Have you ever stood at the crossroads of a career upheaval, unsure of which path leads to fulfillment? Jeanne Collins, a beacon of transformation, joins us as we traverse the landscape of personal growth and well-being. With her "Two Feet In" philosophy, Jeanne illustrates the art of being fully present and setting daily intentions to cultivate inner peace amid life's tumultuous symphony. Our dialogue with Jeanne reveals a treasure trove of strategies that promise a life of contentment from within, offering a sanctuary from the relentless din of negative self-talk.
When life handed Jeanne Collins an unexpected pink slip, she didn't fold—she flourished. Jeanne walks us through her remarkable pivot from corporate sales to a life rich with purpose and balance, sharing how embracing journaling, meditation, and an openness to new beginnings transformed not just her career but her entire existence. Her narrative is a vibrant tapestry, weaving together the threads of embracing change, the power of a life-work balance, and the joy of crafting a career that resonates with one's true self. Jeanne's story stands as a testament to the surprising destinations we may find on the road to self-discovery.
To cap off our episode, we journey through the serendipity of authorship and the salience of authenticity in our personal and professional quests. I express profound gratitude for the connection fostered by Jeanne's meaningful insights and the personal touch accompanying her book. This episode is an ode to the strength found in vulnerability and authenticity, inviting listeners to cherish these qualities as they navigate their own paths. Join us for an exploration of life's rich tapestry and the boundless potential within each of us to redefine success and embrace a fulfilling existence.
She also chronicles her journey and the approach that changed her life and work in
her memoir, Two Feet In: Lessons from an All-In Life.
Websites:
(Book) https://www.two-feet-in.com
(Business) https://www.jermardesigns.com
Social Media Links:
Facebook Book: https://www.facebook.com/jeanne.collins.ct
Facebook Business: https://www.facebook.com/jermardesigns
Instagram Book: https://www.instagram.com/jeanne_collins_ct/
Instagram Business: https://www.instagram.com/jermar_designs
Follow Playing Injured on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/playinginjured/
Have you ever stood at the crossroads of a career upheaval, unsure of which path leads to fulfillment? Jeanne Collins, a beacon of transformation, joins us as we traverse the landscape of personal growth and well-being. With her "Two Feet In" philosophy, Jeanne illustrates the art of being fully present and setting daily intentions to cultivate inner peace amid life's tumultuous symphony. Our dialogue with Jeanne reveals a treasure trove of strategies that promise a life of contentment from within, offering a sanctuary from the relentless din of negative self-talk.
When life handed Jeanne Collins an unexpected pink slip, she didn't fold—she flourished. Jeanne walks us through her remarkable pivot from corporate sales to a life rich with purpose and balance, sharing how embracing journaling, meditation, and an openness to new beginnings transformed not just her career but her entire existence. Her narrative is a vibrant tapestry, weaving together the threads of embracing change, the power of a life-work balance, and the joy of crafting a career that resonates with one's true self. Jeanne's story stands as a testament to the surprising destinations we may find on the road to self-discovery.
To cap off our episode, we journey through the serendipity of authorship and the salience of authenticity in our personal and professional quests. I express profound gratitude for the connection fostered by Jeanne's meaningful insights and the personal touch accompanying her book. This episode is an ode to the strength found in vulnerability and authenticity, inviting listeners to cherish these qualities as they navigate their own paths. Join us for an exploration of life's rich tapestry and the boundless potential within each of us to redefine success and embrace a fulfilling existence.
She also chronicles her journey and the approach that changed her life and work in
her memoir, Two Feet In: Lessons from an All-In Life.
Websites:
(Book) https://www.two-feet-in.com
(Business) https://www.jermardesigns.com
Social Media Links:
Facebook Book: https://www.facebook.com/jeanne.collins.ct
Facebook Business: https://www.facebook.com/jermardesigns
Instagram Book: https://www.instagram.com/jeanne_collins_ct/
Instagram Business: https://www.instagram.com/jermar_designs
Follow Playing Injured on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/playinginjured/
All right, Welcome to another episode of playing injured. I'm excited for this episode. Jean Collins she's an interior designer by trade, but she's also an author. I recently released a book in July called Two Feet In Lessons of Living All In Life, and she's a speaker as well. Jean, pumped to have you on the show.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to talk to you. This is going to be great 100%, 100%.
