Ep# 108: My Uncommon Story: Effects of Unguided Entrepreneurship and an Unmanaged Mind
Episode Summary
Have you ever felt like you're waiting for the perfect moment to take the next step in your business, but that moment keeps being slightly beyond your grasp?
In this episode, Jenna delves into how to overcome the mental barriers of creating a business concept or any new business idea, and explores the challenges of doing so without guidance or the skill of managing your mind’s doubts, fears and overthinking. Discover the transformative power of different kinds of coaching focuses and how they can propel your business to new heights and help you reach your true potential.
In this episode you will:
Learn what happens when you base your business solely on passion and how to overcome this common pitfall.
Understand the thought patterns that keep you switching from one idea to another and how to establish real momentum and success instead.
Discover why a comprehensive coaching approach is the most effective and how it creates the necessary conditions for success in business and life.
Don't miss out – Listen now to unlock the tools and insights needed to make empowering, momentum-building decisions in your entrepreneurial journey.
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The Uncommon Way is led by business coach Jenna Harrison, who helps women entrepreneurs feel confident, find their ideal clients effortlessly and avoid overwork so they can manifest money and abundance in their business and life.
This podcast empowers female entrepreneurs to overcome imposter syndrome, perfectionism, and limiting beliefs through somatics, mindset, and spirituality, create 7-figure offers, and build an online coaching business with clarity and alignment.
Episode Transcription
You're listening to the Uncommon Way Business and Life Coaching Podcast, the podcast that helps women entrepreneurs get clear on signature offers and strategies that sell themselves so you can lean back and stop the hustle. You will learn to maximize your mindset, messaging, and strategy, and step into the uncommonly successful business and life you are creating. Here's your host, top-ranked business coach and reformed overanalyzer turned Queen of Clarity, Jenna Harrison.
Jenna:
Do you feel like you should be able to figure out business on your own and you shouldn't really need a coach? Or you're stuck in the chicken and egg thing of wanting to wait until certain things happen until you move forward, but then the thing doesn't happen because you don't have someone helping you make it happen? Then this episode's for you.
Hey, welcome back to the Uncommon Way. This is episode 108, which is such an auspicious number. Fun fact, in India, when you need to call in an emergency, you dial 108. Anyway, I have definitely been feeling the auspicious shift, feeling a lot of good energy, seeing it with clients as well, so hopefully you are too. And at minimum, at least this episode will help you start making some really good decisions.
So this episode is part of a series where I share the great lessons I've learned and the mistakes I've made in life, so you can see the context behind what I say in all other podcasts. And luckily, now we're at a turning point in my journey where I begin to focus on entrepreneurship. So there will be a direct tie to your business, and I hope, I sincerely hope, you can learn from my pretty massive mistakes. This is definitely a case of do what I say and not what I've done.
So in this episode, you're going to find out what happens when you try to base your business solely around something that you're passionate about. And you'll learn what it is that keeps us switching business ideas and not doubling down to gain momentum. You'll get the behind the scenes on why I practice and believe so strongly in such a comprehensive style of coaching. And I do want to give you a spoiler alert that in this episode, we are going to be talking about depression, suicidal ideation, and infertility.
We're picking up at a point in my life when I'm in my early 30s, living in Miami Beach, and I have just exited an abusive relationship, and I have the space to think about me. So naturally, my thoughts turn to freedom and entrepreneurship. I had spent my whole life, really, as long as I can remember, thinking I would give anything to just know what I'm here to do, right? What would really fill me up? What would give me meaning? Why have I been placed here on earth? The big questions. And that answer was always so elusive for me.
Anyway, I've talked about that in past episodes, but that's where my mind turned, because that's where my mind always turned. And when I lived in New York City, I'd had a business. It was just taking off. I was doing computer-assisted jewelry design for jewelry manufacturers. But now I look around at that industry and I thought, wow, everything has changed. It's only been a few years, but this is the way I'm perceiving it, right? Software has changed. Processes are different. There's lots of competition now before no one else was doing it. Now lots of people are doing it. So obviously, that is now a terrible business idea.
Nowadays, I know that all of those things prove there's lots of demand and there's still plenty of time for me to get in on the ground floor. And even if I didn't get in on the ground floor and there is lots of competition, I can definitely have a successful business if I focus on creating an offer that's perfect for my specific clients and unlike anything else that they can find anywhere else. So this is just one of many examples of what happens when you don't have business experience and you're just going off of whatever your brain wants to make up. And if you don't have the perspective to know that your brain just makes things up, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's right.
Now to be completely transparent, I notice my brain now a lot in the present, too. That doesn't necessarily stop. My relationship to what it's saying to me has changed. Like, for instance, right now, my family and I are about one month into our move to Spain and my brain keeps telling me how hard things are. But now I think just because it's hard doesn't mean that it's not worth it. Whereas before, I would have thought, okay, the universe is definitely showing me that this is not the path for me, or this is not the way, this is the way things will always be, and I don't want them to always be this way, so I have to find something different.
