Episode Summary

Ever wonder how some people seem to bounce back stronger after life’s toughest blows?

In this episode, you’ll uncover the hidden strategy that allows you to channel setbacks into breakthroughs, showing you how to move from feeling terrible to creating your greatest moments in both life and business.

In this episode, you will:

1. Get the exact strategy I’ve used with hundreds of clients to help them transform their darkest moments into incredible results

2. Discover a surprising yet powerful first step that most people overlook when handling emotional turmoil that sets the foundation for real clarity and resilience.

3. Learn how these three phases transform not just your personal resilience but your entire approach to business and life, helping you emerge stronger and more aligned.

Listen now to start your journey from major setbacks to powerful gains with actionable resilience-building strategies

Links:
Get on the waitlist for Black Friday and receive a free gift with purchase valued at $197 https://www.theuncommonway.com/BlackFriday 

Episodes mentioned:

Ep #76: The Key to Making It Through the Holidays and Other Challenging Times

Ep #43: How to Win at the Game of Entrepreneurship

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Leave a voicemail for Jenna and get her personalized advice for your business: 

 https://www.theuncommonway.com/talk

Find Jenna on Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/theuncommonway/

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

📍 What if you knew the secret to bouncing back from any big shock or setback better than ever? Hey, welcome! Welcome back to the Uncommon Way. Today we're talking about how you can become one of those people who seem to really bounce back stronger after life's toughest blows. I created this episode to respond to what many women in my community are feeling after the results of the U.

S. presidential election, but it really applies to any big setback in business or life. Maybe that's a failed launch. Maybe it's not hitting your revenue goals. Maybe it's heartbreak. Maybe it's losing a loved one. We all get affected by different things in different ways, and there's no judgment. So today we won't be doing the typical format of a tactical tip, a mindset tip, and an energetic tip, because I have a process that I want to take you through.

But in this episode, you will get the exact strategy that I have used with hundreds of clients to help them transform their darkest moments into incredible results. You'll discover a surprising yet powerful first step that most people overlook when handling emotional turmoil that sets the foundation for real clarity and resilience.

And you'll learn how these three phases transform not just your personal resilience, but your entire approach to business and life, helping you emerge stronger and more aligned. But first, have you gotten onto the Black Friday wait list yet? If you have not done so already, you need to do it now. It's The Uncommon Way.

com forward slash Black Friday. All one word, and we'll link to it in the show notes. Now more than ever after these election results, women need the autonomy, the power, and the freedom that businesses provide. We need financial freedom to be able to make choices in the best interest of ourselves and our families, and we need the freedom to pursue vocations that are deeply meaningful so that we have more capacity to deal with everything else coming at us.

Throughout many points of catastrophe, since I started my business, I have been able to go back and think at least I have this as I'm getting up in the morning. At least I have this business that is so deeply meaningful to me. It is not just a money generator. I believe it's important. I believe it makes a difference in the world and there's nothing that can take that away from me.

And I am here to encourage you to create the total picture as well, the business and the life. So don't miss this opportunity to get on the wait list for these really cool offers that have never been released before. Because you will get a free gift with purchase only if you're on the wait list and you don't want to miss it because it's going to expedite your growth to this kind of business in life.

Okay. Before we dive into the actual steps and process here, there's one, like really important belief point that you need, and that is the concept of post traumatic growth. You can Google this. There's been a lot of research done on this, but we were all familiar with post traumatic stress, right? Ways in which a previous trauma would play out in our lives in the future and continue to inhibit us.

In some way. Now, if you think about that, that's almost like the trunk of a tree getting an axe to it, and each time it becomes weaker and weaker until it finally topples. Post traumatic growth, however, is showing that people that have been through trauma, often come back stronger than ever. So because there has been a cut in the tree, it actually rebuilds itself with an even stronger, I don't know, I'm not a horticulturalist, but a stronger cellular structure.

And I actually do not know if this is true for plants, but this is just the image that I want you to have in your mind about the difference between post traumatic stress and post traumatic growth. So before any of the other things that I'm going to say to you will actually land with you, you have to believe that it's possible to suffer some great blow and that that actually helps you in the long run, not saying that all tragedies are good things or that we want to experience these things, but if they do, at least, you know, you have the capacity to regenerate in a stronger way.