Speaker 1:Well, Jean, I always love starting a show with. Who is Jean and how does she spend her time today?
Speaker 2:That is such a good question. I love that one. I am someone who is so fortunate and so blessed in my life to be in my 50s and really living my best life. And my best life for me is I am someone who has managed to find incredible inner peace, and I think that is so much more important than happiness. And so I've managed to find inner peace, and I've managed to do that while being a single mom and being an entrepreneur and being an executive and being an author and being a tiered designer and all of those other things that you know we normally use to describe ourselves. But I would say I am someone who's managed to find great inner peace and welcome the chance to talk to people about how I accomplished that, so they can maybe do it too.
Speaker 1:I love that. So inner peace, right Right Reading your book, you said inner peace comes from your mindset, right Kind of the world. How can folks start to incorporate more of that inner peace, that inner corp, incorporate kind of that mindset to gain inner peace? I think today we're in a very noisy world and it's only going to become more noisy.
Speaker 2:You are correct, it's very noisy, but we all have our own noise. I find, when I talk to people and I say, like you know that thing that sits there and talks to you all day long and chatters and chatter, and everyone knows what it is, it's that inner voice that we all have and it talks to us all day long. And so what I encourage people to do is find ways, small ways, within your life to have some calm and to have some pause and to kind of put the pause button on that talking chatter thing that's going on and that might be reading, meditating, journaling, exercising, going for a walk, spending time with a positive friend. That will lift you up.
Speaker 2:There's so many things that we can do, but I think it requires us proactively making choices in our lives. To make that a priority is to spend the time quieting your mind, because you know it doesn't mean you have to sit there like in a you know, meditative yoga state for an hour. It's not about that. You can do it in 10 minutes in a chair. It's just about and becoming aware aware of the chatter and we are our own worst enemies when it comes to the negative chatter and the negative banter and be aware of how our minds are constantly, unfortunately, programmed to talk to us in a negative way and having to actively reprogram our brains to quiet that. And everyone has it. Even the most successful people at meditating still have that negative chatter. So you're not going to eliminate it, you just need to quiet it a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know I was working on that this summer when it came to listening to my thoughts, actually being quiet right, getting off my phone, going for walks right and just being able to hear my internal dialogue right, and understanding that a lot of those things that go on in our head are not even our own thoughts.
Speaker 2:It's not even no, and it's we're worrying about things most of the time. We're worrying about things that haven't happened, or we're thinking about things in the future, or we're just not present.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, we suffer more in imagination than we do in reality.
Speaker 2:We do Right, right, it's always future.
Speaker 1:Oh, what happens if I, you know correct, can't pay? You know my rent this month? What happens if you know it's all time of different things?
Speaker 2:Everything. It can be absolutely everything. You know anything on any subject, and it's. I write three intentions every day in a journal and I find the most common one I write is to focus on being present and positive. And it's like you really have to. I have found this even, especially for me, because I can swing negative so easily as most people can, but I definitely can. So I have to really work at it every day to really focus on being present and positive, because I know I'm a happier person and I know I'm in a better headspace, but I have to consciously write down that that is my intention for the day is to stay present and positive 100%.
Speaker 1:Two feet in right, two feet in. When I think of two feet in right and we talk about living, you know an all in life, right, and I want to get to what that means in a little bit. But two feet in right, you know fear. People say, hey, you're one foot in, one foot out, right. I feel like it's like multiple different meanings to have in two feet in. It's like, like you mentioned, being present, being where your feet are right, right, you're being now, but also to just being committed and being more conscious about where you're going in life. Talk about all in two feet in. What does that look like?
Speaker 2:All in. Yeah, so I didn't realize that I was living life this way until I actually started writing my book. And then I realized the common theme in my book, which was when I was forced with a difficult situation or a challenging situation where I had to make a decision, and there were sort of all these forks in the road in life where you have to make a decision or something happens to you and it forces the fork and the road for you. And I realized that the way I approach that is I make a decision and I plow forward and like get out of my way because that's where we're going. And so what I realized is that in order to do that, you have to have a degree of self-confidence in yourself and you have to trust and you have to quiet the banter that's in your head. You have to quiet that negative banter, because that negative banter is what prevents us from taking leaps of faith or from trusting, or from just plowing and moving forward. And so I realized that when I hit crossroads in my life I mean I've been fired, I've been divorced twice, I'm a single mom, I've raised my daughter by myself since I was 17, like as a single parent there are all these crossroads and when I had to make decisions about those parts of my life, I made a decision. I trusted myself and I moved forward.
