I’m excited to share my interview with business coach, consultant and fractional COO, Jessica Lackey with you.  Since we talk about courage and authenticity in this episode, I think it’s important that I acknowledge something. When I was first introduced to Jessica Lackey by a mutual mentor, I expected to be a little bit intimidated because she has an MBA from Harvard, was a consultant for top-ranked McKinsey & Company and also had a successful corporate career at Nike.  I am certainly no slouch, with a master's degree from UCLA and a resume with plenty of high profile employers of my own, our culture teaches us to compare and compete, so those insecurity vibes were there.  

What I experienced in getting to know her is that Jessica Lackey is like many high ability and high performing women I’ve known: approachable and down to earth, which is to say - warm, funny, and genuine.  After years of pushing herself to fit into the mold, she embarked on a journey of self-exploration, diving into alternative healing modalities and ancient teachings. Today, she is a business coach who empowers others to embrace their authentic selves and create lives that align with their values and potential.

While our paths were not identical, Jessica and I internalized many of the same beliefs growing up.  When you are identified as gifted in elementary school, the message you get is that you have a lot of potential and you need to live up to all expectations placed on you.  While both of us remained on the overachiever path for quite some time, eventually each of us reached a point where we recognized that the success we had created did not feel fulfilling.   

Here’s what we cover in this vulnerable conversation: 

- Toxic productivity which results in disconnection from awareness

- Learning to trust oneself and recognizing the importance of being authentic

- Alternative healing modalities and how they can facilitate growth and insight 

- Discovering our values and the concept of Dharma

- Using our gifts to serve the broader good and not just maximizing wealth

- The experience of Impostor syndrome and rejection sensitivity as gifted adults 

- The courage it takes to learn to trust yourself and building something authentic 

Connect with Jessica Lackey beyond this episode:

• Website: https://www.jessicalackey.com/
• What’s Your Stage of Business? Quiz: https://bit.ly/3XGqoBv
• Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-lackey/   

If summer is a little slower in your business, it’s the perfect time to turn things around before the fall rush. My short term, Choose Your Own Adventure options are only available during July and August.  Kinda like summer camp, but without leaving home or S’Mores.  Find out more here: https://bit.ly/summer-strategy-form  then, schedule a free 30-minute consultation here:  https://bit.ly/calendly-free-consultation

My favorite place to connect online is Linked In, click here to subscribe to my LinkedIn newsletter: https://bit.ly/TDWE-Newsletter

For the time crunched, or impatient: go back (or skip)  to your favorite parts! 

00:10:16 Breaking Free: Corporate Ladders and Crucible Moments

00:14:44 Understanding the Limits of Adult-Defined Identity

00:22:25 "Leaving Nike: Family Pushback and Pursuing Happiness"

00:26:51 "Evolve Your Personal Values: A Painful Journey"

00:33:16 "Life Coaching Journey Leads to Pandemic Resignation"

00:39:56 "Overcoming Impostor Syndrome: Trust and Authenticity"

00:43:46 "Women Entrepreneurs Exploiting Each Other: Reality Check"

00:47:38 "The Fascinating Path of Personal Evolution"

H: So I am here with my new friend, Jessica Lackey today to talk about some things that are very, very interesting to me and a specific group of female entrepreneurs who are near and dear to my heart. And I am talking about the recovering good girls, the corporate refugees, the A plus students, the perfectionists, the girls who literally checked every single box, did it all right and then walked away from it, so I can't wait to get in to this topic with you.

G: Super excited to be here.

H: And let me be honest, when I first met you, when I first heard about you before we even met, I thought, oh, she's out of my league because you have a Ivy league education. We're talking Harvard MBA, you were employed by the gold standard management consulting firm, the well known and very well reputed McKinsey and I thought, geez, you know, I only went to UCLA. I don't know if I could really hang with this chick, but you were every bit as warm and wonderful and down to earth and authentic as I could have hoped for and I think that might be a great, good place to start because that is not what people expect of women like us, is it?

G: It is not, they expect me to walk around with a holier than thou attitude and to have no patience for other people and that's not how I, that's not my speed at all, but it is what you get labeled at as a Harvard MBA, McKinsey and Company, you get labeled as a corporate mercenary and that is not certainly not who I am.

