can't do anything about this. Oh well."Jenné: And I got to that point a few years even before becoming vegan. It wasn't until I became vegan that I realized that it was really the dairy, because by the time I became vegan, all that I had left to cut out of my diet was I was eating yogurt, and occasionally, I'd have a slice of pizza, but I was hardly eating any at all. My skin cleared up after that. Of course, I had more energy after that. My whole outlook on life changed, because I wasn't uncomfortable all the time any more.Suzy Chase: One food that's listed in your southern pantry staples section is peanuts, the overlooked peanut, which I happen to love. Talk a little bit about George Washington Carver's vegan recipes in the 1900s made out of peanuts.Jenné: So, I've always been fascinated by George Washington Carver. In black history month in school, you learn about him and all his inventions of the peanut, the peanut butter, and revolutionized growing peanuts to fix soil, and all this amazing stuff. So, when I was writing my book, and I was doing research for the book, I started learning more about him, not just what I had learned in school during black history month. He made so many "inventions," recipes with the peanut, everything from making peanut butter to peanut meats, mock meats using peanuts. He used it for all different things, and he taught homemakers, in fact, back in the day we'd call them, how to use peanuts in their homes. Basically, they were very nutritious, obviously, high in protein and fiber and just great for the whole family.Jenné: The funny thing, though, is as much as I think it is very fascinating, as much as I love George Washington Carver, I'm allergic to peanuts, so I don't really eat peanuts.Suzy Chase: I know. I read that, and I read that for the longest you were repulsed by the sight and smell of peanuts, and it's almost like your body was protecting you.Jenné: But the thing is, I do not have an allergy to peanuts when they're not from the United States. It might be mental. I admit it might be totally psychosomatic, but I have multiple times eaten peanuts in different countries and not realize that I was eating it until three bites in or whatever and had no reaction whatsoever. I was at a talk recently, and the presenter was passing around peanuts that she had brought back recently from Ghana, and I'm like, "I'm gonna taste this and see what happens." I'm not gonna die. I'm not anaphylactic allergic. No problem, no issue, so I don't know if it's psychosomatic with me, or if there's something about the American-grown peanuts. I don't know, but I would like to get over this allergy, because I feel like it keeps me from my roots, my culture.Suzy Chase: Right.Jenné: But you know, another thing ago about him, George Washington Carver, that I didn't realize until working on this book was his also fascination with the sweet potato. He really researched peanuts, because peanuts are used to repair soil, farmland that's been overused and damaged. You can plant peanuts. They're nitrogen fixing, so they will fertilize and make that soil fertile again.Jenné: He also focused on sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes are similar. They are very easy to grow. They are high in nutrients like peanuts are, and you can do a million and one things with them. So, in addition to making all these different inventions with peanuts, he was doing the same thing with sweet potatoes. He was also teaching homemakers how to use sweet potatoes. He has sweet potato milk. By the way, he has peanut milk, too, sweet potato butter. It's funny, because he says sweet potato lamb chops or sweet potatoes whatever, but it's 100% vegan. All this stuff is vegan. So, I just thought that was so interesting way back when it took him doing all this stuff.Suzy Chase: He was so ahead of his time.Jenné: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Seriously.Suzy Chase: Speaking of sweet potatoes, they've always been your favorite food, and it's also the name of your hugely popular blog, Sweet Potato Soul. Talk a little bit about that.Jenné: I've always loved the sweet potato, and I can remember my grandmother preparing them for me when I got home after school. She always keeps baked sweet potatoes in our refrigerator. Quick snack, healthy, energizing, it's just perfect, and I've always loved them, and everything from canned yams to sweet potato pie, my two favorite foods. So, when I wanted to start my food blog, it made perfect sense that I would have my very favorite food in the title. Then, of course, soul, because soul food means so much to me, and I want to expand what that means, what soul food means. So, yeah.Suzy Chase: I never knew there were so many kinds of sweet potatoes. You have nine listed I your cookbook, to be exact. Can we find all of these varieties in the grocery store?Jenné: Yes, we can. There are more that I didn't feature, because they're too hard for us to find here in America, but you can find those. If you go to the grocery store, you might see a fake garnet and jewel yams. Those are sweet potatoes. They're not yams. Yams are something totally different. Or sometimes nowadays, you'll see the purple ones. I forgot the name of those right now, but the purple on the outside, purple on inside, I see those a lot at the grocery store these days. Also, the white on the inside, white on the outside, but if you want to go for the Asian varieties like the Okinawan sweet potato, which is gray on the outside and bright neon purple on the inside or the Japanese yams with the green ones, then you'll need to go to, usually you'll have to go to, an Asian grocery store. Why would you not want to go to that, anyway? That's my heaven.Jenné: So, I'll typically explore town, especially if you live in a big city, or if you live in Atlanta where I'm originally from, they're really easy to find. You might have to go to the ethnic or the international or Asian grocery store.Suzy Chase: I recently learned on another cookbook podcast that I did that monks in China wanted to invite non-Buddhists into their monastery, and they would eat vegetarian, but the guests wouldn't. So, they made dishes that looked and tasted similarly to meat and seafood dishes. This was the beginning of culinary replications. I'm dying to know what your thoughts are about vegan replications that look like, let's say, chicken.Jenné: Yeah, I am all for it. To be honest, I don't eat a lot of that. At home, I'm in love with vegetables and grains. That is