Speaker 2:And the irony of it is is that as I started to write about myself, I actually am not the most self-confident person. I actually struggle with tons of doubt about myself and my self-worth and imposter syndrome, and I realized that I actually have so much of that, and so do so many people, but yet everyone's like but how do you have all this self-confidence to do that? And I'm like I don't consider that I do have that. But when I looked at it and started writing about it, I was like, oh wow, maybe I do. I still don't think I do, but maybe I do. And how do I approach that?
Speaker 2:And it's really about trusting myself, and not only trusting myself on a larger scale, whether you believe in God or whatever you believe in, it's trusting that the universe has your back and that it will work out okay. And if you just make semi-educated decisions that are somewhat smart, it's going to be okay. Because when you look back on those times when you made those decisions or took that risk, you're like, huh, you know, it didn't work out exactly as I thought it would, but it did work out okay, like I was okay, you know. And so once you can really reflect back on that and kind of let go of the outcome and make decisions and be just all in and on what you want and where you want to go, I think it makes it a little easier to quiet down the chatter, because the chatter is what prevents us from you know, here, all the time, people are like I hate my job, like okay, so what are you gonna do about that?
Speaker 2:and that like, and then the conversation ends right there. That's it, like I hate my job, but I'm not willing to do anything about it. So I'm just gonna live hating my job. I hate where I live, I don't like my spouse, I feel fat, whatever. It is Okay. But then jump two feet in to make changes to your life, to feel better about that 100%.
Speaker 1:And you know it's crazy to talk about having a lot of self-doubt, having kind of a lack of confidence in self, and I think we all can experience it. And you know, I was reading this book, six pillars of self-esteem, right, one of the main things that he talks about is that it's not I, people just are confident in themselves. No, they actually had to do things when they were kind of nervous, kind of scared, uncomfortable. That then made them more Self-confident, right.
Speaker 2:Right, we don't start out confident like no.
Speaker 2:We're not born with that, we're actually born more with the negative, and it's by those chances and building it up, just like he says that you then and I also find and I talk about this with people when they ask about you know Things that I do when I reach new forks on the road and I journal a lot about all the times that things did work out, big and small. Big and small because we tend to forget, forget the tiny moments where we were afraid or we were nervous, we were scared, and something worked out Okay. And so it's like when you start to journal, I find when I journal specifically on that subject of the times, the universe have my back, the times it did work out okay, to help make myself feel like okay, breathe, it's going to be okay. The journaling starts out kind of slow. You're sort of like trying to come up with things like and all of a sudden it gets going and you're like, oh, wow, okay, yeah, that worked out.
Speaker 2:You know, like I needed a black dress. I found a black dress. Oh wow, I got fired. But look at what I've done now and I lost a client. But look, I got a new client. And once you start really thinking about all the times that and writing it. Like to me, writing is really impactful. Writing it down that helped build the self confidence that you can have when you just look back and Everyone had, no matter how bad your situation is and how you know rough you feel you are in life, everyone has instances that they can look back and be like you know what it worked out. Okay, that worked out well for me. I did well, okay.
Speaker 1:No matter how big or small. I think that One way to get through adversity, one thing you can do when you are having a hard time or you're nervous about something. You can literally write down multiple different Instances in your life where you overcame it or you were facing a tough time. And what actually came out of that tough time Right, why that tough time actually happened For you, not to you before you, for you.
Speaker 2:All right. What happened as a result? And there's always. There is always something that was learned, or you met a person that now has great value in your life, or you went somewhere you never went, or something always Happens, and even from challenge, there's always something on the other side, if you're willing to reflect back, and then you can see the progress that you've made. Because that's life we all like plow through. It's not sunshine and roses every day. That's ridiculous. We all have adversity and challenges. It's all. How do you face those challenges and how long do you let yourself Mullen? It also like I talk to people all the time about.