H: You know, a lot of what we're going to talk about today, Jessica is going to be identity and how our identities have evolved how we have intentionally deliberately evolved them. But was that ever an issue for you, is it ever a problem for you? That sort of that misfit between how you saw yourself and how you knew other people saw you with no actual experience other than your pedigree.

G: I didn't know how other people really saw me versus how I saw myself because I didn't know how I saw myself that wasn't the point. Because the point growing up, and we'll talk about this more, was to get good grades, to get into the best school, like how I saw myself never mattered because that wasn't the point.

H: Okay. I think we have to talk a little family history here, right? So I'm going to guess that you came from a very high ability, high achieving family, and you did what was expected of you because that's what everybody in the family did, am I right?

G: Okay, I would say like my parents were the first ones in their family to go to college, my dad got his MBA, but working from a part time, my mom was a teacher. So I would say it wasn't the stereotypical like legacy from a high achieving career, but I was labeled as gifted early on. And that set the trajectory of my formative years.

H: Yes, and gifted women are my sweet spot, and I am going to guess that, like me, because I was also identified gifted in the fourth grade, as was my daughter. Whenever I ask a woman, were you identified as gifted in school or are you gifted, what they'll typically say was I was as a kid and that's such an interesting thing because it's not something you outgrow.

G: It is not something you outgrow although I've discovered that of the kids labeled gifted in my gifted class, when I was a first grader, cause that's how labeled early we got labeled, only one or two of us had this kind of traditional professional career, by the way, they were both women. The boys who were labeled gifted at the time took different paths that weren't necessarily the follow the corporate ladder paths.

H: Okay. So can we infer from this that when you were identified as gifted as a young girl, that you internalize certain expectations as a result of the G word that you're conditioned as a female, like everyone else, but you have to be a super female. You have to be an a plus plus female.

G: Yeah, there is the conditioning of being labeled gifted, but then there's also the true ability. I could read when I was before kindergarten, I could take tests and not have to study like things came quickly. So there's both the, I was labeled gifted, but there's also the internal pressure of, well, why not try to get a hundred percent on every single test I ever take because I can, and I'm expected to, and I get rewards and accolades from my family for doing so. So there's the label and what that means and then there's the, well isn't this what we're supposed to do like maximize our abilities.

H: And I think most people would say, yeah, everybody, all of us, men, women, smart, less smart, we all expect to do our best. And certainly throughout the whole academic process and most parents would say, just do your best and we'll be happy right and most parents don't actually mean that. I can tell you, I have three kids and I said the same thing, but if I don't think they're doing their best, then they're going to have another conversation with me. But it's like, wouldn't you naturally want to do your best and in so doing, realize my best is actually very stimulating and very rewarding and it forms the basis of a lot of my identity. Like I can do things really well, so why wouldn't I, but it's interesting that you say you didn't really have as strong an identity of yourself in that way. You knew what others expected and it felt good to do what others expected, but did you go through life thinking of yourself as gifted and if you did, what did that even mean to you?

G: Yeah. I went through my life as gifted, my kind of, I was great at learning. I was great at school, but you know, I was great at college. I was great in the workforce. I was a high capacity workhorse that my whole self was based on my ability to achieve, which meant I didn't really develop the skills like having friends and having fun and play because, you know, I was gifted in this area that seemed to get a lot of attention and accolades and made my life actually much easier going through it. So I doubled down on the areas that I was valued for and didn't develop at all the areas that were hard or a struggle for me. So, you know, then I had to be gifted because if I wasn't gifted and wasn't doing high capacity, high adrenaline work, who am I if I'm not my work.

H: It's literally, we paint ourselves into a corner, right? And what's interesting about this is, is a lot of people will say, well, instead of trying to get better at things, you're not good at just lean hard on your strengths. There are entire coaching and consulting programs built around this philosophy and on the surface, it makes a lot of sense. Why try to get better at things you suck at, why not just double down on your strengths and really leverage those, but when you are only developing your intellect and your ability to learn and your ability to produce the things that get left out, we're not talking about things like learning how to type or learning how to cook you know, learning how to change tires. We're talking about actually learning about enjoyment of life and enjoyment of other people doing anything other than work. And that leaves the majority of your life out of the equation, out of your personality development.