If you've listened to episode number 64, it is also part of the My Uncommon Story series, and it's called Sex, Drugs, and Flamenco. You know that that is a big part of why I left Spain the first time. Things were really hard. Now, obviously, a lot's changed now. I have a lot more stability and financial cushion, for example, but things are still hard. There are things that money does not insulate you from. It doesn't insulate you from you get to the fully furnished apartment and they're in really hard beds and everybody's sleep deprived. It doesn't insulate you from not being able to buy or lease a car because your attorney didn't tell you you'd need a special identification number for foreigners that you could have gotten before you left the country, but now they're so backed up that it's going to take you forever to get that number here.
It doesn't insulate you from a clerical mistake by your accountants that end up causing you months of problems and jeopardizes your residency application, and it definitely doesn't insulate you from the family dynamics when you're all pent up together and frustrated and jet-lagged. But what has changed the most is that I have tools that I didn't have. I have emotional and mindset tools, and those are the kinds of tools that can change not just the experience of your life, how you're feeling as you're going through hard times, though that alone is something I would trade my house for if I didn't have it, but it can change the direction of your life, right? That is how powerful they are.
The old me would have cut and run. The new me knows exactly why I decided to do this. I can breathe through and manage the obstacles. I can see them as road bumps and not make them mean much more than that, and that's why only now will I end up creating the life that my 23-year-old self longed for.
But back to Miami in my 30s. So after freeing myself from that traumatic relationship, it was time to heal. I'd sold my apartment in New York, I'd purchased the most adorable little bungalow in Miami Beach, and I let myself soak up all that beauty, that tropical vegetation, the sun, the sea, and for the first time had a really large group of friends, men and women, who were just loving life as much as me.
But you know what else I needed? I needed a safe return to sexuality. And in Miami, they show lots of skin, right? I could walk along in a bathing suit top and a skirt on my way to a hot yoga class, and nobody would think anything of it. I could dance the night away at salsa clubs, and I was free to be in my body and have my body be safely appreciated by others. And I didn't realize it at the time, but this was actually critical for my future development because I didn't have the vocabulary for it. I never would have thought of it in this way, but I'm convinced that this is where my understanding really began of how our nervous systems influence our actions, right? And how important it is to be able to be present in your body if you're ever going to tap into your intuition and your wisdom and your true desires, especially in the US, right?
We run around in such a hyped-up fight or flight activity that we miss our genius and we self-sabotage our power. But what I was really longing for and missing as I came back online in myself was travel and freedom. I was enjoying my job as an executive assistant for a top fashion company. I talked about that in the last episode. And my role was very quickly changing there because it was becoming apparent that I was being underutilized. So I was moving into different roles, but it was still a daily corporate grind like I'd had in New York City in my 20s. And I described that before where I was sitting under fluorescent lights and looking out a window and feeling like I should be out there rather than in here.
My longing for freedom and travel was so large, especially after everything I'd been through that I thought about just quitting my job and going around the world and putting up flyers and saying free yoga class and gathering whatever money I could from donations. And I remember I was sitting once having dinner with a friend and I said, yeah, I'm thinking, I don't know, I really am longing to get back to the Mediterranean, maybe Italy or something and just enjoy that living. But I also really want to be furthering my yoga studies in India. And I've just been dying, always called to go to Bali. And I'm thinking, maybe I'll just write a book about that as I travel. And she looked at me and she said, oh, you haven't heard of Eat, Pray, Love, have you?
And I was like, Eat, Pray, What? It had just come out and I had not heard about it, but it was the book that I wanted to write. Not a divorce, but an abusive relationship as the impetus for it. Anyway, I also realized at the same time, though, that my growth edge was really to stay where I was. I'd grown up in the military. I was used to moving every few years. Even as an adult, I'd continued that pattern. And I understood that I needed to learn to move past boredom and to not just change outside circumstances all the time. To keep seeking what I now know is like the dopamine rush and the learning curve and the getting, you know, fitting, settling in and figuring things out and finding new friends. And I'd learned to love that process, which is great. It was a survival technique. I needed it growing up, but I also wanted to not need to keep changing, obviously.
So I really was channeling my energy then into thoughts of entrepreneurship. Remember, I was dismissing this business of computer-assisted jewelry design, but I thought, okay, what I really want is to actually work the gems and the fine metals. So I spent a small fortune on metals and gemstones and started trying to sell them and quickly discovered how challenging it is to manage inventory and manage cash flow with expensive inventory and to be sourcing sales channels and work with their delivery schedules and all the things. So I closed up that business. And then I spent money on becoming a yoga instructor. And I did pick up a regular class or two, but I had no idea how to turn that into full-time income.
And so I'd fill up mountains of journals with lots of ideas for businesses that I'd get really excited about until I'd see all the reasons that business would fail or my brain would get really clever and I'd just come up with a better idea. You see what I'm doing here? Those of you who, like me, have struggled with clarity will feel my pain. And this is what happens when you have an unmanaged mind and you don't realize that just because your brain has a thought, whenever you're trying to change something, those thoughts are usually going to be fear-based or stem from your inner critic. Because there's a part of you that really doesn't want to create change, it wants to stay with what it knows. So just because your brain has a thought does not mean the thought is true. And that acting from those shitty thoughts will never produce the results that you really want.