Speaker 2:I have a 24-hour rule and I started this when I worked in corporate America and I was like you can complain all you want to me as a boss for 24 hours about whatever happened, how you got screwed by this with your compensation. You got screwed by your client. You guys, you know this person internally. You are mad at the scale. You are mad at the fact that your water heater broke, like whatever it is. You have 24 hours to complain to me, but then after that it's over.
Speaker 2:Whatever it is, I don't care the magnitude of it after 24 hours, and I do this with my daughter as well. I'm like you've 24 hours to cry, vent, get it out. But after 24 hours we have to be done and we have to move on and I think by following that it helps us get out of the rut of negative Ism sorry not saying that right, but it helps us get out of that and not being stuck in like the woe is me life. It's horrible. Yeah, you know your life could be awful just today, right now, but after that we need to move on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. And so you know, now, thinking about it you talked about, we talked about kind of our passion and looking at it right, right now, you know you start out and say, hey, I'm living my best life, I feed the fourth floor, I feel a great sense of peace, right, when you wake up, and it may not be perfect, but right now you feel aligned. I think aligned is a great word, right, but you weren't always this way. What was kind of a journey to kind of get here for folks you know, 2024 is here in a few days.
Speaker 2:Yep I.
Speaker 1:Talk about kind of your journey a little bit.
Speaker 2:So what really kicked started that journey was me getting fired. So I was a sales executive, an advertising sales executive, for 22 years in corporate America, working for a public company, and if you had asked me who is Gene Collins, I would have said my first thing I would have said probably would have been that I'm a single mother and I'm a vice president of sales, and neither of those things go on your tombstone. But that was how I defined myself was by that success and by that job title, and it was something I was really proud of having accomplished. And so I got fired. And it's been almost four years and I got fired and I kind of always thought they're never going to fire me. But then in the back of my head, this thing is like, yeah, they will, yeah, they will. And I was like, no, be quiet, be quiet. Well, yeah, yeah, this guy was right and I got fired and it really forced me to look at my life and look at how I wanted to spend my days and what did I want my purpose to be and what was going to excite me in going to work. And I had to really do a lot of work in a very short period of time because I needed to figure out how I was going to make a living, just figuring out, like what was going to make me happy, and I focused more on what my life would look like and journaling about that and thinking about that than the actual task of what that job was going to be. And I really focused on the bigger picture of my life and things like not having to travel anymore so I could be around for my daughter, not having to get on an airplane, not having to miss her birthday for a company event that I was required to attend, even though I did it was my daughter's 16th birthday or whatever it was and so it was things where I wanted to be able to see her in school in the middle of the day. I wanted to have more flexibility. I didn't want to have to work on Sundays all the time preparing for the following week. I didn't want to spend stress so like writing down things about. You know, how did I want to feel at the end of the day? I wanted to feel like I made a difference in somebody's life, and then I had to think about well, what does that mean and how is that going to make me feel. And so, by going through those exercises, it really made me take a very hard look at my life and how I was going to define happiness, both personally, in my own life and my lifestyle, and professionally. And what was I then going to do? Because I was about to turn 50 and I have to as a single parent, I'm going to be working till I'm like 75. And so what am I going to do for the next 20 years to make a living?
Speaker 2:That pivotal point, like that fork in the road for me, was so, so, so impactful to helping me get to where I am now, because it forced me to make so many major changes in my life from diet, you know, I became vegetarian, then I became vegan, you know, having more exercise, really figuring out how to meditate, really journaling, making a commitment to these things in life and really deciding that I wanted life to come first.
Speaker 2:You know we always talk about work-life balance everywhere. It's work-life balance and I talk about this in my book and I'm like says who, just like? Who says we have to work five days a week and only have a two-day weekend? Says who, who decided this nonsense? So you know, I decided, made a conscious decision. It's going to be life before work. I have to work, I have to make a living, but it needs to be contributing something to my life that's positive, not just a paycheck. And when I changed my mindset about it, it made a huge, huge difference in the choices I made, and those choices all started to come together to help me be much more aligned as a whole person.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it sounds like you actually designed your life, right.
Speaker 2:I did. I did, yes, I did. I designed my life. I decided what I wanted it to look like and I wrote it all down.