G: Well, the places I ended up working didn't leave a lot of room for life. When you worked at a consulting firm and I was on the road Sunday night through Thursday, super late in the evening, all I did on Fridays and Saturdays was recover from my job, potentially go out with some coworkers and then recover from that. There was, I didn't pay for food, I didn't you know, I got my laundry, did my laundry, dry cleaning I didn't have to do anything, which is kind of by design, right? They take it, I don't want to say they take advantage, but they kind of do. They exploit young talent for their purposes and it seems like a good on paper trade, right? Oh, I'm gonna, I don't need to develop friends and hobbies and of the ability to kind of take care of my life because it's either paid for by my work or I've made colleagues and friends from my work or I'm working, that was all that was there and that continued for a very long time in most of my jobs and actually even school.

H: And a lot of people would think, you're killing it, right? I'm sure you probably had a lot of people say, I envy you, Jessica. I envy your success because you you're living it. You've got the drink. You don't even have to do your own fricking laundry, how many women would love that trade. But at some point you must've realized, you know what, there's something missing here, there's something lacking here. I can't quite put my finger on it, but was it like a slow awareness or did you have an epiphany? Did you have a rude awakening?

G: I've had a couple, because I've had a couple of different juncture points. So I knew I needed to get out of consulting and that was a little over a decade ago. But of course you don't realize this when you get on the ladder that you can't just get off the ladder, at least at like predetermined checkpoints right. When you work at McKinsey and Company, where do you go next? You go to a top three business school and if you go somewhere else, people look at you kind of funny, or unless you go something that's equivalent to that, like maybe you join a startup or something like that, but there's a predestined path that, yeah, you get off one path, but you're on like the next chapter of the exact same path.

And then when you go to business school then one, you have to pay off your loans and two, there's only a certain type of company and a certain type of job you can legitimately get after business school cause everything else, people look at you funny like, why do you want this type of job? So I stayed, I knew this wasn't my path, I explicitly did not go back to consulting. I explicitly moved to a smaller city thinking that will do it. But then I got trapped on the corporate ladder at Nike and then as a high caliber, high powered woman, I got put into roles.

Literally, there was one role that I got put into the one before my crucible moment, as I call it, where I got like a 15% pay raise when they moved me, it was a lateral role because they said, this is the type of role that deserves combat pay. It was the type of job where it's not at a one person job and the only people that have ever been successful at it work around the clock and have the capacity to see everything going on in the business and I could, and I did.

H: That's giftedness.

G: It is giftedness until I hit a wall where I literally started crying in my white male boss's office for multiple days in a row and realize like something is genuinely not right in my body. I'm like, okay, I kept trying to slow it down and every path just sped back up again until I hit this point where I was like, all right, legitimately something needs to change because I can't keep on this, nor do I want the life that these. That this path would lead me to, I had no desire for the next step, I look around at everybody else, I'm like, I don't want to be them. If y'all have lives, it's because you have a stay at home partner. You know, Nike was kind of a progressive company in that a lot of the women at the next level had stay at home husbands, but there was no single people at the next level because they worked you so hard that you had no time to take care of a household, regardless of whether or not you had kids or not.

H: So you needed a stay home partner to manage your life because the you weren't any part of the shared life. You weren't any part of the domestic life. You weren't part of your own self care. You were the workhorse who needed to constantly be on the track and not someone else has to take care of well, all the emotional labor.

G: Yeah, the basics of cleaning the house, even when you're one person, someone has to cook meals, someone has to pay bills, someone has to do laundry, unless I was willing to trade all of my money to outsource things, which then again, like removes you even further from life. I was in survival mode for such a long time, I didn't realize it until I one hit, hit a wall with my body and then two started seeing my friends have families and my friends have fun. And I'm like, I'm literally in my office seven days a week.

H: And you had literally been almost trained for that lifestyle from the very beginning. It's like, I was identified gifted in the fourth grade but in the first grade, you have no identity whatsoever. Other than what adults tell you, you have, you start to form a little bit of self awareness and a self concept between grades one and four. But you were literally the littlest kid with this incredible brain that adult said, basically, when you have this kind of brain, this is the path your life will take and we don't know what we're lacking. We don't know what's missing. We don't see the void. We just know to continue to do what we do means other people are happy with us. We have mirror neurons, so when other people are happy with us, we're happy with us until we begin to realize, wait a minute, I don't even know what happy is.

