From Boardroom to Boundless - The Journey to Nomadic Leadership and Authentic Living - Jenny Lincoln : 142

How does one transform from a high-powered corporate executive to a free-spirited nomad? Jenny shares her incredible journey from a life driven by seriousness and fear to one led by heartfulness and play. She shares her early years in an emotion-suppressing family and her rise in the corporate world, where she felt increasingly disconnected from her true self.

Jenny Lincoln is a story-weaving sorceress and wise nomadic sage. With 30+ years in the Corporate trenches, Jenny balances authority with gentleness, serving truth with love & grace. Her talks are lightning bolts to your heart & soul, igniting you into action! Jenny is the visionary behind HUMNAV ~ the HUMan NAVigation Practice—your inner GPS for all things leadership.

We discuss the need for personal and professional disruption, exploring how breaking away from comfort zones can lead to tremendous growth. Using examples from early online media's disruption of traditional industries and the evolving role of artificial intelligence, we discuss the importance of embracing change. Jenny also shares her career transformation from finance to psychology and behavioural coaching, fueled by a desire for more human-centred work and fulfillment.

Emotions are at the heart of our final discussions, as we navigate through loss, grief, and transformation themes. Jenny shares her experience of hitting rock bottom and finding a way back to self-love and purpose, likening her journey to a caterpillar's metamorphosis into a butterfly. We also highlight the concept of the "sage age" and the empowering journey of turning 60, emphasizing the importance of heart in professional roles. How Jenny reconnected with her empathic nature through a nomadic lifestyle and how embracing internal feedback and intuition has liberated her to live authentically.

To connect with Jenny: https://jennylincoln.com/

Chapters

• 9:11 Embracing Disruption for Growth
• 13:56 Navigating Career Changes With Heartfulness
• 25:40 Navigating Transformation Through Depression
• 33:37 Navigating the Path to Nomadism
• 39:00 Embracing Heartfulness and Personal Transformation

Transcript

Daniela SM : 0:04

Hi, I'm Daniela. Welcome to my podcast, because Everyone has a Story, the place to give ordinary people's stories the chance to be shared and preserved. Our stories become the language of connections. Let's enjoy it. Connect and relate, because everyone has a story. Relate because everyone has a story. Welcome. My guest is Jenny Lincoln. Jenny is a story weaving sorceress and a wise nomadic sage, and I will also add that she's an insightful speaker. Being uncomfortable creates wonderful new beginnings. This is one of the many nuggets in Jenny's story today. Once a high power executive, jenny now embraced a life led by her heart and play. In this episode, she shares her powerful story of breaking free from the corporate world, discovering her true self and becoming a wise nomadic leader yes, a nomad. You know how curious I am about the nomadic lifestyle. It was so insightful to spend time with Jenny. We could have talked for hours. She's the visionary behind Human Nav, demonstrates the courage to disrupt comfort zones, embrace change and live a life of purpose and heart. Let's enjoy her story.

Daniela SM : 1:33

Welcome Jenny to the show. Thank you, daniela, I'm really pleased to be here. Thanks for the invite.

Daniela SM : 1:38

Yes, I'm excited to have a nomad in the podcast. So, jenny, why do you want to share your story?

Jenny Lincoln: 1:45

Living a nomadic life after being in corporate. There is just so many fundamental transformations that I've gone through that I see people kind of stuck in the middle of right now. Two in particular are in corporate. I was very kind of head-led, very serious and kind of surly powerful business exec and I'd lost my love of play and heartfulness and all of that. And so you know, I've had this whole rediscovery of kind of moving from fear and anger and seriousness to being led by my heart. And you know, I think the other thing that my story illustrates is the power of everything that happens around us and also within us, like our emotions. Everything is feedback, and so you know we're actually being supported and being given all sorts of wonderful information to guide us. We have this amazing guidance, internal guidance system. So they're the two things that I really want to share through my story and give some liberation and freedom to everyone that's listening.

Daniela SM : 2:55

Great, thank you. I'm looking forward to this. Jenny, when does your story start?

Jenny Lincoln: 3:01

The nomadic adventure and journey started 10 years ago, so I've been nomadic for a decade now. My corporate journey started back in the 1980s. Can everyone remember back then?

Daniela SM : 3:12

Yes, yes, yes, it's not that old.

Jenny Lincoln: 3:16

The combination of the two are really powerful. So there's kind of two books to me and I'm probably in my third one now where I bring the two together.

Daniela SM : 3:24

You said you were corporate. You lost kind of like your playing and smiling because you were focused on that. But you seem to be a type personality. So how were you when you were younger? I mean, what was a combination of both of these times or what happened?