Speaker 2:And people will be like you have manifested that, like holy cow, and I'm like I don't always look at it that way because I totally believe in manifestation, but it's hard sometimes when you're like I'm waiting, I'm waiting, I'm waiting. But when you can reflect back, I'm like you know what. You're right, like I didn't just sit back and have all these things happen. I created them all. I actively said yes to people who asked me to go to coffee, even though I didn't want to, because you know what you need to put yourself out there. If you're trying to find a new path for yourself, you never know who that person might know or you never know what they might open up and expose you to from a career perspective, from someone to help you. You just never know. And so I said yes to a lot of things that I would have said no to from a networking perspective, and I think that also helped broaden my eyes to see how other people are living and what other people are doing and how other people are finding peace in their lives.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's so huge. I don't think we do enough lifestyle design, right. I think we do a lot of. These are kind of my passions, or this is what I need to do. This is my job title, right you talked about before. Just like a piece of the pie. We don't really look at the full picture, right?
Speaker 2:Right, and how is the work gonna contribute to the full picture other than just a paycheck, cause we need that, obviously. But how else is it gonna make us feel fulfilled as a person and that like we have a purpose here? Where are you gonna get your purpose from? Where are you gonna get that feeling that you are helping someone else, cause nothing is better than feeling like you have helped someone else in even the smallest of ways, even if it's just buying someone a cup of coffee and lying ahead of you Like you know. How are you gonna accomplish that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, cause you could have very well loved selves, I don't, you know. Hey, you could have very well loved it, have passion for it, right, but if it isn't contributing to your full life, like you mentioned before, maybe I'm not as present of a parent as I wanna- be Right.
Speaker 2:Right, and I do love sales. I love sales, I love my team, I love managing my team. But there were a lot of things that I realized when I took a step back that I didn't love and that weren't good for me and weren't good for my mindset, weren't good for my soul, weren't good for my overall lifestyle. The stress, the stress was actually physically and emotionally killing me and I didn't even realize it at the time until I took a step back and then I realized, wow, so making choices like understanding stress is a big one for people and figuring out how you're going to make lifestyle changes to deal with stress cause we all have stress, but we have to figure out how to manage that as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So when it comes to what you did as far as, like, lifestyle designing, what would you say folks should start off with? See you mentioned, hey, I don't wanna travel, this is kind of how I want to live, right, right. So I think that's how folks kind of understand, how they can at least start. When they're doing their New Year's resolutions, they can start to say, hey, this is what I want my life to look like, and then this is kind of the action plan I can do to support towards that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I mean. So I'm a huge proponent of journaling. I feel like journaling is brainstorming, right? You know, I come from sales and marketing and advertising and that's where the best ideas come out, right it's. You got the blackboard and the whiteboard and you're just writing away.
Speaker 2:So I would tell people to sit down with a journal and have one page that says you know, what do I want my life to look like? And then have another page about how do I want to feel in that life and what feelings and emotions am I looking to get back and I actually do this for people when I design their homes, I say how do you want your house to feel? How do you wanna feel when you walk in the door? Because it matters. And then, if you just let yourself like, don't worry about what you're writing so much as letting it just flow, so don't overthink it, figure out how to quiet your mind a little bit and just write. And there's no right or wrong answer. Just write, and write, and write. And I would do that for five days and then at the end of the and even if you're writing the same thing every day, it doesn't matter. At the end of the five days, you will find common themes and you will find that there are threads and themes of the things that are important to you in terms of how you wanna feel in your life and how do you want your life to look. And then, from there, I would encourage you to either read some books on careers and career shifting so I mentioned a couple of books in my book as well or, if you can afford it, hire a career coach, and people like that can be a really great investment to help you see how you take the skills that you have and transfer that into a different industry, because I think the older we get and the longer our career history goes, the more we put ourselves into a box that that's kind of like all we're good at, but the reality is we all have so many skills that you don't even think about, and so a lot of it. When I talk to people a lot of it they're like well, I don't even know what I can do, and I'm like but then that's your job. That's the research. Figure out what other people do for a living. Get out on LinkedIn, read some books. Start figuring out what are people doing in things that you're passionate about, whether it be photography or management. If you're in management, you could go be in management in any career, any industry you want.