I just know how to keep doing this so, you know, you're talking to a former psychotherapist. So, of course, I have, I'm curious. I have to ask you, you said you reached a point where you realized I need to get out of consulting. Your whole life, your whole identity, everything you've done, you were climbing up a ladder that was leaning against a very specific wall and it's not like you could just take your ladder and move it to another location and put it up against another wall and start climbing there. It was literally more like an escalator or a treadmill that just kept going. How did you know that, that you couldn't do it anymore, what were the signs for you?

G: I think this big signs for me were, I hated my job.

H: Well, that's pretty obvious.

G: Well, I've hated many of my jobs but you can still realize the futility of your job and do it really well, which is the, that's how I actually leapt out of my last corporate job. We'll talk more about that, I think, but I leapt out of my last corporate job. I was exceptional at doing my job and I also realized it had zero impact. It had no, it didn't, I was just a cog in a machine and I was a cog in the machine. I was putting on weight. I had a drinking problem. I couldn't, I didn't date. I didn't know how to have friends and when you start to stack all that up the nice thing about consulting is that the predetermined path gives you checkpoints. Like it's literally gives you the upper out, gives you an out that's, you don't have to explain to anybody.

H: It's like, a perfect fit for being trapped in a system where you don't stick around long enough and you don't have relationships deep enough where they see the cracks in the armor so you can't see them either like you don't, I understand consulting. You're not having like deep, intimate conversations with the people that you're working with. So oftentimes they might not even be asking about your personal life in order to discover that you don't actually have one. It's almost a perfect fit, but a perfect trap too.

G: It is a perfect trap, actually, you know, like consulting does give you an up or out moment. You have to decide, do I want to continue being indoctrinated into this process or do I want to leave? But then it gives you, but then when you leave, you're still indoctrinated into the trap. You just a trap of business school. It's a trap of the next corporate gig, right? It's all, it looks like the illusion of a door, but it's really just like a brick wall in the same cave. So the moment I knew I needed to leave the corporate track was again, this kind of in my boss's office at Nike.

H: You're at Nike now. So you're done, you're done with McKenzie. You've moved on to corporate. You're thinking freedom. I broke out, I got it and you're like, oh shit.

G: It's the same damn thing. Like at McKinsey, you never made friends and you never made plans because you were never home, at Nike I didn't have friends that didn't work at Nike and I never made plans because I was always working. So I lived at home, which meant I didn't actually have the benefit of like having my meals comped. But now I had to take care of my house and I never had friends and I never made plans even though I lived in a place where I could.

H: Well, yeah, but let's be honest, one of the things we connected over is that we both lived in Portland. I lived there for three years and in fact, your phone number is Portland area code still. But, you don't really have the same social life in Portland because it rains all the time, so a lot of people stay home anyway, but if you have friends, you can at least have them over.

G: If you have friends so I had work colleagues. We were friends inside the firm, but as a gifted child, the other thing that they don't really tell you about is you're going to get promoted pretty fast and you're going to get promoted to where your peers are not your same age. So they have kids and they have families and I'm single and a decade younger so not relatable.

H: Not relatable, not as a friend anyway.

G: Oh, lovely, lovely human beings and they all had houses in the suburbs and I had an apartment in the city. So I didn't have colleagues and friends from work. I mean, they were amazing and I have some long term relationships from there, but the people that are like, going to go hang out with you and play in the kickball league and, you know, go have brunch with you on the weekends, I didn't have those people because they were my direct reports or my interns but they weren't my peers.

H: And it's not really in anybody's best interest to be too friendly with their subordinates anyway. It's actively discouraged in most places because they don't want you to have dual relationships where you start cutting slack for people because you also see them outside of work, this all feels incredibly lonely, doesn't it?

G: It really, really was, it really was and when the work was tolerable, you kind of put up with it. You're like, okay, I'm doing good work. I'm getting very well compensated, this is going to be another list on the resume, that's going to make it easier to get a job somewhere. But at some point the runway ran out like the conveyor belt, I'm like, okay, the step is much deeper here and if I take this step, I'm going to lose everything.

H: Which is terrifying considering the opportunity, well the sunk cost really of everything that you've put into, that's why I admire women like you and I so much because everything we've put into building the life that we have and then recognizing, I can't live this way anymore, the sacrifices, the losses, the identity crisis, the huge ass void that you open up in your life with really no guarantee that you can fill it again or that you're not being completely delusional, not to mention the pushback you get from other people. What the hell are you doing, did you get any of that?