Jenny Lincoln: 3:41

Well, actually it's a really interesting story. That story is the seed of a talk that I'm giving in two days time which is called Leading from the Lens of Love Reprogramming for Growth. And I actually started my life as a very fun-loving, smiling, sensitive. I'm definitely an empath and back then I felt everything, every single thing, that I was born into a really commercial family which didn't do emotions and feelings. They were considered to be a weakness, also a family where it was very masculine, very male-dominated, and women were seen as feeble spirits kind of. And so I made a vow very early in my life to not be stomped upon or treated like a doormat, like I saw some of the female generations getting done in my family. So I kind of chose to be the aggressor myself. So I took on that serious power welding role at a pretty early age.

Daniela SM : 4:47

Is that easy to do? I guess survival mode you can change. You can be more your personality.

Jenny Lincoln: 4:53

Well, I think it's when everything around you is supporting that, like when emotions are considered to be frivolous or weak or just not a valued currency. It's kind of smacked out of you. You're conditioned that way. That conditioning, and certainly the conditioning that I had during my school years, led me to the desire to work in corporate, because I think I saw that one. I wanted to model myself on my father because he was powerful. And secondly, I think corporate gave me a structure where I could continue all those defense mechanisms without me having to be consciously doing it all the time. So I think I was drawn to that environment because of that.

Daniela SM : 5:39

But you succeeded. Maybe not everybody could have had the same success. They could have molded themselves to a personality that they are not necessarily not their strength. But you just actually went all the way until you realized well, I want to change.

Jenny Lincoln: 5:55

Yeah, absolutely, and I think part of that somewhere in there. As a kid I thought it was a life and death situation, Like I wasn't threatened with life or death, but as a child you kind of work out. Well, I'm not accepted as that version of me, but I get rewards for being a different version of me, so I will move hell and high water to be that version. It's interesting that like probably 40 to 50 years of my life, I was seeking approval for my father, even though he wasn't still alive. I was seeking approval outside of me and trying to comply with being the good girl, being tough and strong and capable and business orientated and all of that. And it really wasn't until I went off and started to become a nomad that I reconnected with my heart and I realized the power of open-hearted and intuitive leadership. And so now that's kind of where I've gone and that's my true essence. I think everyone has that true essence.

Daniela SM : 6:57

Yeah, quite interesting, because you were saying that you see that I could be accepted if I am this way. Some other people could have been rebellious against it and still keep themselves. You, however, were able to mold, to adapt, to survive.

Jenny Lincoln: 7:13

Yes, I think so, and don't get me wrong, I went through my rebellious stages. Each of those rebellious stages were powerful, pivots in my life, certainly as a teenager. My response was I actually stopped working at school. So I started to fail everything. I was disinterested in school because they didn't have any business subjects. When I was back in those days, all I wanted to do was be a business exec and so I thought what's the point? I'm not going to waste my time doing all these silly subjects that I'm not going to use. Of course, that bites you in the end when you go to leave school and do your final exams and you don't get very good grades. So I repeated my final year so I could get grades to go and do my business degree. So that taught me a powerful lesson around, I suppose discipline and doing what I had to do. So I did both.

Jenny Lincoln: 8:04

I definitely did arc up and play rebel, and it's really interesting because I went from six or seven years of not really failing to when I got into business and started doing my business degree. I got straight high distinctions. It was all about what was relevant and what I wanted to be. So that's a powerful lesson about. You know you need to. Whatever you're doing needs to marry up with your sense of purpose at the time. And also my parents were going through a divorce and that was my way of getting attention. You know to be the disruptor, but it's interesting that that was an early sign of something that's innate within me I am a disruptor and I'm a purposeful disruptor. Now I disrupt for change and for evolution and so my clients hire me as a disruptor. But not stomping down corridors back in school and making you know noise. Different type of disruption meaningful, purposeful disruption.

Daniela SM : 9:04

I am interested in that. How do you know? How do you become a constructed disruptor?

Jenny Lincoln: 9:09

That's a really good question. I like that one. When I was a destructive disruptor, it came for the purpose. It was, if you look at the purpose of it, one I was seeking attention, and so I was motivated by things outside of me. I was seeking attention and so I was motivated by things outside of me. The obvious difference as a constructive disruptor is that I disrupt to grow, and that comes initially within me, right, so I will consciously disrupt something and shake something up in my environment when I see it's an old version of myself and it's no longer serving me, and so that helps shake things up. So I think that's one really important factor. And I think the second one is being a constructive disruptor is more about building and reinvention, whereas when I was in a destructive disruptor, I was doing real damage, not just to myself but the people around me.

Daniela SM : 10:11

Yes, you said that your clients hire you to be a disruptor. So how do you became that Like? I mean, I know we're jumping in no order here Well, I think certainly for me, the penny dropped that.