all I need. I don't need mock meat or any of that. However, I love it for what it does for people. So many people use mock meats and these replications as a way to help in transition. Firstly, because a lot of people, they're so [inaudible 00:18:58] tastes of chicken, so they need something when they become vegan to hold them over for a while until they can figure out how to cook beans and figure out how to like broccoli and whole grains. A lot of people just don't like that, and they're not used to that. So, these foods act as a little bridge between the two. They're still totally vegan, so that's great, but they really help usher people a little closer into the real whole food, plant based lifestyle that I try to have people join.Suzy Chase: I'm surprised. I thought you were gonna be totally against it. I'm shocked.Jenné: No, I really don't have any ... The closest I have to that is I have two different sausage recipes, which are handmade sausages, so not store bought, vegan sausage. You do it by hand. It's very easy. And then I have the cauliflower chicken, but it's cauliflower. It's not Beyond Chicken that you get at Whole Foods and you bread and you fry. So, yeah, I'm not trying to like, "Everybody go eat this stuff," but I do think that those are good, like I said, a bridge.Suzy Chase: Just yesterday, I read an article that cited a recent study on consumer trends that found the term vegan to be the least appealing food and beverage marketing term among U.S. adults. What do you think about that?Jenné: Wow. Well, I'm surprised and I'm not surprised. I think vegan people, like myself, we tend to have an intuition about that. For me, though, with what I do, the marketing I'm doing and my mission is I want to be real trend, and this is vegan. I'm speaking to people who thought to themselves, they saw a movie, or they had a conversation, or whatever, they think, "I want to become vegan. I need to find vegan, specially vegan resources."Jenné: So, they might Google vegan recipes, and they'll find me. I want to be specific. I want those people. I don't want to proselytize to people. I'm not out there converting people. I'm more of a resources. However, I have thought about how if I want to reach a more mainstream audience, reach people who are not already looking for vegan resources, then using the term vegan is probably not the best way for me to do that, because it is a turn-off for a lot of people. Frankly, I think the biggest issue is that people have an image of what a vegan is and what a vegan lifestyle is, and they say, "That's not me, and that is not for me. I'm not interested."Jenné: So, until we can change the image and people's perception of what it means, I think it's a little bit more wise to influence people, get people on board without using ... I shouldn't say people. I should say more the mainstream on board without, I don't know. I don't want to say without using that term, but just maybe be a little bit more undercover with the term.Suzy Chase: So, yesterday, I made your recipe for sweet Jesus mac and cheese on page 113, and it's interesting, because for a different cookbook podcast I did, I made the original James Hemings recipe. First off, talk a little bit about James Hemings and who he was.Jenné: So, he was the enslaved chef of Thomas Jefferson, and he went with Thomas Jefferson when he went to Europe and spent time in France, and he studied food or cooking in Europe, and he brought it back to America. And he wrote down his recipes at Monticello, his estate, and that's probably that recipe that you made. I know Monticello, they have a lot of their recipes on their website. I have one of their books that's a cookbook, and it's all old recipes from James Hemings.Jenné: How was it?Suzy Chase: It was so bland, because they didn't use any salt.Jenné: Yeah, right, back then, can you imagine? So, the food back then was so much more bland, I think it's not until you really needed to combine. Mac and cheese, as soul food as it is, it is a European invention. He made it what it is, what that recipe is that you tasted, but it's definitely using all that cheese and the noodles, that's a European thing. But it wasn't until he brought it here and then folks started playing around with it and adding more flavor that it became what it is today, tasty, gooey mac and cheese.Jenné: But I think it was really necessary for this blending of culture. I mean, it is unfortunate the way that the cultures had to blend, but for these foods, these European foods to become tasty, they needed the African influence and the Native American influence.Suzy Chase: They sure did. So, your recipe for mac and "cheese" calls for sweet potatoes, lemon juice, and Dijon mustard, three flavors that never come up when I'm thinking about mac cheese. How did you create this recipe?Jenné: So, I played around with different mac and cheese recipes that I found on the internet and other cookbooks. My dad used to work at a famous vegan restaurant called A Soul Veg in Atlanta, and at Soul Veg, they make a mac and cheese. Everything they make is tofu, soy based. I love soy, but you don't have to use it for everything, very oily, very down-home vegan mac and cheese.Jenné: But I didn't want to do that. I wanted to make it a little healthier. I wanted to use whole foods, but you still need a lot of flavor. So, the mustard, the Dijon that I use and the lemon, it's to add tang. And then you also use nutritional yeast, which has a naturally cheesy flavor, but you can't just use it by itself. You need to add that tang that real cheese has. It's a different take on mac and cheese, really. Obviously, it has sweet potato in it, too, which is totally unexpected.Suzy Chase: Totally. It was light, though. It looks really heavy. I posted a picture on Instagram, but it is light.Jenné: Yeah, it is. Good.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Jenné: You can find me at sweetpotatosoul.com. That's my blog. There are hundreds of recipes, and on social media, you can find me at sweetpotatosoul, including YouTube. I have a big YouTube channel as well. So, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, sweetpotatosoul.Suzy Chase: Thank you for writing this beautiful cookbook, and thank you for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Jenné: Thank you.Suzy Chase: Follow me on Instagram at CookerybytheBook. Twitter is IamSuzyChase, and download your Kitchen Mix Tapes, music to cook by on Spotify at Cookery by the Book and always, subscribe in Apple podcasts.