G: I didn't, I got some pushback on leaving consulting, but everyone, like everyone in my family, they saw how miserable I had gotten at Nike. They saw how miserable I had gotten at Nike and I think my friends and family were like we support your choice in doing something different, which for me was moving to Charlotte for a bridge job, but they support it because they're like, you're going to destroy your life if you stay on this path. So they, my parents still are not super aware of like what I do and like that I'm sustainably successful. They don't really get it, but they know that I'm no longer like a walking train wreck. And so they're like, we want you to be happy, this doesn't seem to be doing it. We don't really know what's next for you, but we can see that this is slowly killing you.

H: Do you think it had to get that bad or do you think that because I often think about myself, you know, am I a masochist? Why do things have to get so bad for me before I will take action to change them? But when I'm being more compassionate with myself, when I'm being more forgiving of myself, I'll recognize that there are very few people on this planet who understand exactly how this feels and how the weight of other people's expectations, because you are supposedly somebody special. And it almost felt to me, and I'm very curious to know if you have the same feeling, it felt like I was being ungrateful for like I didn't appreciate the gift, you know, like I didn't really appreciate that I had the ability to be really successful at something and then go be really successful at something else and it seemed like I just kept wanting a refund. I just kept wanting to say, well, no, this isn't doing it, nope, I can't do this anymore. No, thanks, this isn't the thing while other people are thinking I would have been thrilled. I would have been beyond thrilled to have done any of those things. Like, why can't you ever be fricking satisfied, how about that?

G: Yeah, I think I never think about it as like getting a refund, but I'm…

H: I didn't either at the time that just kind of came out.

G: Yeah, I think every step I've taken since kind of the realizing something was really, really wrong at Nike has been both tinged with, how can I use my gifts to do it differently? Like, how can I pay it back? The choices I've made, the educational opportunities that were open for me. Like it, I've picked up a lot of skills, I have a lot of gifts and the biggest thing I learned is that deploying them in service of making capitalism work for lack of a better term is that's what's misusing my gift. So every step further along the way has been tinged with a bit of guilt of like, I collected all this experience and to use that experience to make me extremely wealthy and continue to perpetuate the like cycles of like intellectual gatekeeping, that would be like the turning on the gift.

My gift no longer can be in service of maximizing my wealth. It has to be in service of something larger and more expansive than me and that's when people didn't understand people understood getting off of the consulting train, they understood burnout in a company job. Most people don't understand though, explicitly doing things that don't make you enough money and that, you know, or as much money as you could, or that are less sustainable. Most people don't understand that and to make choices that again, serve the broader good versus serving yourself, that people are like, the right people get it. But other, a lot of other people are like, we don't get it.

H: Which is so disappointing because and I, you know, we're not the moral majority here, we're not even the moral minority, we are talking about creating lives that are in alignment with what matters most to us and what a person with incredible potential may go through when they realize that everything they've ever learned or been taught about who they are actually doesn't satisfy them and their values evolve. We are talking about an evolution of your personal values, or maybe even reaching a point where you recognize you have values, or you could have values, or you should have values, if only you were given the opportunity to pay attention to yourself, to your body, to your mind, to what feels good, to what doesn't, you have to get off the hamster wheel, the conveyor belt, the escalator, the ladder, you have to be able to get off of that to even have the head space to pay attention to anything below the neck.

Like, I used to think of myself as like, and I think you use this expression on your website, Jessica. I used to think of myself as a head with a body and the only purpose for my body was to move the head from place to place. It was like a transportation system so the head could go places and do what the head does, which is think and learn and teach and all that. The body was really just sort of this useless kind of thing, like an appendix until I started realizing your body is very unhappy with the way you're living your life and this toxic productivity and this sort of disconnection from any awareness that this doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel right. I don't believe in the mission of this organization, they're nice words on the wall or on their annual report. Nobody here behaves as though they mean them in the slightest and that just feels horrible to me. I cannot do this. That's painful though.

