30: How Women in Beirut Are Finding Strength in Chaos (Bootcamps During War)

We’ve been taught to praise resilience. But what if resilience isn’t the goal?

Jennifer El Hage is leading women in Beirut while her country is actively experiencing war. And instead of telling women to “stay strong,” she’s redefining what strength really looks like. From hosting bootcamps under the sound of warplanes to rebuilding a sense of home within herself, Jen shares a powerful perspective on grief, leadership, and what it means to keep showing up when everything around you feels uncertain.

Connect with Jennifer El Hage:

jenniferelhage.com

instagram.com/jen_el

In This Episode:

• (01:15) Why Jen chooses to stay in Lebanon
• (04:40) Hosting a bootcamp during war
• (06:05) When women gather, they create resistance
• (10:30) Losing her home; “home is within”
• (13:45) Jen’s message to the world: be curious
• (16:00) Finding peace in darkness

Connect with Daffney:

The Game-Changer Consult → This 60 min deep dive offers you clarity and insight into what’s possible for your next 60 days. Leave this consult feeling full of possibility and with the energy of purpose!

liftprowellness.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What if resilience isn't the goal anymore? Today's conversation with Jennifer El Hajj will challenge everything you think about resilience, especially if you've ever been told that you just need to push through, stay positive, and keep going no matter what. Jen is leading women while living in a country that's actively being bombed. And instead of talking about resilience, she's introducing something different: resistance. Not loud, not performative, but deeply internal and grounded. Here are what it really means to lead, to feel, and to not shrink, even when everything around you is uncertain. Welcome to Don't F and Shrink, the podcast, where we stop playing small and start showing up big. I'm your host, Daphne Allwine, and I'm here to cut through the noise, ditch the self-doubt, and get honest about what it takes to live and lead with unapologetic confidence. Each week you'll hear unfiltered conversations, powerful stories, and in real life strategies to help you take up space in your life, your work, and your world. So buckle up because shrinking is not an option here. Let's dive in. Hey Jen. Hey, how are you? Jen, you are smiling, but we know that there's a backdrop going on for you. We know that there's a pretty significant fear and some real big stuff happening. Because you're in Beirut, you're in Lebanon. Exactly. Yes. This is not Jen's first rodeo when it comes to war and bombing. Jen has lived there her whole life. Jen, what was like growing up in Lebanon?

SPEAKER_01 1:41

First, I've been receiving a lot of calls of people saying, Jen, why don't you leave Lebanon? Why don't you always have a home? I have so many homes outside, and I'm so grateful for that. Yes. Yeah, and I'm very grateful for that. And I realized that literally my network is my network. And I'm so grateful for that. But no one ever will understand what it feels to be born in Lebanon, grow in Lebanon, and wanting to stay no matter what. I say that if you have a kid that is sick, you won't leave your kid because he's sick. So I have this kind of relationship today with my country, except that it feels like it's more of a cancer now. It's a different sadness that we're going through. But growing in Lebanon, I think gave me a different set of tools than the rest of the world. Growing in Lebanon gave me the power of adaptability to situations. So the set of tools that I grew up with being Lebanese gave me a different kind of power and a different definition of what is joy, what is resilience. Even though I'm tired a bit of that word, I don't want to be resilient anymore because with the resilience, there's a lot of tiredness. We're like tired. Like uh what defines us growing in Lebanon comes with a different definition of the adjectives that we knew. Joy for me and peace for me is not just world peace anymore. At this point, you grow in Lebanon with no peace physically around you. You are forced to create a peace within. For me, being safe is just being able to sleep and wake up, even though this time with the cancer spreading in the country, it's harder to put your head on the pillow at night. But uh growing in Lebanon is my biggest asset today because I see life differently, I see peace differently, joy differently, and above all, strength and women differently. Because when I see women around me, women in Lebanon, the way they continue living with all the sadness and the emotional weight they carry, I kind of look at myself and say, Wow, I of course I'm meant to be Lebanese and be born here to grow with such women.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

You you are such a fixed point. You are such a grounding energy. And you're doing this for other women. Jen actually has a boot camp where she actually, even in the midst of all this backdrop, is still meeting with women who are experiencing these things. Because you mentioned that the cancer has spread. There, this is not just one location experiencing this trauma this time. So this does feel new. Jen, what are you what are you learning from these other women? Because I know in any boot camp situation, you are leading, but like hearing other people's stories, what are you learning from them?