Jenny Lincoln: 10:24

It's that classic analogy of you can't bake a cake without breaking eggs. Some of the challenges that we face in our own personal development and the evolution in business and the entrepreneurial kind of journey, we get stuck in our ways. We get stuck on our comfy, on the couch, in our comfort zones. Sometimes we won't initiate the change, we won't initiate the reinvention, we won't initiate taking a new path or pivot, and so what happens is it's that whole thing of uncomfortable ends create wonderful new beginnings, and so I think I started to see the connection that there's a certain element of where you need to be your own disruptor and then there's actually powerful ways to do that in business. Let me give you an example.

Jenny Lincoln: 11:21

Back when online was starting, I was working in the print media back in Australia and the first thing that online did was it threatened. All of our print classifieds, all the ads for car sales, home sales, real estate sales and for jobs, employment, all used to be in print, you know, in your newspapers, and that's the only way you could find a job, find a car or find a home right, and with online, all of that got threatened. That's billions of dollars across so many companies. One of the valuable lessons I learned in business then was that if we had done that well, we would have cannibalized our own business. We would have disrupt our own business purposefully, with strategic intention, rather than it being hunted by all these new startups in online.

Jenny Lincoln: 12:23

But our executive team was too scared, it was fear-based and it decided that it said no, online's not a real threat. We're not going to lose billions of dollars and you know, within 18 months we lost billions of dollars. So sometimes you've got to follow some of the Hindu you know. Have you heard of Shiva the destroyer? No, he's. You know one of the deities. You sometimes have to do some destruction to clear the space, just like a storm. Sometimes we need to clear off the dead wood from trees. We need to clear all the space out so that we can have rebirth and new growth.

Daniela SM : 13:06

Yes, the story is similar to the artificial intelligence nowadays, right, Like when people are worried about all that. And actually I had an episode that I posted recently and the lady she's a voiceover she might things have changed, but the way she put it is like when people need a voice, they are going to say, well, I have the luxury to have a real human. If you cannot afford it, then you are using artificial intelligence, and then you go for that diamond, she said, and I thought, oh my God, that's just like the perfect way of seeing progress, because it's always like that. You can avoid it, you can complain if you're old, and oh my God, things were better before and the truth is that we're getting old. Everything always gets moved forward. That's pretty interesting that you see it that way too.

Jenny Lincoln: 13:55

It is, and I agree. I think AI is a wonderful opportunity in so many different ways. And, yes, it just means that everything's going to change form and we're going to say goodbye to some things, old forms and old ways. And you know, as humans, we get attached, we like to attach to things, and you know one of the universal laws is the law of impermanence. Things come together and then they fall apart, and so this is a normal part of evolution, but we fight it tooth and nail as humans, because we don't like to let things go.

Jenny Lincoln: 14:28

When I look at AI, I look at the opportunity for us to be more human, which I know sounds paradoxical because we're using AI, but what we do is that we can allow AI to do the patent work, the jobs that don't necessarily require the human touch. That means, like your other guests you were talking about, she can position herself in a premium situation. I'm all about behavior and the human experience For me. I rub my hands together and I think, wow, we can move away from being so task driven and spend more time in the richness of being humans and dealing with the human element, you know, and the human experience. For me, it's a powerful shift from the doing, which many of us hide behind I've been guilty of that to the being space. Who you be, and that's really important, I think as role models and leaders in communities and business, in families, as matriarchs and patriarchs.

Daniela SM : 15:32

Yeah, I agree, that's very well put. So, jenny, you mentioned the word attachments. Let's go back a little bit. So you were in the corporate world succeeding. Explain a little bit what you were doing and how did you change.

Jenny Lincoln: 15:45

Yeah, okay. Well, you know, for a large portion of my corporate life I was in finance and strategy, so I ran finance departments. I was the numbers person that took me into kind of mergers and acquisitions work as well. So I used to buy and sell different parts of companies and reconstruct them and deconstruct them and all that sort of stuff as well. It was after this brutal experience and when our leadership team turned around and said, you know, made up all the excuses and said no, it's not going to happen and all that sort of stuff, and our share price plummeted and all that I ended up having to run a project that ripped out about $100 million, included retrenchment of a lot of people. After that I thought, you know what? I can't do this anymore. I need to retrain as something.

Jenny Lincoln: 16:38

So that's when I retrained in basic psych and became a behavioralist and a coach and a profiler and all of that. So I started. So I moved away from finance and strategy. So someone said to me, what's accounting got to do with the work you do now? And I said, well, I've gone from balancing the books to balancing hearts and minds now. So that brutal experience was what gave me the focus and the desire to make a big change. Otherwise my attachment to all the mastery that I had developed logically didn't make sense. And everyone that I went and saw in management you know, in all my leadership team and so many people said you're too old to like too old I was like 30s, you know to change your career and to get retrained and I thought, bugger that. So again it kind of fired me up. I jumped in and retrained.

Daniela SM : 17:35

You were in your 30s and then you decided to change. But did you quit the job that you were having, or you just slowly started to do something at the same time?