I was so lucky to have been living there with these holistic modalities that a stone throw away and people looked at me like I was crazy. They still look at me like, well, I'm crazy when I say, yeah, I go see a tarot person every couple of months and I do energy healing. They're like, I don't really get it, I'm like, that was those modalities plus coaching is what allowed me to clear the energy that wasn't mine, start to open doors that had been locked in my body and in my soul and my spirit for a really long time. And if I was living in a big, bigger city or one that was less spiritually inclined at that time, I'm not sure I would have availed myself of those types of options. What I thought it was too woo, but in Portland, everything was normalized.

So, the timing couldn't have been more perfect and that was the period I reconnected to my body. And I started to know more about what, who I was and discovered those values and discovered, you know, what the concept of Dharma and these more ancient teachings that provided such a counterpoint to everything I've been schooled in before and that tension has carried me through the last decade. As I've navigated setting up my own business and becoming a, in the midlife crisis. I think I hit my midlife crisis at an early thirties versus a lot of people hit it at 40.

H: You've always been ahead of the curve, come on.

G: I've always been ahead of the curve right.

H: But I think you, you know, to your point, and I happen to have spent my three years living in Portland, two of those years were pandemic years. So I really didn't get to know the city and all its riches in the way you did. It's fascinating to me that you availed yourself to all these alternative, types of healing modalities. But I think, you know, it speaks to your breaking point. It speaks to the fact that I want to get as far away from everything I've been thinking, everything I've been doing. I'm going to literally crack myself open and receive, and I'm not going to put up artificial constraints about where my healing may come from. And I think that level of openness and just your ability to trust yourself and think if it feels weird, maybe I'll go back a second time.

If it still feels weird maybe we'll do something else, but you received it and you integrated it. It's another thing we share is an interest in the Dharma and recognizing that sometimes we don't need something new. Sometimes we need something really, really old. Something that has been around for thousands of years and still really work. Now you went through this healing journey and you obviously had the resources to give yourself some time and space. At what point did you decide, you know what, I'm going to set up my own business and I am going to be a consultant again, but I'm going to do it in a totally different way.

G: So four years ago, I moved five years ago, I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina as part of my journey, getting life coaching certification. I wanted to move back to the East coast where I'm from and live near my parents and my brother and my family. That was part of the nice thing about consulting. I mean, the bad thing about it is that they divorced you from, they just, you moved to a city and you have no roots there and I didn't want to be that far away from my family with aging parents so I moved back to the East coast. My family all lives here now but at that point in time, I knew enough about who I was to know that this is just this job, I took a job to move me here.

This was just to bridge things, it was to save up the money to leave when it was time. I never knew it was going to be time until the pandemic happened. And the pandemic, I got married, we bought a house, I got a dog. And for the first time in a really long time, I got to have conversations that were not monitored by my employer because I wasn't in the box, I was working from home. I got to listen to interesting podcasts. I didn't have a commute. I wasn't in the energy all the time and I was working in appliance manufacturing. And at some point in time, they were like, we're going to bring everybody back and I also knew I was in supply chain at the time that I was in one of those no win jobs.

Again, very much like the general, you know, the jobs that are more than 1 person jobs that you have to be exquisitely exceptional to do well, and I never wanted a promotion because I didn't want anybody else's job. I didn't want to move laterally because I want any of their jobs and I realized that I was about to become, I've moved from pet to threat. I'd moved from the woman they brought in for a diversity move, who happened to do her job well to the first sacrifice that they would make as like the pandemic supply chain continued to roll out. And I was like, I got a bonus, I got my house. I got married. I'd like completed all the logistical things. I don't want to go back to the office and I don't want to continue to like play act like a nice girl, knowing that nothing I say would change the CEO's mind on things and I was like, I'm done, peace.

I don't know what I'm gonna do. I don't, I really didn't know what I was going to do, but I was like, nothing can be worse than this because at that point knew myself well enough to say I can't keep a straight face around these people anymore. And I'm going to get myself fired by my run of my mouth and saying something unpolitically correct that's actually very true and I was like I want to go out on my own terms and I go out and not go out being fired.

H: Yeah. I don't want to be escorted from the building by security with a box.

G: No, I would have been, had I stayed, I would have been one of the sacrificial children that happened during rough times because I was willing to speak my truth and I wasn't willing to tow the company line and give up of myself for the fact that they had poor management. I wasn't willing to do it, they knew that I actually told them a year in advance that I was going to be looking for a new job at the end of the project I was running. And they're like, what do you mean, I'm like, I'm not going to be here anymore.