Got it? Okay. So when I woke up, and actually it was just yesterday, and I saw the election results, I felt that feeling of having the wind knocked out of you. I mean, we were this close for the second time to having a woman president. Both times, they get defeated by that guy? Of all the guys? Not to mention that even if it had been two men running, I personally believe that having Trump return to the office will be much worse for the country and the world, especially in the long run.

So what did I do? I paused. I first thing went and paused social media. First of all, the content that I had scheduled, it did not feel in integrity with me. It did not feel appropriate for where I'm at at this moment. And it also didn't feel appropriate for my clients. And also because I wanted to walk my talk.

I believe in taking a pause, and we'll talk about that more in a second. And then my thoughts turned to others. All the women who don't have the same tools that I've gathered to move through these kinds of hard knocks. And so I invited my clients and everyone on my list to hop on an impromptu call so we could, first and foremost, feel the togetherness of other women, to feel community and to not feel alone, but also to pause together.

And process in a space where nothing is wrong. So often we're told, Oh, isn't that a little dramatic? Everything will be fine. Or shouldn't you be focused on this instead? But when you're in one of these moments, having this human experience, it is not about logic. It's just, this is the emotion you're feeling.

Even if you're not feeling much emotion, right? If you're just numb. That's real. That's what you're feeling. Someone on the call said, just thinking that it's okay to feel whatever it is that I'm feeling is already helping a lot. Now the power of the pause is totally underrated. It's also downright avoided.

Why? Usually either because we're avoiding the feelings that we're feeling about the thing, or because we're afraid that if we open a tiny little opening to those emotions they will totally overcome us and we'll get stuck there. Maybe because in the past some emotions did seem to overcome us and we just stayed there wallowing and we didn't have the tools to move through them, or because our nervous system is activated.

It's either activated into fight mode, where we want to do do do do away the problem, or freeze mode, where we avoid the problem by curling into a ball in front of Netflix and eating cookies as a buffer to our discomfort, or moving into victimhood and wallowing in the futility of everything anyway and our powerlessness to change anything.

But when we react to the fight response and we skip into action, we put on a brave face, we repress, where that gets you is just a lot of internal stress, sometimes sickness. Often we're creating neural pathways that get wired in. And so when there's a similar trigger, we act out in certain ways. And almost always, these are not your highest level activities.

And so the action you're doing is very ineffective. And often misread by your audience. We of course have less time for the things in life that really matter to us because we're so much in the doing. We can become even more stressed and snap at people we love. I mean, it just goes on and on. And when we react with a freeze response, where that gets you is really diminishing your power.

It's impossible to move forward from an empowered place when you are in a victim state. And you can be victimized without being in a victim state. I know that's a bit of a brain twist, but think about it for a second. But you also end up self sabotaging because, whatever, maybe your business isn't moving forward, or if you are overeating or overdrinking, that's not doing you any favors either.

Rarely do any of these two reactive ways of being lead to your highest level moments. So instead, Pause. Pause. That's the first step of this process we're outlining here today. There are so, so many reasons to pause. I'll give you five. Number one, it lets your nervous system regulate so you're in a less reactive space.

Once you're more regulated, you'll have access to so many more parts of your brain than you do right now. The highest level problem solving and creative and compassionate parts. If you can just breathe through it, like you're temporarily holding a very challenging yoga pose, you'll soon be having a completely different experience.

So see your discomfort, witness your desire to fight or freeze, to give in to that reactivity, And be the watcher, watch the human you who is so in it at the moment, witness the big emotions, the big shock, and just be there, breathe, observe. This is a hard thing to do at first. This one step can change your life, though.

Second reason. It gives you a beat to process the emotions. Why would we want to do that? Why would we want to do that thing? These emotions feel awful. Yes. That's exactly why you don't want remnants of them lingering around. And honestly, it tends to make the feeling less acute after just 30 seconds or so if you process it anyway.

Often it even surfaces the other deeper emotions underneath. So when you knock down that domino, the other ones just don't hold up anymore. So if you're feeling lots of rage, chances are underneath that rage is a lot of fear or a lot of grief. And once you process that, the rage doesn't have the same texture either.