Jenny Lincoln: 17:42

I stayed with them so that they could pay for it all. That's a bit naughty, okay, clever, but they got the benefits of it. And then, when I was fully retrained, then I left and started doing consulting on my own and eventually I became nomadic. Sometimes we need these things to really tilt us or tip us out of our comfort zones. I don't see myself stepping away and turning my back on all my finance and strategy work if it hadn't been for that brutal experience and also, in my upbringing, my family. You didn't quit, you know, and so that was perceived as quitting. But you know, I don't see it as quitting. I see it as being reading yourself, reading the signs and realizing it's time to you know, take a totally different path and pivot, and sometimes that pivot takes you in exactly the opposite direction, which is what it took me.

Daniela SM : 18:37

But that means that you were a human, because it affected you. Some people are doing your job and they are ruthless.

Jenny Lincoln: 18:43

Yeah, oh, I was ruthless. You know, back in those days I walk into someone's office and people would start crying. I can imagine, and as awful as it was, it gives me an insight, Like now as an open-hearted loving. You know I'm just a giant love bug now but I can still be assertive and firm. I'm not ruthless and heartless and cold. You know my own sense of self and keeping other people's integrity and themselves intact is far more important to me. You know, leading through the lens of love with that soft strength of open-heartedness and intuitiveness to me I find that far more successful than being a ballbreaker, because it's like a soothing balm. When you're a ballbreaker, half the time you're just pouring kerosene on the situation.

Daniela SM : 19:34

But the truth is that the job that you did had to be done. I mean, there is places that you have to go and things need to change and people need to lose jobs and it's heartbreaking, but it needs to happen and those people will survive or will find another job. Somebody has to make the decision.

Jenny Lincoln: 19:53

Yes, yes, but I would do it very differently now than how I did it.

Daniela SM : 19:58

Is there a different way? I don't think that there is a different way to let people in half of the company, to let them go.

Jenny Lincoln: 20:05

There's degrees of brutalness. Do you know what I mean? You can be more constructive and heart-based with really tough, difficult situations and decisions. And, yes, we have these real commercial and economic needs to keep changing and redefining what a business looks like. But if you do that with a heart-based approach, you can have those difficult conversations differently. You do them with empathy, like you were talking to, and understanding, and you also look at what have we got, what is the natural genius of this person and how can we utilize it. And if we can't utilize it within our organization, within the restructuring, then how can we support that person to getting something just as good or better? So I think it's a different approach to me. So the how is different and I think the outcome is different and the energy is very different.

Daniela SM : 21:04

Have you thought about teaching that to the people that still have to do it?

Jenny Lincoln: 21:08

different and I think the outcome is different and the energy is very different. Have you thought about teaching that to the people that still have to do it? Yeah, I have. Actually, I believe I would love to help and to get back into, to change management from the point of view that I would love for people.

Jenny Lincoln: 21:20

I think one of the first things that needs to happen when you're changing anything in an organization is to sit people down and have a conversation, a difficult conversation around helping them to understand what their fear of loss is, because to me, the fear of loss is what underlines everything we say. We have fear of uncertainty and we have fear of failure and all of that, but what's the bottom line under that? The fear of failure is like oh, I'm going to look like a goose, you know. So that's losing face, losing ego, you know, losing money. Everything comes back to loss, perceived loss, and so I think you know when you can have powerful conversations and get people to be open about and reflective about.

Jenny Lincoln: 22:05

Well, what am I thinking I'm going to lose with this restructuring? Okay, I might lose my influence, I might lose my job, I might lose my power, I might lose my car park, which is right next to the elevator. I might lose my title, and all of these things attach to how we define ourselves. So I think there's a second piece that needs to be done, which is to show people they are more than just the things that they have and do. It's the whole, what I call the be do have model. They're a human being. We're not human doings, and yet we are so defined by what we do and what we have. I see you're smiling.

Daniela SM : 22:39

Yes, I mean this is a subject that is really in my mind constantly, in every level. And then you mentioned the word lost. I was using grieving and you know we always talk about grieving as a I've lost someone, but it's actually so many things that you lose that you're attached to that. We think that they are part of us Every time.

Daniela SM : 23:04

If I lost a job, when I have lost a job, it is hard because you feel really like a loser. Even when there was the pandemic, I knew that I was going to be laid off. I understood it, but then, when the day that I was tall which lasted two days anyway they called me back immediately but I was like not again, and you felt that lost. And so I feel like it's not enough conversations about it in every level the job, because you think that you are the title. The husband because you think that you are a wife. You know your kids when they grow up and they want to do their own life. You're also now not the mom anymore, you know, and so many things that you're attached to, even wanted or not wanted. People need to talk more about that subject.

