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Today’s show featured an interview with Jessica Joines. She will be the keynote speaker at the Conference.
IES Women in Sales Program Director Gina Stracuzzi conducted the interview.
Find Jessica on LinkedIn.
JESSICA’S ADVICE: “It’s an evening practice that I have. I review my day and I go in a chronological fashion. All the things that I feel really good about, I did, I acknowledge them. Like a virtual pat on my back. “That was great,” I celebrate myself. I acknowledge the good. Then the things where I’m like, “Oh my God.” We all have them, those things that are whatever, I say, “I forgive you, Jessica.” I do a self-forgiveness and letting it go. Because what happens is, and neuroscience is actually showing a lot of this interesting enough, you don’t let those things go. It’s a living pathway and it stews and then they just keep compounding all that negative self-talk. Making it a daily practice to celebrate the self.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Gina Stracuzzi: Welcome, Jessica. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you are as a leadership coach. I believe you classify yourself as the life and leadership coach and tell us how you got to where you are and about your philosophies.
Jessica Joines: My journey has really been about coming to understand the value of purpose in my life. It wasn’t something that was in my vocabulary when I was starting out. In fact, it’s been more of a mainstream conversation in only the last 10 years really. When I went to college, it was like skillset, figure out what you’re good at and go do that. The problem is, is that’s anchored to a belief in scarcity and survival, versus doing what you love and really coming to understand who you truly are on the inside, not just the skills you have, and anchoring a life to that. Because in my experience, that is what brings you true happiness and joy.
I spent the first 20 years of my career in marketing and advertising. At the height I was the global CMO of a company called Rakuten. The secret was that I was living a life where I was achieving a lot and I was finding all my worth in what I produced, and that wasn’t leading to true fulfillment and happiness. My story in the last 10 years has been literally figure out who I truly am, what’s going to bring me happiness, because when I can anchor to that, all the other stuff becomes easy. It’s not so complicated.
How much time do you have? It’s been a journey, Gina, and I’ve gone through a variety of different stages of it, but it’s really been coming to, and hopefully this doesn’t sound too out there for some of your listeners, but it’s been coming to believe the truth in my heart more than the fear in my mind. That is the journey that we’re all on. Whether it’s how to thrive more in sales, well, this is telling you you can’t do it. This is telling you that’s not possible. No. Your heart is always encouraging you and pulling you forward. I’ve been applying that in now big and small ways to my life. That’s really what my life has become about.
Today, what that looks like, really is the founder of The Women’s Purpose Community, which is a community for C-suite high-achieving female leaders that want to focus on their personal growth, because they know that that’s been the missing link and the missing key to really stepping into a life of deeper fulfillment, which we all deserve. I know when we talked offline, think about it, the level of thought that we’ve given, and I will now say, one of the most sacred decisions you’re going to make, what do I do for 10 hours every day for my whole life? We did it from a, “Oh, I’m just going to figure it out. This sounds good. Oh, I think I can be good at that.” Versus like, “Am I going to choose fulfillment for my whole life?” I think we deserve nothing less than that. That in a nutshell has been my journey and helping other women find that too.
Gina Stracuzzi: For some people that means stepping away from a big corporate job, but for a lot of people, a lot of women really love their companies. They just aren’t always getting the support they need. They like what they’re doing, but they’re not getting that sense of ‘anything’s possible here’. I think that there’s a real correlation between what you were just talking about and getting what you need from the place where you are. If all things are equal and you really love what you are doing and you actually like the company, but think overall you’re not feeling very supportive, then I think it’s really about finding that voice within, as you say, where’s your heart leading you and what is it you really want to do? If you feel like you’re in that spot right now, but you’re not knowing the success that you want, then what’s holding you back? I think that our conversation today and at the conference is going to help women really figure that out a little bit better and put into play what they need to. You set it up very nicely.
One of the things that we talked about offline as we were discussing the conference is the fact that, and this is true of men too, in our society, we put so much emphasis on what you do as your sense of who you are. It’s really a deeper quality that really says who we are. Let’s talk a little bit about your belief in that too, and about the unique gifts that women bring that set us apart, but the fact that we also discount those gifts, because I know that’s something that you really work at in your workshops and in your group. Talk to us about that.
Jessica Joines: One thing we do in the Women’s Purpose Community, and it serves two purposes, no pun intended, is women, they’re in really senior leadership roles, they’re on this board, they’re on that board. When you come into the community or come to one of our retreats, you do not introduce yourself by what you do, no labels and titles. Instead, introduce away some adjectives that describe you, a gift that describes you, a value that’s important to you. To really start to connect again on who you are within, not just externally what you’ve presented to the world and seeking all your worth in that, not that that stuff isn’t worthy, but it’s not the only thing, connecting to something more.