And if you're not sure how to process emotions, I've got you. We've linked to an episode in the show notes about that very thing. Number three reason to pause. It gets you in touch with you, your values, what you really care about. So yes, it is nice that your emotions aren't quite so painful when you process, but that's not the only reason we do it.

We do it to learn from what those emotions are telling us, to get closer to our truth and what really matters. Why are you so sad? What's driving all of it for you personally versus the other sad person down the street? And why are you choosing to go forward anyway? Why is it important? All of that will later create the clarity in your offers and your marketing, and also the creative canvas of you.

of the woman you are creating. She doesn't become who she is without walking this path, without having these realizations, these experiences. Do not let the opportunity to know yourself pass you by. The pause is where your greatest work begins. This is why sometimes the most powerful action you can take is to pause. It's to pause, to feel, breathe, and let your next steps reveal themselves. Now, you don't need to force the clarity of what that will be.

We're still in the pause, but it'll come. All you need to do is kind of get curious, observe. You are creating the conditions for those seeds to germinate. And that won't happen if you're repressing all of your emotions or avoiding them or leaving little fragments that get triggered at inopportune times into outsized behaviors in response times.

To whatever stimulus happens to remind your brain of that specific event. Number four, getting in touch with your emotions also builds emotional resilience, which is the number one most important skill for your entrepreneurial journey. So we'll link to a podcast episode that goes more into that as well.

When you learn to tolerate big emotions, it makes them not so scary. Which means you're more likely to do the brave, scary things that might lead to failure your first time, or your fifth time around, and generate all those big feels. This is what gets you to be braver. You won't let yourself get extremely visible if you know that you can.

Any hater is going to make you shake and quiver in the corner for three months. And then you'll think, Oh, I don't ever want to experience that again. So you totally change your business model or pivot your business to something safer. Just cause you haven't learned to handle those emotions. No, an emotion is just a sensation in the body.

It doesn't kill you. Your skin doesn't feel off your face and agony has one of my mentors used to say. It's just a slightly icky feeling that goes away pretty quickly if you deal with it. And yet people change their lives to avoid a single emotion. I certainly did, waiting decades to start my business and then hiding behind blogging for a year because I so desperately did not want to experience failure.

Come on girl, do not repeat my mistakes. You can do this. Learning to navigate emotions like this will change your business in life. You'll bounce back so much faster. You'll create such bigger results. It's what they used to call having a thick skin. And having a thick skin comes from knowing yourself so well, having your own back, keeping your eyes on the prize, And not letting emotions cripple you.

And number five, a pause allows you to be present to what's around you. Moments like these crack you the fuck open. You're knocked off of your autopilot. You notice things that you otherwise wouldn't have. You become extremely grateful for the things that matter most. How many times have you had something big happen and what you know for certain in that moment is that your family is the most important thing, and no matter what, you have them.

Or you might become mindful and present to the little things in a way that you normally aren't. I was telling the ladies on the call how that day, yesterday, I took Skye for a walk and I felt the sun on my face in a completely different way, and the gorgeous 70 degree weather. It was like, Uh, no matter what, I have this.

Now one thing I've seen with many women is that they block themselves off from pleasure when they're in pain, and lots of other times too, because they think they don't deserve it, or it's wrong to feel it, or they don't want the pain to go away, really. You might have felt this if you had a loved one pass.

Or maybe with the election, you know, a lot of people who feel physically scared, maybe worrying that hate crimes will increase and you think they're suffering so much, so much more than me, I shouldn't be thinking about how nice it is for me and all my privilege to be celebrating the sun in Spain, but as souls, we are here to experience all All of the emotions.

This doesn't mean that we tune out and forget what everyone else is going through. It just means that as humans, we are here for all of it. And we have been experiencing all of these same emotions that we're feeling in this moment, and we will continue to feel them. We are human. Zooming out, no matter what, there is always rage.

There is always disappointment. And there is always love. There's always gratitude and deep generosity. These wake up moments help you tap into that universality. And in so doing, You joined together with so many women from the past, so many women in our future, so many children and grandparents before us and yet to come.