Jenny Lincoln: 23:54

I totally agree with you, daniela. Agree with you, daniela. I think it's a really important conversation because, at the end of the day, so many of our decisions come back to this fear of loss. We've got a lot of people operating and living their lives from the space of fear and it comes back to how they identify themselves. If we could demonstrate that you are more than your words and actions and your thoughts and beliefs and even your value set, you know you are more than all of that. The essence of who you be is the most important thing.

Jenny Lincoln: 24:31

Things coming and then going is actually a natural part. You know us holding on to them. We're actually working against the law of physics. You know us holding on to them, we're actually working against the law of physics. You know the universal laws, so of course it's going to we. That's why humanity struggles, because we're trying to operate against a fundamental law and principle that things come together and then they fall apart, and we don't want them to. And so instead, instead of seeing them as loss, we see them as opportunity and evolution. And if we can break some of the attachments we have, then that transition, which is the icky, sticky part that people get lost in and sometimes they need to come out of.

Daniela SM : 25:13

But I think it's harder than that. I intellectually can understand all that that you say. I have my brain, or maybe 90 is clear about all this. You know, I can of course understand it, but there is the emotions and as long as we're humans and we have emotions, this sense of lost is always going to be, there, is going to creep in between the logic and the intellectual understanding of it Totally.

Jenny Lincoln: 25:39

I agree, I agree. So I think the third piece is looking at our emotions differently, and so, for me, I see our emotions as our energetic emailing system. You know, we're hooked Again, we have an attachment to the positive ones and we try and delete the negative ones or we send them to trash. You know, we never read them. I prefer to think of emotions as treble and bass. We all everyone loves music, and when we have treble and bass, we get this beautiful synthesis of sound. And to me, emotions the the treble and and bass aspects of emotions, instead of positive and negative, are powerful streams of information, and being authentic with your emotions and then knowing how to be with them and then knowing how to unpack them so that you can get the messages, is really powerful, and I think we need to look at that in a different way to how we've looked at it before.

Daniela SM : 26:35

Yes, you are giving me a lot of and realize that treating people with like the most human way that they can and the grieving subjects are two of the things that are really, really resonate with me all the time, so it's something that I really think I can talk for hours. So then what happened? You did all this changing and you went into coaching and counseling. And then what happened? You did all this changing and you went into coaching and counseling, and then what happened?

Jenny Lincoln: 27:02

Well, I think in the middle of that I fell into a deep, dark depression. That was a really icky space for me and I wish I had understood that process. I realize now that it was a really powerful process of transmutation. And everyone talks about the caterpillar to the butterfly, but no one talks about the process of transmutation that that caterpillar goes through it when it crawls into the cocoon becomes a pile of goo, it loses form, it loses shape right, it becomes a little puddle of green icky goo and it has what I call a mush moment. And and I believe we constantly have mush moments, which is our process of transmutation.

Jenny Lincoln: 27:48

And for me, my depression was actually a deliverance. I entered at this cold, hard, steely, steely, egoic left brain, highly successful business exec, but I came out with an open heart. I was transparent again. I'd found my love, my playfulness and all of a sudden I had access to all this powerful intuitiveness because I'd let go of all this other stuff, and so that was a really powerful state. That was a really important part of my transformation, and so I would love for people to maybe look at some of the gnarly experiences we go through and we judge as being bad experiences or we're broken or something like that, and maybe see them as bridges. Maybe they're bridges to a different part of us, you know. And so depression was definitely a bridge for me not an enjoyable one, regardless to say I could never have been the truth of who I am now without going through that.

Jenny Lincoln: 28:53

And so I think sometimes, if we just have a different frame of reference, a different perspective I always say freedom is one perspective away If we could look at depression and other things like that as a process of metamorphosis or transmutation, then maybe we could look at it differently, maybe we could have greater gratitude and acceptance towards it, which would lessen our struggle, right, and we could put our energy into going into what I call the cocoon room, treat ourselves with soft eyes and love and gentleness, which we need, rather than cursing ourselves and going, oh, how the hell am I going to get out of this? I should be better, I should be this, I should be that. We should on ourselves all the time.

Daniela SM : 29:40

Now, with all these technologies, that we get to listen to more stories and hear all more changes in people. You always hear I was this way, and now look at me. They never talked about the process, which I feel that that's the most important thing, because it's very easy to say I was this and now I that and you're like, oh, I want to do that too. But then when you're stuck in the process, that is difficult. That is when people quit. Nobody shares those moments where you're saying you're gooey and you didn't know what's happening and so you were feeling depressed because yeah, it was an emptiness.

Jenny Lincoln: 30:12

I started to head down this road but I was still empty and I'd get the spark of inspiration, but then the spark would go out, it wouldn't hold. And it was so frustrating. And I had done so much work on mind mastery, my mind had become a steely trap. I was a prisoner in the cell block of my own mind. I feel that being in this dark, gnarly space of depression, it was the only way that I could find my open heart. I just deconstructed myself. What made it worse was nothing that used to light me up, lit me up. I had a perfectly beautiful life. I had a beautiful partner who I loved dearly. She was so supportive. I had great friends. I had a beautiful house. I lived by the beach. I had a fantastic life.