What that also helps do, is going back on one of your earlier points, why women are happy at the company, but there’s a lack of fulfillment. I really think it comes down to relationships. I know you’re doing this in your community, the relationships we build, and we don’t have a lot of time, they end up being transactional, like exchange a business card, and they don’t go anywhere. What that also does is help you connect, and I say at a soul level, but start to really connect in a deeper way. We need strong deep relationships with our peer set when we’re in these very senior roles because it can be very isolating and very lonely. Men have had the golf course. They’re doing it that way in a way that serves them. I think that’s a really important point, but really connecting and understanding who you are beyond those labels and titles and achievements. It opens something up for you and a new way to think about yourself.
Gina Stracuzzi: I love the idea that, don’t tell me what you do, tell me who you are. When we lead with that, it is so powerful because that’s where we feel the most comfortable. When we’re comfortable, it shows. We’re so much stronger than when we’re somehow holding back. I really love that idea.
Let’s talk a little bit about how you help women or the advice you give them for overriding insecurities, because I know that is something that comes out in the forum quite often. Some of it is the way that women are socialized growing up. It really goes back to the socialization because the idea that we’re not supposed to make a lot of noise, we’re not supposed to take up too much space, we’re supposed to defer to others always, that just feeds insecurities. What advice do you give to women in your community for dealing with that?
Jessica Joines: I present it as, there’s two simultaneous paths. One is, I’ll say healing the root causes and understanding them. That’s deeper harder work. We all have our own stories. There might also be trauma, whatever childhood upbringing. It’s understanding the root stories and where they come from, and that’s deeper longer work. We do a lot of that work within the community. Then there’s what I’ll call behavioral embodiment. They’re too simultaneous, so you can do both at the same time. Behavioral embodiment really, there’s a saying, you want to build self-esteem, do estimable acts. It’s really that. You are creating new neuropathways when you take on consciously, it’s a very conscious practice, new behaviors. One is starting to just witness that fear in the mind and witness the stories and not attach to them and make it a practice every day to step into witness rather than identified. If you’re believing the stories, you’re identified. A witness is objective.
It’s witnessing the story and go, “Huh, that’s a thought, that’s not a fact,” and getting in a real practice of that. That’s important because then those stories start to be able to grip on less over time when you get in the practice of witnessing, not attaching to them. Then it’s feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Again, this sometimes can be a little bit customized and personalized, but a big thing often with women is like, not speaking up in a meeting, not saying what you really think.
A lot of times, I’ll give them the script, you can just get out the first few words. It’s, “Well, have you thought about this?” Just getting that out, whatever it is. Then what I do is I set a little goal, “Okay. In two meetings,” depending on how often you’re sitting in meetings, in the next month, you’re going to do that twice. You have an accountable goal. The thing is, once you adopt a new behavior, it starts to become more comfortable. Then you start to build a little self-esteem in the process.
Gina Stracuzzi: We do a whole session in the forum around basically thinking better thoughts and pulling apart what is a truth versus a story you’ve told yourself. It’s amazing how we believe something so strongly to be a truth. The coach that we use, Amanda Doyle, she’s amazing, she’s like, the truth is, the desk is brown, the sky is blue, it is raining outside. The fact that you can’t do that is a story, or the fact that that person is keeping you from doing this is a story. She walks them to it so they understand. It is amazingly powerful.
Jessica Joines: This is why I was like, perception is a choice. As you learn to master your perception, you master your reality. It’s so hard to just wake up because they feel so real. But here’s the thing, if you start getting into that witnessing energy and you make that a disciplined practice, I’m an objective witness. Could be true, could be not. It’s just a thought. It really, over time, if you’re disciplined about that, the thoughts start having less power over you. Then here’s the cool thing, when you start to see how powerful you are by actually choosing your thoughts, “Okay, I’m actually choosing to believe this instead. I’m choosing to believe I’m going to rock this meeting. I’m choosing to believe I’m going to exceed my sales,” you start to see how powerful that is. Both are powerful, it’s just there’s a dark and a light to it.