Speaker 2:Management is management. Sales is sales, like it's all the same stuff. It doesn't matter what you're selling. You're selling pencils or software, it doesn't matter, it's sales. You have skills, and so it's getting people away from the job title and getting them into the skills concept. And then, like I also wrote a bunch, my career coach had me write a lot about, um, what things in my job made me happy and the skills that I needed or had that got me that result. And so it was oh, wow, coaching makes me happy. Mentoring the people on my team and seeing them grow and become better sellers that makes me happy. Well, that is coaching, that is mentoring. So that's a skill set that I had that produced an outcome of a feeling for me that made me happy. And so I was like, okay, wow, that's something you really need to think about for your next career. Maybe that is something that you want to focus on, because that is something that you have demonstrated a strength in and the outcome makes you feel good and you like that 100%.
Speaker 1:See, this is what we don't talk about, of why you have so much kind of peace in your life and alignment in your life, because you knew exactly where you wanted to go, what that looked like, what you want in your life to look like, and then you were flexible with the journey it took to get there. And you're telling folks now is like, hey, once you're clear about what you want the outcome to be, it's so many different journeys along the way to get there.
Speaker 2:So many. And it's not to say that me starting into your design firm was the only option. It wasn't. And when I started it, that was never. That is not in the journal at all at all. Like never, was it. Like. Oh yeah, I want to become an entrepreneur and become a small business owner. That was never part of it at all. And even in interior design wasn't part of it at all. It wasn't until later that I started also thinking about what hobbies do I have, what passions do I have, if I had time to go back to school this was another one If I had time to go back to school to learn what, what I want to learn, what excites me?
Speaker 2:Because we should constantly be learning. It keeps our brains going. Learning is so good, reading is so good. You love books, reading is so good, learning is so good, and we need to keep doing that. And so if you have the chance to go back to school, even if it's just to take one course, what would it be in? And then that's something that you can kind of dig into a little bit and then potentially follow along and see, well, where does that take me?
Speaker 2:And for me it was interior design. That was my hobby, that was my passion and I was like, wow, if I could go take classes in that, I would love that and if somehow I could figure out how to make money in that field, that would be so great. And then I took one giant leap to, okay, I'll start my own business, which if I were younger I would not have done. I would have gone to work for somebody else. But you know, at 50, I was like I don't have the runway to just go work for somebody else's in apprentice for five years, like I don't have the runway for that, that's not going to work. I'm used to, you know, being the boss. How's this going to work? So I kind of took the bigger leap and was like, okay, I'm going to figure this out and start my own company.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you had late to groundwork in your professional life anyway to be able to do that Correct. But it's just crazy to see what I've learned and even hearing your story. You actually took action. You get your answers from the actions that you take. Until you take some type of step or some type of leap, you won't know the answers beyond that first leap.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, correct. No, you have to be willing to act. You can't just sit back. You're not just going to come to you because you just decided to sit back. You have to actually proactively be doing something about it.
Speaker 2:And I encourage people if they're trying to make a change in their life and they're trying to figure it out, I would carve out time every single day to actively work on that, and that might be. I'm going to spend half an hour in LinkedIn reading articles and finding people and following, connection to connection to connection, group to group to group, to see what other people are doing, and that might be it. I might spend half an hour reading articles in the New York Times to figure out, you know, find a passion, hobbies, things like that it might be. I'm going to spend half an hour having a Zoom call with a friend and talking to a friend about where I am. I'm going to go spend half an hour in the library reading a book, anything that you can do to carve out a little bit of time every day to feel like you are working towards understanding what you want down the road. Those are all actions and they all compound. And then the answers if you're quiet, the answers do come.
Speaker 1:I love that and I you know. I listened to you on a few other podcasts and I know you said you talked about the process of you writing your book and how you wrote for about an hour every day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I had to make that commitment. So when I I had no intention of writing a book, by the way, that was not on the radar at all I had kind of played with the idea. I was like, oh, it would be so fun down the road to write a coffee table book about design and all the pretty pictures and be able to have it like out there for eternity. Right, I don't know about that out there, but it was never about actually writing a book. And I got an email I don't even know how. I got an email about a seminar and it was like an hour and a half free seminar about mind mapping and writing a book. And do you, you know, can you write your own book? And it's one of those moments where I always encourage people. If there's something that catches your eye and you take a small pause, the answer is yes, you're supposed to go, you're supposed to go after that, right, you're supposed to respond to that email, you're supposed to open that up. And I was like you know, I actually have time. You know, on my day of this free hour and a half Zoom thing, I can sign up for this. And I did, and at the end of it I had mind mapped out which is basically brainstorming my entire book, and I had no idea that I had a book worthy of anything. And all of a sudden, like I had a book, I had concepts, I had, you know, subjects, I had chapters all written out in an hour and a half and I thought, wow, there's a lot that people could learn from my story if I do it right. And so I made a commitment to write a book and I hired a book coach to help me with the process, because I know nothing about writing a book. And I made the commitment that every day I was going to write for an hour. So every day, from five to six, I would write for an hour. And even if I didn't want to, you know that time was blocked on my calendar. And that was the commitment Because I'm like it's just like exercise. You have to commit that. This is what you're doing.