Jenny Lincoln: 31:01

But I was just a cesspool of everything, everything dark and gnarly. That made me detach from everything because I withdrew. But I withdrew with lots of judgment and beat myself up and berated myself to the point where I really wanted to take my own life. And then I remember laying on the floor, because I spent a lot of time laying on the floor of my home office and I was crying out and I just you know, god, buddha, allah, someone, someone tell me what to do, because I'm done. I'm done, I've made my peace. I can't do this anymore. It's just horrendous, it's horrific. I cannot because it's so incongruous, because you have this wonderful life but you just can't relate to it. But that is the breaking down of your value set, it's the breaking down of everything that you have constructed yourself into, down of everything that you have constructed yourself into. And as I laid on that floor, I was like the sun was coming through my window and I was just enjoying that and then, all of a sudden, the shaft of life well, I like just it went across my face, but then it played down to my heart space and all of a sudden I just went oh, wow and wow. And my intuition said, jenny, all you have to do is just breathe. That is your sole purpose right here, right now, just breathe. And I thought, is that enough? And my intuition said, yes, it is Just breathe. And it was like. That was kind of like I don't know. That was my reboot. That was my reboot and from that moment onwards I place my focus and my energy in my heart space. And so when I'm revolving up here and I'm the little mouse on the running in the wheel. I just re-anchor back into my heart space and I go. I'm love, I'm love, loving, lovable and loved. I go back to there and my heart recalibrates because, you know, our heart is an intelligence center and it's our primary energy source and it's our harmonizer. It gets to recalibrate our whole body and our mind can't recalibrate our mind. You know, any instrument has to be recalibrated from outside of itself, so to speak the mind. You just get more stuck in it. So we need the heart to help recalibrate it, you know.

Jenny Lincoln: 33:37

Coming back to the point you were saying, these messy moments are so important, we need to talk about them. These mush moments are so powerful because they are how we rewire ourselves. I totally rewired my operating system. It was like going from Windows to Mac or Mac to Windows. I went from fear and anger to love and compassion. That was my truth. But I had built such big armory, effectively blew myself up from the inside out. We can do that, I think, in a more supportive and a more managed way. You don't have to go to that same extreme If we look at some of these catalystic things that are happening within us and around us, and we see them as opportunity for metamorphosis and we look at them with love in our heart, even though at times you don't feel that you have a heart or that love could even exist. But if you could work with people that know that, have been there, done that and hold that space for you until you find the truth of you, that's what we need more of.

Daniela SM : 34:43

Yes, for sure. And so then, after that, you quit the job, or when did you decide to be a nomad? What happened?

Jenny Lincoln: 34:50

Yeah, well, I did lots of different things, kind of did some work and, you know, helped a friend start, do a not-for-profit startup and, you know, did lots of different volunteering. You know I obviously had some time out as like an unemployed beach bum. And then, you know, I used to box and kick box and one of my friends was a real estate agent and he said to me do you know how much you can rent for your property for? And I went no, how much, tell me. And he told me I went God, why am I living in it? It was permission to go traveling, packed up the house.

Daniela SM : 35:23

He was a good salesman?

Jenny Lincoln: 35:25

Yeah, he was. So then he rented my house out for me and my partner at the time. We both started traveling and that was wonderful. The rent more than paid for the mortgage and what we needed to travel. So that's when I became nomadic. Three months into that, my partner and I, after 21 years she was my soulmate, I was hers and we both looked at each other. And this is where you know love isn't true love. You know when I mean like unconditionality, that sort of love. It's not all unicorns and rainbows. You have to make some tough decisions and we kind of woke up and realized, you know what, maybe we're not partners for each other going forward, we realized that we needed to grow beyond the confines of our relationship. We couldn't recalibrate in relationship and so, you know, she's still my best friend, we spend time together, but we're not each other's partners anymore. And that was a really tough decision, but we made that through the lens of love. You know, it was freaking hard.

Daniela SM : 36:27

Yes, I can imagine and I hope the travelling wasn't the issue.

Jenny Lincoln: 36:31

Well, the travelling showed up stuff that we would not have seen and that could have been covered up being, you know, in having all your distractions around you when you're in your home base. And like, I'm not saying it's going to happen to everyone because it doesn't, but it happened for us that way because I think we were such loyalists. There's no way we could have left each other. Do you know what I mean? It kind of had to happen in that situation.

Daniela SM : 36:57

Well, you're scaring me now. No, no, I'm scaring my husband, I mean we've been together for 30 years, and it's true that we're best friends as well. But uh, you know, I don't know, I don't know, we're already so used to that I cannot even imagine.

Jenny Lincoln: 37:14

No, look, I don't think that's the case. I mean lots of people that are nomadic and they it has cemented their relationships even further. I just think that was our destiny. And what the point I'm trying to make is that love isn't always, you know, fluffy, duffy stuff. No, that's true. It's having difficult conversations and making difficult decisions. You know, when you lead from the lens of love and come from an open heart, then you can have those sorts of decisions and things are a little easier. I think it's never like breakups and loss and all that is not easy, but you would know yourself, with a successful relationship at 30 years with your husband, that when you come to the table open rather than defensive, it's a better conversation, isn't it? Yeah?

Daniela SM : 38:01

what was the most difficult part of when you started the nomadic life?

Jenny Lincoln: 38:04

there was no difficult part starting a nomadic life.

Daniela SM : 38:10

Really Wow, not even like material stuff or like having a nice bed or something like that.

Jenny Lincoln: 38:15

Yeah, good points. Actually, that raises two things. The difficult part of starting was the 350 items on my to-do list. Okay, you know, and of course I I was ex, you know corporate, I I had a tick list that was an excel spreadsheet that had, or project management sheet that had and I think there was, I think honestly there was like 357 line items. Oh, my god, I would never create that sort of document now, it would overwhelm me. So the logistics we we set ourselves a really short timeframe and just powered through it. So that was good and because it was meant to be and it was aligned, everything just unfolded. The universe I have a saying you go first and the universe follows. The universe really supported us with our exit out into our new life. And the funny you say about comfy beds I have one of those beautiful memory foam pillows. I had headaches for 18 months as my neck and head had to get used to not having the beautiful support that it had had. I laugh, but it was awful, it was actually painful.

Daniela SM : 39:30

You adapt to that too. Like okay, now you have a house and you have your toothbrush and everything is in place. And then it takes a while, I guess, until your body's like okay, I can live with. Like that, if you have the personality, yeah.

Jenny Lincoln: 39:43

I agree. That's a lovely analogy, daniela. I think that our neck and our spine and our backs, metaphysically, are all around support. It's a big thing to become nomadic. It is really a big deal, as you know, because you're in the throes of it. What happens is your whole support mechanism, not just yourself, but everything, every area of your life changes. I think my body was physically recalibrating or becoming agile in a different way. You know, when you were a kid, did you remember getting growing pains? I think as adults, we have these growing pains, but they're different. I think that's part of the discomfort that we experience all the time when we step into something new. You know, there were some really severe growing pains, becoming unattached, but I felt them as that they were liberating, and I felt the freedom aspect of them, the fact that I had nothing to take responsibility of anymore. I didn't like we'd set off with 20 kilos of stuff. I now travel with 10. I only own 10 kilos of stuff. So what's that? 22 pounds.

Daniela SM : 40:49

Oh, I think it's interesting, right. So what's that? 22 pounds? Oh, I think it's interesting, right, because it's true, you get used to and you think you need it all and then you start leaving things behind.

Jenny Lincoln: 40:56

Yeah, but it's this whole thing, it's the whole. You travel with physical, tangible things which you are attached to. So it's this having aspect, it's changing the having relationship in the be, do, have model. So you let go of physical, physical things, you become a minimalist with tangible things. But you, very soon you start letting go of your emotional baggage too, because you think, well, I want to just have, you know, my little physical bag and then still carry you, you know, the whole suite of Louis Vuitton emotional baggage as well. You realize pretty quickly when you keep showing up in different countries and the same attitude or perspective follows you and you go oh, I can't leave that behind. That's interesting.

Daniela SM : 41:44

Wonderful growth and development. You mean attitude like complaining about something or something bothers you.

Jenny Lincoln: 41:49

Yeah, yeah, You'll, just because you just different, things will activate you and you'll go oh, that's interesting, that's the same thing. But I've been in five different countries. What is that telling me? And then you realize, oh, it's just an old, outdated view I have of myself, or it's a limiting belief. You know that you need something and it just shows up that you don't, and then you can let it go. So it's really. You'll become more minimalist in your mental and emotional capacity as well. So it's very, it's really good. It helps you become more agile there.

Daniela SM : 42:24

Okay, interesting, thank you. And then, jenny, all this thing about being holistic or I don't know if that's the right word that you would use, but being an A-type personality, how did that happen?

Jenny Lincoln: 42:36

I think it's what I call the kitchen sink approach. It's like kind of you're going to throw everything into it, like I did theta healing. I did like after my depression and when I found myself residing more in my heart space. The most important change for me was getting out of my head and into my heart, because when I'm in my head I was revolving and I don't want to make the head out to be the bad guy. It's a really important intelligence center. It's, you know I always say it's our command center. Our heart is our harmonizer and source of energy. And then for me the intuition is you're in a GPS, but I think what happens is we tend to use our mind as the GPS, and so I think this connectivity that we can have with different dimensions and with energy happens when you get out of your mind because it defies logic, or get out of your left brain in particular because it's logical.