Gina Stracuzzi: It’s interesting too how intellectually we can know that the brain doesn’t know the difference between a reality and what we continually tell it. It will continue to look for evidence to support whatever it is we tell it. We can know that intellectually, and yet when it comes to the stories we tell ourselves, we find a way to absolutely convince ourselves that this is not one of those instances where I’m telling my brain something that’s not true, because it’s so true. “Can’t you see? It’s true. Bob is in my way.” No, Bob isn’t in your way. We’re in our own way. I pick on Bob a lot. Bob is my go-to target.
Let’s talk a little bit about how, and this is something I really believe in quite strongly, that we shouldn’t be trying to be like the men. We need to embrace all that we bring to the table because it’s unique, it’s different, and it’s incredibly powerful. Yet we’re all still playing, especially in the sales community that we work in. We do a lot of public sector sales and working with public sector companies, and they deal with the government. It really is still a lot of old boy club thinking in a lot of ways. It’s getting much, much better, but it’s still there. What advice do you have in terms of acknowledging the presence of this leftover cultural thinking and moving forward and past it?
Jessica Joines: It takes each of us being committed and willing to do it. Change is collective. I was sharing about this at a conference I was speaking at in New York last April. I very much acknowledged, I was like, forever I was trying to be a man. My whole demeanor changed, how I held my energy. For me, I ended up really not liking who I was. I was saying this to someone else recently, I think you’ll love this. I’m like, “I will know that we are now brought this, let’s call it feminine masculine energy, back into balance.” Can you just imagine this happening in a conference room? Every time someone has a gut feeling, “Okay, let’s go validate that with data.” What if we flipped it? What if I go validate this with my intuition or my gut feeling? Heads would be spinning.
There are qualities women have, like intuitive empathy, those kinds of things. When you’re leaning into it from a place of like, “I’m ashamed of it,” or an insecurity about it because you’re nervous about how it’s going to be received, then you’re attracting some of that. What I say is like, pick one thing that you have that you know is unique to you as a woman. I’m just using intuition and empathy, and really, because it’s hard to do a lot at once, own that one thing, but go in with a place of strength behind it. Because all of these things, they all have equal strength to qualities that might be considered more masculine. Doing the production, the building blocks kind of energy, their strength behind both of them. Your job to help the change happen is as best you can go in it and hold it from a place of being proud about it, feeling good about it from a place of strength, because people respond to energy at the end of the day. They respond to energy.
Gina Stracuzzi: It’s interesting you talk about the intuition, because that’s something that we spend a lot of time talking about in the former, we have in the past. It is one of women’s superpowers, as you say, and yet it is something that people are very fearful of using because it’s like, who’s going to listen to me? Well, you have to own it, as you suggest. It is the strength with which you say something that makes it persuasive or not. You don’t have to say, “My intuition is telling me.” You can use different words like, “It’s been my experience.” Frame it in a way that sounds data-driven, if you have to, “I have witnessed this,” or, “In the past I’ve seen this.” However, you want to quantify it, but get that point across. Because if your gut sense is going off and we’ve had people talk to us in the forum where I absolutely knew we were going down the wrong path. I absolutely knew it. I just couldn’t get the words out, and it just blew up in our faces. It’s like, can you imagine where you would’ve been if you had said something, if you had found the words to say what your intuition was telling you?
Jessica Joines: You’re absolutely right. I love that advice that you’re giving. I think that’s really powerful, Gina, because you’re saying don’t suppress your own gifts, but you can meet them where they are. You can package them in a way that they can receive them, but you’re not suppressing yourself as a result. I love that.
Gina Stracuzzi: Thank you. Let’s face it, it’s how we package anything that either makes it palatable or not. Even in sales, how you sell it, how you package it, how you talk about it makes all the difference in the world as to whether or not someone is going to accept it. Find the words that give you the confidence to speak what you believe to be the truth, and it’ll change everything.
You prioritize it in pretty much everything you do, meaning and purpose. Let’s talk about where self-care comes into that. Because this is one of the things that I think trips women up a lot. I don’t think I know, because it’s something we talk about a lot, is the fact that we feel like we have to keep on. We have to keep being on, we have to keep taking on. We can’t say no or we won’t get other opportunities. That really leads to that burnout that you started the conversation off with talking about. It’s unfortunate because then people back away from things that might’ve been really good for them if they had known how to say, “Please come back to me for another opportunity, but I can’t take this on.” How do you talk to women about that?