SPEAKER_01 4:36

Well, yesterday was a beautiful day gathering women who almost like wanting to cancel, but up until the last minute, but all had this like waiting. Should we cancel? Should we not? Is it safe to do it together in Behmut or not? So up until midnight, we were still texting and seeing if it's gonna still be hanged or not. And all of them show up. And one of them is from South Ab Lebanon. Her village was just completely eradicated now, and she still managed to be here present. And so for me to look at them, I had so many goosebumps throughout the day yesterday for the boot camp because seeing these women not wanting to give up, and why I do not choose the world resilient, because resilience comes with victimization, and we won't accept be victims anymore. So that's why resilience makes us weaker. And so seeing all these women coming with so much grief, sadness, and tears, and feeling like creating a pocket of I'm not gonna even call it above it, it was a pocket in the middle of the war. We had warplanes hovering above our head. I was literally equasing the music to calm our nervous system. I put on some beautiful smell, and for the first time since the war started, we all forgot about the war. And I realized the power of women when they gather, they actually create resistance. And I felt that while war was watching us, resisting it from the inside, and was like, hmm, this is resistance, is not giving up, is gathering and yet allowing ourselves to dream. And for me, boot camps are more about rebooting a purpose. There's a beautiful analogy I want to mention that my great friend Alicia Wolf taught me when I did a bit of work with her. She said, most of us want to build the puzzle without having the picture on the outside, not knowing what it's gonna look like. So yesterday we all came together to kind of build again that puzzle picture. Because during these hard times, you kind of lose your purpose and vision constantly because you have to be in the present. And hope comes for future. So we tend to our default like brain functions very much in the present, which is also a beautiful strength and tool, which most of people cannot do. But out of default, we end up staying in the present moment because we cannot hope for much or f or build for the future. So yesterday was a gathering for also building that future picture on the puzzle. So every piece of the puzzle becomes easier because we can go back to the picture and look where we're going and what's gonna look like. It was just very incredible seeing all these women feeling safe to cry, to let go, to be angry. And you know, like the inherited way of dealing with war is like you don't have to speak up, so you stay peaceful. I noticed that women from my mom's generation deal with a lot of resilience by being playing the victim. And they're afraid to speak up, they're afraid to go out, they're afraid to live. Our generation is speaking up, is completely changing the inherited legacies of war, and we are completely building new ones by gathering under the bombs, by creating on purpose little pockets to dream and build that puzzle picture. And the messages I received today from these women was all I needed actually to keep up.

SPEAKER_02 8:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:20

It's really nice to see that even though fear is there, we try to replace it with dreaming together and activating those dreams. And I call them proactive dreams.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

I love that. Because it is like it's not a it's not a soft intention, it's not a mantra. You guys are thinking about the bricks, you're thinking about what you're gonna need, and you're and you're not competing, you're not like, you know, like you said, victimized by the situation. You're just proactively saying, this is what we're gonna need. This is how we're gonna move forward. And it's it's probably just like a sand castle in some ways, where you build something, the water comes in and moves it. And it's painful to watch because you're this beautiful, beautiful piece of art that you just made and put your heart into. But what's really profound in that moment is when you go back and rebuild again, you can see this time what could have been differently, or how you can express it in a different way, or create infrastructure to support the fact that this may be something that's always going to be in the backdrop, right? But there's a way to build a community and a way of thought different from the last generation. So I love that you said that and that you were so willing to just say the generation before us just handled it differently. And God, I like I said, I'd love to be a fly on the wall in this leadership boot camp that you're doing because it's amazing when you're in a group of women who have a shared purpose and don't shrink and are not afraid to share their experience as a way not to be victimized, but to support other people and validating where they're at. Is there anything like I guess the big thing is if you space and you wanted people to know from afar, not just in your community, about your experience, about what it's like to be a woman? Because I'm I'm assuming it's okay for for everyone to get together right now from a safety perspective, or maybe they're asking people like COVID to not be together or to be in separate things. What does that look like? What does that feel like? How are you, how are you organizing this?

SPEAKER_01 10:27

It's interesting that you asked this question because I was asking myself this this morning, knowing that a year ago I had to move out from an apartment I've been living in for 10 years because of the previous war. And the previous war, I was more reactive. The anger was there. I remember in one day I had 13 men packing an apartment that carries a lifetime of memories.

SPEAKER_02 10:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:54

I was like, okay, Jen, as of today, you have to have a home within. And home is not this only space, it's within you. So I kept on while breathing to calm myself from having a panic attack because I was so afraid of when the next bombs are coming. I kept on saying to myself, home is within, home is within, home is within. And ever since I moved out, it was very hard because we didn't have time to grieve. I was grieving a relationship, I was grieving a country, I was grieving my home.

SPEAKER_02 11:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

I didn't even have time to integrate all of this. So the only problem that we kind of constantly need to fight for is creating space to integrate to be able to grieve properly. And this is something that I created myself when I talk about my trips. For me, traveling is like asking myself for permission to integrate and grieve. So I can come strongly because when you're in the middle of it all, you are strong. You always find solutions, but integrating and grieving needs to be outside of the whole this whole madness. So what I'm trying to do with the reboot camps is trying to find a space within this madness where we can integrate and grieve war after war and chaos after chaos. So the only wish I still am working on is to be able, for example, for this war that happened now, there is so much anger and so much sadness that I don't want to grieve now. I want to first express my anger, and I'm still trying to find ways and channels to do so because it's not easy to be angry when you need to also seek for solutions. And I think this is my challenge today to how can I express my anger when I need to constantly be in an alert mode? When you need to constantly be in a survival mode and alert, your body is constantly alerted. How can you be angry? When do you have time to be angry?

SPEAKER_00 12:59

Yeah, even just from a brain perspective, if you are high in in high alert, right? Your limbic brain, right? You're reacting to everything around you. It doesn't give space, it doesn't give availability to that prefrontal cortex, like the part of your brain that like makes solutions and those sort of things. So that's a really good question. I was like, and maybe that's part of the tactic, right? Maybe the part of the tactic is that if it's constantly happening, it's causing people to be in more chaos. And that's actually the trauma. Thank you. Wow. There could be no better time for this, by the way, too, that you're doing this. I'm sure you thought about quitting, like you said, a thousand times or deciding that the universe was telling you you can't move forward on this boot camp. But if you had a message for people watching this from afar, what would you say?

SPEAKER_01 13:46

I would definitely say don't count on what you see or what you hear. Be curious. Curiosity for me is what will save us. And if you're curious about your values, if you have for yourself connections, safety, growth as a value, you have to be curious to, like you, Daphne, like to go and knock on people's door to know more, to dig more. And what saddens me in this world that people are not curious anymore to learn the truth or to go beyond what they receive as information. Growing up in the digital era removes all of the curiosity because information comes to you. You don't have to search for it. What past generations generations used to go and in libraries in on rage try to read fight for answers and understanding, and now your algorithm thinks for you. Please be curious beyond what you receive as information because the reality is not there. The reality is like how life aligns with your own value and go talk to people, go ask people, go read. Do not only allow yourself to binge receive information, then make your own assumptions.

SPEAKER_00 15:07

Curiosity comes with a real sense of bravery, right? Where you have to really be brave in yourself. You have to be really strong in your own convictions to be curious. And I think sometimes that's the part people miss. They're they're happy to allocate it out to somebody else or you know, deter to what they watched or what they think they know. And that's really the pinnacle of why I wanted to have this conversation with you today is because I cannot imagine anybody not loving you. Jen, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you for not fucking shrinking. And I am sending all that I can in this moment to make sure that you continue this work that you're doing. Cause I hope you know how essential and how important you are. And that's not just to the women of your community or the women of your country. You showing up in this huge fucking way to say there are so many reasons for me to quit. There are so many reasons for me to be afraid, and I'm not. Jen, how can people how can people support or how can people learn more? Do you have a website that you can like share with us?

SPEAKER_01 16:14

If people are curious to follow like my bail through my eyes, who document a different reality from the media is because beyond this masculine toxic energy that we live in now, there are things that are still like blooming. And I want to just mention one thing that came to my mind this morning while I was watering my plants. I have a huge, like a lot of uh plants and flowers and like I call it my garden, it's like a long balcony. And these plants survived since 2019, the biggest like apocalyptic wars explosion. And I thought they were dead. And I was like, whoa, I'm not gonna give up on them, I'm gonna move them from my old apartment with me. And they went to everything. And this morning while I was watering them, I was like, actually, being Lebanese is having a seed that even if it's not gonna bloom with every season, at the right time when you water it and at the right time when she's ready, the plant is blooming again, and all my plants are blooming this morning, and I was like, is this a lesson that I have to like they've been through everything too with me. And they accomplished them to the women yesterday. So it was a little thought that came to my mind this morning. We're not afraid of living in darkness because I think in darkness you find peace. I just really hope that one day we more like not only women, but the whole country start dreaming again and hoping again. Because I think this is the only way through. Jen, you're a force.

SPEAKER_00 17:49

You're absolutely a force. We are gonna share your Instagram handles here in the show notes. Jen, thanks for being on the show today, and thanks for not fucking shrinking.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

We won't, I won't. Thank you so much for having me.