Jenny Lincoln: 43:31

There's a good book by this lady, jill Bolt Taylor, called my Stroke of Insight. She's a neurologist and she had a left brain bleed stroke. She explains in her book that when her left brain was flooded she couldn't see where she began and end and where the bed began and end. No one had construct, no one had outlines, no one had the table is the table, the bed is the bed. You are you, I am me. It was just a blur of color. So it shows you that our left brains are actually putting the shape and the detail around everything you know, and so this kind of supports this whole quantum theory that everything's just moving molecules. But if we, if we saw that, we'd probably freak out. You'd think something's wrong with us and we're having a meltdown, you know so.

Jenny Lincoln: 44:31

So I think it's this art of getting out of your head, and I know people call it mindfulness, but for me every mindfulness approach actually gets you into your heart space. So to me it's actually heartfulness. So when you get out of your head and into your heart and then you open yourself to being guided by your intuition, you break down your limiting beliefs around those sorts of connections. Yeah, we also have a lot of limiting beliefs around our subconscious mind and our conscious mind. So I've got rid of all the kind of limiting beliefs around oh, that's lost into the ether, or I can't recall things in an instant or any of that. So you know, we can restructure our minds in that way and open up the access to our multi-sensing dimensions, because that's how we're made, that's our full potency. You know, I think it's just trying lots of different things and finding what speaks to you yes, I understand, and so Jenny's.

Daniela SM : 45:34

So I want to ask you who is the real, jenny? Now, who is that Jenny? What are you doing and who is that person? Who is the real?

Jenny Lincoln: 45:42

Jenny. Well, she's heart-based, you know. She's very open and transparent. She's got a lot of wisdom that she likes to speak about. Um, and hence my brand now is the sage from the stage restarted my speaking career again.

Jenny Lincoln: 46:00

Turning 60 was a bit of a really difficult thing for me uh, as it is, I think, for a lot of people, this whole aging equation thing. And one of my best friends said to me you know, some people don't get to turn 60. It's a gift. And I went, wow, that was like a slap in the face. That was a really good, like wake-up call and I thought, oh, you know, I'm just in a different part of my life. I'm in what I call my sage age. So that's when I decided you know what I'm going to be the sage from the stage. So, yeah, so that's what I do.

Jenny Lincoln: 46:36

I have talks around leading through the lens of love and emotional fitness, you know, being able to read your emotional emails and how to you know be authentic with your emotions and use them as part of your guidance. I do talks around unlocking, you know, the power of introverts, because I think introverts are forced to act like extroverts and they're measured in that way. So I think we're doing a lot of damage to our introverts. Yes, and you know I do things around courage camp and rising from rejection. And you know, at the end of the day, my big body of knowledge is called HumNav, that's H-U-M-N-A-V. Humnav is the human navigation practice and that's about you tapping into your internal guidance and using all these wonderful support programs that we have.

Daniela SM : 47:27

And how did you became a speaker? Like did you just put yourself out there and then that happens.

Jenny Lincoln: 47:33

I've done a lot of speaking in my previous corporate role, but at the end of last year I actually started work with the delightful and wonderful Tricia Brooke. She's my speaking coach and she's actually a Broadway director and producer, and so it's it's about performance and she lives in New York, so that's why every second month I'm in New York and so, yeah, I've been doing a lot of, you know, conscious and purposeful work around that and finding gigs and getting back onto the stage, starting to work with different communities and different companies to help help, having the conversations that we've been talking about, emotional fitness and courage camp and facing, you know, first aid for failure and facing your fears and all these sorts of things, and that will be under the hum nav, umbrella, umbrella. Okay, I see it as a university eventually. Wow, so we'll see. I don't know how that's going to happen, but you know it'll happen some way, yes, and you should add the lost conversation, yes.

Daniela SM : 48:39

And how to be human when you do the job that you used to do before.

Jenny Lincoln: 48:43

Yes, I know, I know Exactly.

Daniela SM : 48:50

There's just so many things to talk about Fire with humanity, fire with heart. Thank you, jenny, so much for sharing your story and having this amazing conversation that is super insightful and inspiring.

Jenny Lincoln: 49:02

It was my pleasure, daniela, it's been absolutely fabulous. I feel inspired after our conversation, so thank you for the opportunity. Thank you.

Daniela SM : 49:10

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I am Daniela and you are listening to, because Everyone has a Story. Please take five seconds right now and think of somebody in your life that may enjoy what you just heard, or someone that has a story to be shared and preserved. When you think of that person, shoot them a text with the link of this podcast. This will allow the ordinary magic to go further. Join me next time for another story conversation. Thank you for listening. Hasta pronto you. Thank you.