Speaker 2:And I did take some breaks. You know, full transparency. I took some breaks, had some low emotional periods where I was really struggling with work and was struggling with a little bit of depression and I was like, how can I write about living my best life when, here I am like talking to my therapist about how unhappy I am and she's like but that's perfect content for the book because it's real. Like that's real, it's not always great and you're doing all these great things and all this great work, but you still are struggling with sadness and you are struggling with your place in life right now.
Speaker 2:And that is great content for the book because how you were going to then overcome that is the lessons that people can have, because it's not linear. Life is up down, up, down, up down. So then I went back, I took like a two month break from writing and then I went back and I went back to writing every day for an hour and it was amazing how, all of a sudden, you know when, I wrote my whole book and then I rewrote my whole book and then I rewrote the whole thing again. It's a process.
Speaker 1:I love the transparency, first of all, which I think we need more of in the space of self-improvement, because we have a lot of where we feel like you need to be absolutely perfect, you need to be flawless, right, and for you to say, hey, yeah, I finished the book, I wrote an amazing book, but I also took a break. Right, I was in a rut. I was in a rut.
Speaker 2:I was depressed and life was not happy and I'd be crying driving down the road and I'm like, oh, what am I doing? I'm supposed to be writing a book about my greatest life. How can this be? How can I like I didn't feel authentic because I was like I can't write about this right now. This isn't authentic. This isn't my best life. I'm crying driving down the street, but I did talk about that in my book later in my book. It's incorporated in there and the lessons that I learned by getting through that and how I got through that for myself made me so much stronger and I think it made the book better in the end because it made me add more vulnerability to the book than I had originally, and I think that is really important.
Speaker 2:And I think if we want to be on any public platform where we want to try to help people, you need to be willing to be vulnerable, and it's hard A lot of it. Like myself, I'm an introvert, like I'd be happy to stay at home and never see anyone. It'd be great. But yet in my public life I'm very extroverted and so, as my extroverted persona and what I feel is my role with this book, I have to be willing to be vulnerable, because that's how we can really help people with our public platform that exists right now.
Speaker 1:Why it's how we connect. It's really how we connect.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, yeah, right, yeah. And that's what people want. People want to connect, they want to feel. I say this in the beginning of my book I'm writing this book so that no one feels alone, because so many of my experiences other people have been through the same experience. So it's not that like this is so oh my goodness, off the charts. Insane it's that people can read my book and say, oh my goodness, chapter two. It was like that when I was growing up too. I can so relate to that and it helped me see how you overcame that challenge later in life. And now it's made me really think about my life and the role my childhood had on me. And it's not that my childhood is earth-shattering and horrible it wasn't but there are parts about it that a lot of people can relate to.
Speaker 1:And we all have something right from our childhood right and, like you said, you gotta have that quiet time to be able to understand how it affects you in your world today.
Speaker 2:Right, because it does. Yeah, it does. Our childhood and how we were raised affects us tremendously, and so we have to be able to come to peace and come to terms with that and understand that and have it play the role that it played, which is it was our upbringing, for good or for bad, and the people in it, for good or for bad, that was our lives. That's okay and accept it for what it is and then be able to move and grow from it 100%, you know.
Speaker 1:I think you mentioned something important is that, hey, we make commitments and a lot of us get into a rut to some degree, right, and we may not even know we're in a rut, right? Sometimes. Hey, I know for myself, right, I can start to see my time in the gym. I didn't go to the gym that much this week. What's going on with me, you know, having been eating that healthy these last few weeks, what's going on, right?
Speaker 2:A little too much pizza, carbs and sugar yeah, pizza loves us, everyone loves them.