If my brain told me, you can't do that, then I would believe it. I took that at face value. I guess it can't be done. But no, figure it out. Make it work. You create your own results. And I was very emotionally reactive, which meant that if I had a strong emotion, I reacted in some way to make that go away. I remember once I was asked to substitute a yoga class in a well-known yoga school that I liked to attend and I freaked out. I know in hindsight that I freaked out thinking about failing in front of people that I knew. And so I said no. I actually convinced myself though that I just needed more experience for a while. Seems so reasonable, right? So logical. Like we'll just put it off for a little while until this thing happens. I gain more experience. I gain clarity. I have more money, right? There's so many things that our brain puts up as a reason why we should wait. Oh, I have more time. I've fallen victim to that one before too.
But it's pure emotional reactivity. A circumstance presents itself. You feel an emotional activation and then return to baseline, right? We go back into our cave. So when it comes to this pattern of switching things and really not doubling down to gain momentum, it's really one of two things. It's either this unmanaged mind, right? An emotion that I've talked about or it's a lack of alignment. Something deep within you knows that that's not the right path for you, right? Your brain is getting in the way trying to put you on that path but you know that you're meant for something else. And of course my clients learned to reverse both of those and come out on the other side, clear, decisive and successful, which is where we all want to be. And it only takes having the right tools to get there.
But luckily it wasn't all negative for me because what I was doing was learning so much about business, about different industries, different businesses, what was common amongst them, what you have to think about in different ways and how you build skills that can transfer as you move from business to business. I didn't see it then but of course now I can. And you may be thinking, why didn't you get a coach or a mentor? I honestly had no idea that these people existed. I had never heard of coaching. I'd never heard that you could pay someone to help you build a business. It never occurred to me. But stick around because in a few minutes I'm going to be telling you about when I did learn about these things and still did not take action on it.
I can see now in hindsight, so clearly. I know I keep saying that, I can see in hindsight, I can see in hindsight. And that's really the premise of my whole connect the dots method because the truth is that those things are there for you to see even when you're going through them and you don't necessarily have to wait for hindsight to connect those dots. But usually if we aren't searching for them, we will have to wait for hindsight. And I definitely was not searching for them. But I can see that really I was deeply afraid of failure. And I had no idea because I considered myself so confident. I'd moved to different countries, move states, start over fresh. And I interviewed really well. I mean all the signs were pointing to the fact that I must have total confidence.
But it turns out that when it came to something I really cared about, like whatever I was going to dedicate myself to, I was scared to death that I was going to fail. And so it was, I would get all the accolades. I'd still get people saying, oh, Jenna, she has so much potential, right? Or if only she could figure out what she wanted to do, watch out world. So I still got all those props, but I didn't actually have to go out and take the risk. So this lack of clarity was a perfect place for me to stay and hang out because it was so win-win.
So this is about the point when I met Ben, my now husband. And since I do get more personal in these episodes, and since he's going to play a very important role as my development as a coach in the way I think, I'm going to segue now. I'm going to tell you two funny stories about meeting him. And then I'll resume the entrepreneurship story.
So I was in Miami Beach. He was stationed in Korea. And we met on an old dating site, one of the first called eHarmony. You had to fill out this huge long questionnaire, like 40 minutes. It was supposed to be a personality assessment. And then it was going to match you with people that were really great matches for you. So I remember I would get invitations, so-and-so wants to connect, so-and-so wants to connect. I was actually talking to one man that I was convinced was Mr. Right. And so I was not answering these invitations until I saw Benjamin from Korea wants to connect. And I thought, it caught my eye, right? I now know from social media copy, it's a pattern interrupter. It stopped my eyes from scrolling through the emails and it was so like unexpected. Benjamin from Korea, so I had to click it open.
And then I found out that he was a soldier stationed there in Korea. Well, I grew up in the military and I was feeling so bad for him. He was, I don't know, mentioning something about, I don't know, I don't remember how it came to pass, but he was on the DMZ in the winter and I was feeling so bad for him that I thought, oh, he really needs a pen pal. Like, of course I'm not going to turn down his request to connect. We joke now, like that's the start of our relationship was my pity for him. But as we got to, and the good thing is, we had six months to get to know each other over email and phone before we actually met, which was so perfect for me because I was a little skittish coming off of that other relationship. A few years had passed since then by that point, but I was still pretty skittish. And so I had built up so much trust with him by the time we actually met in person.
And the funny thing about meeting in person was he ended up then getting stationed in Texas, which is about an hour and a half flight from Florida. And so we were deciding, is he going to come out to Miami, which of course is a much more fun place to hang out than in the middle of Texas where he was stationed at Fort Hood, which is outside of Austin. And so we were thinking about it, but I had this fear in the back of my mind, he could just be a serial killer, right? And so I didn't want him to find out any information about where I hung out or where I live.
Thank you for tuning in to another episode of the Uncommon Way. I hope you found today's story inspiring and informative. Remember, your journey to clarity and success is unique, and sometimes it takes navigating through mistakes and lessons to find your true path. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and share it with someone who might benefit from our message. Until next time, keep striving for your uncommon way of success.