H: Only a good girl A plus student would give a year's notice.

G: I told them, you know, I was like, I'm going to leave. They're like, what do you mean you're going to leave? I'm like, they couldn't imagine that I had…

H: An alternative reality.

G: Yes, exactly because they'd all given their lives in service of the company, or they had lives where they had small children at home and they couldn't take the financial hit. And I could, and I did, and I designed my life in order to be able to give it, give my FU notice and so I did and it was glory.

H: You created your own parachute, isn't it disorienting when you realize, I mean when I think about it like you you can't put the genie back in the bottle like you were all the way out, you hid the cork you were not going back in. Isn't it interesting? It's almost like when a former smoker you know gets around smokers again. It's just they could not understand you and you were not willing to make yourself understood by them. You're literally, you had irreconcilable differences. You can't speak the same language. You don't have the same values. And you know, if the conversation continues, you're going to do something regrettable that may bite you in the ass later on.

So you're like, you know what, it's just better that we just put an end to this now. Your whole personality, your whole identity had to have changed quite dramatically over these years. I'm just imagining where we started this conversation and where you are now and that's an absolutely transformational journey in every way. I mean, do you even recognize your former self when you talk about her?

G: I recognize her and I recognize that we are very, very different. The idea of and I still get the trigger of it, the worst thing that you can ever get is a message from a client being like, can we talk? Because all that does is like trigger the, what did I do wrong? What did I do wrong? What's my boss going to yell at me now about, right? Like that was the, that was the conditioning is like…

H: It's always your fault, whatever it is.

G: It's always your fault, whatever it is and 95% of the time it was, they had a question about something. But like the pit in my stomach was like, fuck, I got it wrong. I did it wrong. I did it wrong. And now I work with clients where I don't, even when they say, can we talk to them like, I don't have that pit in my stomach of like, oh my God, they're going to fire me. One, because there's a level of respect and rapport with these clients that I have, because I work with mostly women who are also kind of dismantling their own conditioning cause they've gone out on their own. They're driven women, they peer and get it. And two is I've started to recognize that I know what I'm doing like, and if I make a mistake, I'll own it and we'll move on. Because in the grand scheme of things, there's not like, I don't need to take all that on myself and I think that's been, so I feel it. I'm like, oh, I feel this, this is reminiscent of where I came from and I also now have the response that is not just immediate reaction.

H: I think the imposter syndrome is a lifelong affliction but how we handle it and rejection sensitivity, I think, you know, those things, they will probably always be in our makeup and that may be the knee jerk reflex that, oh, shit, I fucked up. Oh, they're not happy with me oh, they found fault with me. It may be the first thing that comes to mind but you don't act on it as though it were true and start going into the placating and apologizing and the explaining and the rationalizing and all of that, you think, okay, what else could it be? And then let me find out and you're more easily reassured that they're actually telling you the truth they just had a question and there isn't some secret agenda. Or it's not going to, you know, they're going to, you're gonna let your guard down and then they're going to zing you with it.

Learning how to trust yourself and learning how to genuinely trust other people, I think is also a big part of this journey because you don't really realize that you don't actually trust yourself when all of your validation is coming from being who other people need, want, depend, and pay you to be. It really distances you from your ability to tap into your own intuition and genuinely trust yourself. So I think it's an act of such courage to go out on your own and build something that's authentically you because you gotta take the mask all the way off and leave it off.

G: I don't think I knew that, I knew, I think, going out on my own was a leap from pain, a leap of like, okay, like I can't stay here anymore. I don't really know what's on the other side and I had like backup plans and backup plans. I had subcontracting consulting gigs and I had a nest egg and I was rationally prepared but I had no idea how my life was going to break open when I left. And how my identity would shift further because all I knew was I don't want to be that and I know that there are some things in my life that I don't want to be in some things that I do, but the values that I hold currently think they were glimmers under the surface. And now I'm like, this is me take it or leave it, I'm probably not going to be as polished as you want. I'm going to give all of my gifts to the people I work with and my community, and I'm going to make friends, and I'm going to speak my piece, and if you don't like it, that's great because I'm not talking to you.

H: You can move on.