And now, here you are, in your human experience, living and surviving. and thriving. But to experience it all, you've got to pause once in a while, and you've got to become comfortable with the paradox of having all of these different emotions. We can feel despair and delight. We are that complex and neuroscience has shown that delight actually helps us regulate our nervous systems and gain access to more brain capacity.

So it doesn't just make you feel better. It's a smart strategic move. Now, those are just five of the reasons that I help my clients take sacred pause over and over and really Dig into this shit when their brains instead want to rush ahead or buffer away with Netflix and cookies. Maybe it's after a failed sales call, or a failed launch, or a hater came up, or something in their personal lives.

And this is why they become such emotional ninjas. So strong and resilient. And they bounce back faster and in much higher quality ways than others who aren't. doing this. They've created a military grade mindset where they are undeterred by the things that make most humans quiver in their boots. Okay, so we talked all about the pause.

That is stage one of turning catastrophe into triumph, and you cannot skip it. Luckily, it moves you naturally into the second stage, which is clarity. This is when you feel more regulated and you're no longer in foggy headed shock and you just take the next step with all the things that started bubbling up during the pause and you transform all of that knowing into tactics.

Okay, so what does this mean about what I'm going to do? What does it mean about who I'm going to be? What specific actions am I going to take? Am I getting involved with this cause? Am I going to retool my messaging and offers? What's the so what? Now, there's no pressure to make any change at all necessarily, but changes are something that get born from this.

Because when you grow, which you have, you are different. And different people have slightly different thoughts and feelings than they used to. So they take different actions, and they show up differently, and they aspire differently, and they create different results. And that, my friend, is the third phase.

Create. Go. Do. The. Thing. Don't just think about it and talk about it. Put it on your calendar. Reach out to the organization. Send the check. Create the podcast, say what you think. Believe me, I know what it is to be a busy mompreneur with an active social circle and family requirements and personal goals and all the things.

I'm not trying to add more to your plate. In fact, if you and I had a conversation, I'd most likely be coaching you to take things on board. Off of your plate, cut out the noise. But this helps with that, not detracts from that. It puts you more in touch with what really matters, with what you really want to prioritize, so you can realign and cast off the things that really don't.

When you are more aligned and moving in your zones of genius in precisely the way that you are here to do, You change your life and the lives of those around you, and enough people doing exactly that, that changes history. Look, it took enough people in health crises to create the market for organic foods.

I remember when they used to be super hard to find and super yucky. And super expensive, but enough people were committed because of health problems or other very strong incentives that companies started to see an opportunity and they started producing and then they started competing with each other.

And now in the U S at least we have great organic foods everywhere so that even people who aren't that committed can easily make that choice and start investigating why they'd want to make that choice. And then children are healthier and the planet gets healthier, et cetera, et cetera. Now, a word of comfort.

I very strongly believe we don't always need to have the big health scares or the big failures or the heartbreaks or catastrophes to move us forward. If we are staying very conscious and aligned and tapped in. It's the concept of comfy constant growth, which is the why of how we do things here at The Uncommon Way.

This lets us avoid some of those harder knocks, but hard knocks still happen sometimes, whether it's your mind perceiving a normal thing as hard or something outside of your control totally taking the wind out of your sails. but the key takeaway here is that turning setbacks into triumphs isn't about pushing harder.

Okay. It's about giving yourself the space to reconduct with what truly matters. The path from catastrophe to clarity isn't a sprint. It's taking a moment to realign, giving yourself the chance to create something new, and then letting yourself be amazed with how quickly your changes can come and your renewed energy. can come Now in this episode, you've learned the three stages. of transforming catastrophe into triumph.

You know that you need to pause, and use that time to process and tap into you, and that that generates your clarity so you can go out and create. You know how important that first step is, and how powerful it is, and how it sets you up not just for this clarity and creation, but true resilience. True resilience.

Bravery and transformation in your life and how possible it is for you to emerge stronger and more aligned over and over again. Okay, my friend, hang on because I have got a really exciting and different thing coming up for you next week. I can hardly keep the cat in the bag, but I will. So make sure not to miss that episode.

I'll see you next time.