Speaker 1:Don't say you don't.
Speaker 2:Everybody loves them.
Speaker 1:Everybody loves them, and even for myself, right, I can get into a rut, and it's not about kind of beating yourself up. You just reminded me that, like, hey, it's okay to get into those moments. We just need to rebound and not feel guilty about these kind of down swings that we have in life.
Speaker 2:No, because everybody has them. So you need to cut yourself a break. We're our hardest I feel like myself, for myself and for many people I know we are our hardest critics, and so we are the hardest on ourselves and the expectations that we have for ourselves, and so we need to sometimes just cut yourself a little bit of slack. And it's okay, you gain a little weight over the holidays. It's okay, you'll refocus in January. It's fine. It's okay, don't worry about it.
Speaker 1:What a blessing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, don't strive for perfection, because perfection actually is bad. There's a section about this in my book where it's you know, don't strive for perfection, because perfection actually it should not be the goal. You want to strive for the good and the perfection exists in the small moments of quiet where you kind of look around and you feel like, oh wow, I'm at peace. But that can't be the goal of every day and all of the time, because then you're just going to disappoint yourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know, spending down a scroll time can help with that right, when you look at it, you see the perfect relationship, perfect home, perfect finances, perfect vacation places and perfect friend group. And, um, it's very important for us to understand what it is that brings us peace. Correct, yeah?
Speaker 2:I recognize that what you see in social media, which is what people project their outside persona, social media where you see them out in public, you have no idea what's going on behind the curtain and behind the closed door. So don't let that image that you see define you as who you are. It's hard to do, it's work. It definitely is work. But then I say to people you know, if social media has that impact on you, then you need to only be following things that are inspirational, and there are tons of those things out there, right? Be watching reels and videos of people talking about inspirational things to do today. Watch people working out.
Speaker 2:There's this lady who works out at a town near me. She's like 90 years old and she's like a hardcore weightlifting gym and let me tell you I watch every video posted about this one because she is amazing, like amazing, and I'm like I watch her and I'm like that is so inspiring to me. Look at you're doing pull ups and push ups and rolling the tire down the street and like, spend your time. If you're going to have like that mindless part of social media, spend your time finding those types of people to watch and get inspired by, because that, you know, can change your mindset, as opposed to focusing on the people posting the pictures of their beautiful vacation and their perfect dinner, and you know everything else.
Speaker 1:That's not real life.
Speaker 2:There's so much else out there. It's not that all social media is bad, it's not. There's so much else out there. You just have to find the right content that's going to resonate with you, that can keep you in a positive mindset, not if social media make you feel down 100%.
Speaker 1:Where can folks find you? Where can people continue to follow your journey?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so so my book exists on Amazon. It's two feet in lessons from an all in life. There you go, that's it. It's also it's available as the ebook Kindle and it's also available anywhere. You would get an audiobook. So I did record it myself, the audiobook of it, so you can listen to me for five and a half hours if you want to, which is quite an experience of learning. And also you can follow me online. So I post on Instagram every day. So it's at germart J-E-R-M-A-R. Underscore designs on Instagram. You can follow me on Facebook same handle, or germartdesignscom on the internet J-E-R-M-A-R. Designscom 100%.
Speaker 1:And one thing I want to do I want to thank you because you actually sent the book to me before we hopped on.
Speaker 2:Well, it's helpful. You have to at least have read a little of it. It really helps to kind of frame it a little bit and just to get you know your book is sort of your vibe, it's your energy, it's how you talk, it's so it's good to kind of know that before we talk. It helps you feel a little more connected to me 100%, thank you for asking for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've received, you know, a good amount of books from folks that I've had on the show, but you are the only person to also write a handwritten note as well and give a bookmark. So I just want to say that that is amazing, and to be able to have this book right, hard hard copy, like I said before, actually, I got a chance to read it, and a lot of the ideas that you have in the book I definitely identify with, and so I can't wait to continue to read it and dive deep into it, but also make sure I share it, put it in the footnotes and send this to other folks, because Thank you, I appreciate your support and I appreciate you spreading the word.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for for for giving us a positive message here today.
Speaker 2:My pleasure, Josh. It's been so fun to talk to you and wishing you all the best in 2024, too.
Speaker 1:A lot of percent.