G: You can move on and I can move on and it's still learning how to be my full self because there are, even when you break out of like the corporate and consulting matrix, there are other matrixes in the entrepreneurship space and I'm still finding out which ones, which spaces make me feel like I can't be myself and how can I take what I need from those spaces not in an extractive way, but like, how can I learn? But then be like, yep, this doesn't align, these aren't my people, not in a bad way, but this isn't for me. And that's continued, I didn't know how much of that I'd be doing. I'm like, Oh, well, like everything on the other side is gonna be fine, that is actually not the case in a lot of the spaces. And so finding women like you and finding some similar spaces that we're in has been just transformative because it's like, Oh, I can be seen as who I am here. I don't have to hide my giftedness, even though I stopped hiding it a long time ago, I get to use it for me and not in service of making men more money.

H: And as smart as we are, would you agree, Jessica, that we can be a little naïve when it comes to how other people operate. I think it's one of the things that I think is kind of ironic and maybe a little perverse about the way that we are wired is that it was very disorienting, disillusioning, and deeply hurtful to me that other women in the entrepreneurial space were very happy to exploit me. Like I literally had several women that I used to be affiliated with in some way literally take the words out of my mouth and make money on them. Because I share quite readily, my thoughts and so forth and this may be a person who has fewer ideas and said, well, that's a great idea. I'm going to go turn it into something Diann's just shooting off her mouth she probably doesn't remember that she said it.

And so learning to trust our intuition and our instincts about where we feel safe to be all of who we are. And that's kind of what I meant by taking the mask all the way off. I don't think we realize how much we were masking our authentic self because when you're putting all of your energy, all of your focus, all of your attention, all of your effort into being who you're being paid and rewarded to be, you're not even thinking about the rest of you, the other parts of you that are all being crammed into that box. And once you come out of the box, you're like, wow, how the hell did I ever fit in there? Like, no wonder I had so much discomfort and so much anxiety and so much depression.

I was literally like in a trash compactor and now it just feels good to be spacious and to learn to honor my true self and if somebody doesn't like it you're doing me a favor to move the fuck on as quickly as possible. Because I'm not going back and you're not either. Do you think there's any way you could have done this differently gotten there faster? Have you ever questioned your journey and thought I wish this would have happened or it's too bad this didn't happen, maybe I could have done this quicker or in a less painful way or do you feel like this is exactly how it needed to happen because of who I am and where I come from.

G: There were some situations where I wish I'd handled myself differently, but as like an overall arc, no, because, one, you can't ever change anything, obviously, but two, it's like, I wouldn't be as capable of being an entrepreneur if I hadn't had all those experiences and I wouldn't be able to guide others through the similar journey, if you don't go through the crucible yourself, some or a crucible, it is sometimes hard to guide others through their similar journey. I'm, you know, just turned 40, sometimes I wish that like my crisis had happened earlier because then potentially children would have been in the mix, but also I'm grateful for the fact that that season of my life is probably over and now what?

And now what now, now my life, some of those life choices have been made for me and now it's like, great, I'm going to play the hand that I have been dealt and really like, in less of a, I'm going to do what other people think about me, it's more of a, and live up to their expectations and like achieve to that. And we'd be like, what do I want to do, what has resonance for me and how do I go after that with everything I got.

H: And this is, I think, you and I agree on this along with many other things. Your path is the path of continuous personal evolution, this is where you are in that path right now. We are going to link to your business and your offers and for people who are interested in getting more of you in their life and possibly working with you in the show notes. But one thing I can already say is for sure, you, now that you're on this path, you're going to continue to evolve. You're going to continue to choose you. You're going to continue to say, yes, what is right for you and aligned with you. And you're not going to look to other people. for those answers. You're going to look inside of course, you have your trusted advisors. You're not going to be reckless, but there's no way to go back in the bottle and your path is going to be a fascinating one that I am looking forward to watching as it evolves.

G: And I'm so grateful to have met you because you're going to be one of those trusted peers and mentors that are on the journey with me, I'm so thrilled that we met.

H: Yeah, you're going to have to block me because I will stalk you relentlessly until you shake me loose. Okay, my friend, we accomplished what we set out to do here. This has been a fascinating conversation and looking forward to many others and maybe we'll have you come back on the show when you have a big announcement to make.

G: Sounds great, thank you.

H: Awesome.