Jessica Joines: In a couple ways. I think, again, back to our offline conversation, I told you the same conference I was referencing earlier, it was a women in tech event. I don’t think I’d ever been to a conference like this where nearly every speaker, and myself included, had talked about having physical burnout and health challenges. Then one woman said the thing, which we don’t want to say, but that women are physiologically different. There’s a lot of truth in that. The problem is that the structure of the corporate environment, the five-day work week and how that is, it’s not necessarily ideal for women at all stages of life. I think there’s a lot of conversation like more flexibility, those kinds of things.
Then here’s the truth, women are incredibly productive. I think for direct more to your question, well, two things. One is like, no one’s going to look out for your health other than you. I’m still recovering from adrenal fatigue nine years later. No one is going to take care of you other than you. Health is something not to mess with. To take ownership for that, I really encourage every woman hearing me right now to do that. But the second thing is, back on that I choose my perception, remember your 70% is ridiculous, is productive. All women, our brains are different. We’re incredible multitaskers. We can do many things at once. Also getting a perception shift about how much you’re actually doing, and then you’re talking boundaries.
What I do a lot with my women is the saying, no goal. It has to be personalized. You say no to nothing. I’m saying no twice this month. Literally checking that off and knowing the boundaries. Again, people respond to energy and that’s a powerful thing. It’s saying, “I know me. I know I’m so good at my job that I can set boundaries.” Now, if you’re in people-pleasing energy, it’d be interesting to see some research on this. People that set boundaries versus people pleasers and how they’re perceived, she’s super confident versus not. I bet you anything, there would be some good data there, but it’s okay to set boundaries. It’s okay to say no to things. In fact, you’ll probably receive a lot of respect around that and really people will respond to your power in that way.
Gina Stracuzzi: The truth is, there will be other opportunities. It is better to say, I can’t take anything else on, but I want to be thought about for future things because it does tell people that like, okay, you’re aware of your limits, whatever they might be, and that you’re interested in new things. It is unfortunate that for women, they feel like it’s this one shot or nothing. It’s just not true. It’s just not true.
Jessica Joines: It’s just not. Again, that’s back on a perception, because I think if you really objectively looked at your life, you would see like, “That’s not true. I’ve been offered many opportunities and opportunities I wasn’t even seeking that came out of the blue.” There is a perception shift that needs to occur and happen there too.
Gina Stracuzzi: The one thing we like to do, and I am so excited about this conversation and I can’t wait till the conference, because it’s going to be a really great conference. I’m so excited that you’re going to be leading us off the day off. We like to leave our listeners with something that they can put into place today to take their careers to the next level. In lieu of this conversation or in light of it, something that perhaps women can do to start giving themselves that grace they need to say no, to speak up, what advice would you give them?
Jessica Joines: It’s correlated to what you’re asking, and I’m feeling so guided to say it. It’s an evening practice that I have. I review my day and I go in a chronological fashion. All the things that I feel really good about, I did, I actually acknowledge them. Like a virtual pat on my back. “That was great,” I celebrate myself. I acknowledge the good. Then the things where I’m like, “Oh my God.” We all have them, those things that are whatever, I just conscious, “I forgive you, Jessica.” I do a self-forgiveness and letting it go. Because what happens is, and neuroscience is actually showing a lot of this interesting enough, you don’t let those things go. It’s a living pathway and it stews and then they just keep compounding all that negative self-talk. Making it a daily practice to celebrate the self, to acknowledge the things, the ones where you’re trying to fall asleep and you can’t because you’re still like, “Oh my God,” whatever it is, to consciously say, “I forgive you,” for something ridiculous, and just choose to let it go. You do that discipline every day, you’ll be amazed how much things grow and shift and change for you, and how you show up and hold your energy.
Gina Stracuzzi: It’s so interesting too because we do focus on the two things we didn’t get done or that we didn’t do exactly perfectly, rather than all the great things we did in a day and the way we lifted other people up, whatever it is. We just focus on those little things that didn’t go exactly right. That is just such a waste of energy and it just makes you heavy and terrible.
Jessica Joines: Then there are these active neuropathways. I’m having a neuroscience come in and do a talk for the community. I can’t wait. I think that’ll really help. Like, just when you see the brain, you go like, “Oh yeah, positive thinking works. Letting go of this works and it’s shaping my reality.” Sometimes we knew this through the science, but it’s just phenomenal.
Gina Stracuzzi: We’ve had several speakers at IES that really talk about the neuroscience of selling too. You bring in all of the same things, so I’m sure that’s going to be a well-received discussion in your community.
Thank you, Jessica Joines. Everyone, you can find information about Jessica in the show notes and reach out to her on LinkedIn, but better yet, come to the conference and hear her live. Thanks everyone. We’ll see you next time.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo