Ep. 164- What Lights You Up with Jennie Blumenthal

This is the You Winning Life podcast, your number one source for mastering a positive existence. Each episode, we'll be interviewing exceptional people, giving you empowering insights and guiding you to extraordinary outcomes. Learn from specialists in the worlds of integrative and natural wellness, spirituality, psychology, and entrepreneurship so you too can be winning life. Now here's your host, licensed marriage and family therapist, certified neuro-emotional technique practitioner, trainer and certified entrepreneur coach Jason Wasser.

Today's guest is Jenny Blumenfeld. He's a professional speaker, author, and CEO and founder of Corporate Rehab, an acclaimed professional coaching consultancy that has helped hundreds of executives ditch workplace culture and find their path towards a greater sense of purpose. All right, so Jenny, welcome. First of all, I know you're up in DC, and, uh, we were previously just talking about the, you know, the blossom— cherry blossoms that are coming out in your neck of the woods. —just give people— before we get into all the cool technical stuff, people don't know what this is, the cherry blossom thing. And I know that there's a race in a couple of weeks, but can you kind of just describe that for people who have no clue what the heck I'm talking about? Sure. Because I think it's just a cool thing that I don't get to— I don't talk about these things so often, but you're in the middle of it. So what's that like, right? What's the cherry blossoms and what the hell is going on in DC in a couple of weeks?

Sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Jason Wasser. And it's a good reminder because it is such a normal DC thing, but it is not something that everybody knows about. So I don't know all of the origin, but essentially one of the Japanese ambassadors, I believe it's in the '50s, a while ago, had gifted a number of cherry blossom trees. And so they're planted all along the Tidal Basin, right around the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Monument. And then there's a few other by his residence actually in Bethesda, which is kind of funny. But what happens is they only bloom for about 3 weeks and there's one week that's a peak season. And so every year, it's almost like the way the rest of the country, or maybe just school kids, watch for Groundhog Day and what's he going to say in his shadow. We watch for what's the peak cherry blossom blooming time because it's just gorgeous where all of a sudden these normal trees just all explode into what looks like little snowballs. And you walk through the blossoms and they're raining down on you like it's snowing in the middle of April. And it's just gorgeous. And unlike our friends in Florida, we don't enjoy beautiful weather all the time. And so we have to take our cherry blossom weather when it's here. So we're really excited about that coming up soon.

That's awesome. Yeah, everybody I know who've either done the race during that time or just like, you have to go to D.C. during this time. I've only been during the summer recently over the last many years. So I've not yet experienced that. So those who are listening, figure out when this is and make a trip to D.C. at that time. So there's so many cool topics that I know we're going to get into. And one I just want to maybe start with, how did you know what you started off doing? Was what you wanted to be doing and making that decision to go into this world in the first place?

Oh yeah, that's a great place to start. Um, so for my quick background, um, I was in corporate America for 20 years, left as a partner of a big consulting firm running a $200 million business unit, managing 300 people, climbing the ladder, doing the whole thing. Um, and my story is I thought I was happy. Um, I was doing all the things that were in my background I was programmed to do, or that I was encouraged to go do for great reasons. And I'm sure as you're a therapist, we could go into a whole other long discussion about all the great reasons. But the easy way of thinking about it is I was raised by a grandmother who lived through the Depression, and she instilled a lot of those values of hard work and determination in my dad and my mom and onto my sister and I. And so for a lot of reasons, I thought that climbing that ladder and having the job and doing all the things and running through the hoop as fast as you could, or running through the tape, uh, was the right way to go. Um, and for a long time it really worked for me. I got the promotions. I was really excited about my job, um, up until the point that I wasn't. And then it was really hard to admit to myself, like, why am I not happy? I'm doing all the things. Why does this feel unfulfilled? And I didn't realize it at the time, but I was really deep into burnout at that point. Um, probably from a lot of causes, a lot of pushed boundaries in terms of time, that type of thing. But then also bad habits that we weren't necessarily taught in the '70s of how to put time around your time and energy. I'd be remiss to say that also being a woman, sometimes in business it's really difficult, and a working mother, to figure out what's that role model or who do you model your career and your life off of. I had a lot of great male mentors that would have If I followed that path, I'm sure I would have shot to the top of the organization and it would have cost me my family. And so it was this combination of not really knowing, you know, how to live all these roles that I was trying to live within my life. And the way I describe it is it was really a Venn diagram of all of these different pieces. And I had really lost touch with the person who was at the center, which was me. And so when I parachuted out in the middle of the pandemic and said, I can't do this anymore, I actually threw out the rulebook of having a strategic plan, which is what I used to do for companies. And I started to just do the next right thing. And that, you know, just trusting myself to have the answers that I was looking for for so long instead of looking outside of myself really led me to this place where at first it was just, I want to help other women who are feeling this burnout or want to know if there's another way. And there was so much I learned as I started to dig into the research of the neuroscience of leadership or burnout, all of these things that ultimately I said, I've got to put this together in some sort of digestible way because I had so many people saying, you were at the top of your game. What did you learn that the rest of us need to know? And I learned the hard way that sending them podcasts and videos and 50 books on trauma and intergenerational workplace trends is not that easy to pick up when you're surviving. And so the real answer to your question is I kind of just started to do the next right thing, and the path unfolded before me, as every mystic and guru tells you it does. But every hardworking American raised by somebody with a good work ethic is like, yeah, screw that. You make your own fate. So I've had to kind of rebalance those different parts of myself to find what happens next. And now I get to help leaders thrive in the future of work. And I'm really lit up and fired up about it. That's amazing.

So there's two things I kind of want to tease apart a little bit, which is from your experience and from your research, what is your personal definition of burnout that you're using to start off with as the basis for having these conversations with people?

Yep. So I like to ground it in the science and the definition so that people can get aligned on what we're talking about. And then I can add my personal experience and definition to that. So I think one thing that people might not know is that the definition of burnout actually was changed in 2019 by the World Health Organization, and it added chronic unmanaged workplace stress to the definition. And I think that's important because we all get to this place where we say the world shut down, we went through a pandemic, and oh my gosh, suddenly there was mental health issues and suddenly people were burnt out, right? Right. Um, I think we know that this was building over time, right? We're in global organizations that are on a 24/7 cycle in terms of getting things done. And the boundaries around time and the impacts of that stress have been building over time, enough so that the World Health Organization saw fit to update that description. So I think that piece is important. And then the 3 symptoms that they classically define are exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy, or feeling like whatever you do isn't really going to matter. And so I think that was absolutely my experience. Experience. But I'll have to give a shout out to any working parents out there. I don't know who isn't feeling exhausted, cynical, right? Like nothing that you do is good.

Well, that's why it seems like a cult, just a fundamental cultural baseline of where we're all at based on the way society has been set up for the workforce for the last— since World War II, probably. That's right.

That's exactly right. Or even maybe even with its roots in the Industrial Revolution, where we started to treat people as products and time as units and efficiency. So I agree. So I take that piece and I start there. And there are 6 elements of root causes of burnout that a practitioner would point you towards. But then I add on my own piece of it, which is basically when you feel out of alignment with your own soul. If you feel like there's— it could show up as your own values. Like, for me, I was like, I'm doing this big job because I want to show my kids what an important empowered woman looks like. Well, an important empowered woman at that point in my life, because she was trying to do everything, looked like a really stressed and frazzled mom. And so I'm now giving them a chance to see what that looks like. I'm running my own company, published a book, and doing all those things, but doing it more on my own terms and really checking in with myself to say, is this still in alignment with my own values, or am I using my values as something to say that, you know, family comes first and then I'm getting on a plane 3 times a week to fly away from them? That, that really isn't in alignment. So I think that's where I try to balance the clinical description with how we're actually living our lives and see if there's anything out of whack.

Which makes a lot of sense because what the second part that I wanted to tease apart was this idea of like you being able to distill this wisdom, this knowledge, and these experiences and make it this like packageable, whether it's a book, whether it's coaching or consulting or anything like that where people can hear it. And I know when you're talking about neuroscience, right, when you're in fight or flight and you're in reactive mode, no new data can come in. So yeah, you can send them a Tony Robbins or a Joe Dispenza or whatever leadership, you know, John Maxwell, whatever it is, or even a boy with my couple sent him a Brené Brown video on vulnerability. And if they're in such fight or flight, they're hearing it, but it's not being absorbed and digested. That's right. And I can imagine where you have the culture, especially for women in the, in the, in the business world, the corporate world, whatever, where it's, is that constant fight or flight because they're at work and they want to feel fulfilled at work. And then there's the guilt and shame of not being able to be at home, right? Then so many dualities. Yep. That something always feels like something's missing. Yes.

Yes, I agree. Yeah. And the distilling part was hard because it was hard to get down to, like, the essence of what exactly was needed. I had to learn in this phase of my life, I relied on my head for an awful lot, you know, and I had to start to learn to trust myself with some of this. And like, where was my intuition leading? I find that, you know, depending on how you feel about this, there's, there's things that are very gendered, right? And that we in general ascribe these types of traits to someone who identifies as male and those leadership traits and depth of voice characteristics and something, a different set of traits to women. The challenge is when women show up at work and the culture itself expects them to be affable and collaborative and creative and all of these things, but then expects leaders to be tough. And demanding and rule with an iron fist and drive, it creates that misalignment within us. A lot of times.

And to your point— Yeah, we will call that probably a double bind, right? Where you need to be, right? You want to be authentic to yourself, but also you have to play a different role. I think there was an article that, or something, I remember seeing a YouTube video. I don't agree with a lot of what he says, but he was pretty spot on with this, with Jordan Peterson said about women's roles within exactly that point of that duality of like, you have to show up this way, but it may not be authentic to you. But if you want to get ahead, right, you won't, but then also being perceived as— that's right— opposite of who you genuinely are in order to connect. Right. That's tough. That's a tough— right.

That's like eggshells everywhere. And I think that's— yeah, it's a great way of saying it. I think that what I wrote about in the book was just the fact that when you find yourself in that situation, your choice is to change the system, change yourself. And when you do that, you abandon parts of yourself to fit in. And part of that duality of, like, figuring out which path is right is the fact that there's things that will work for you. But the regular system around us that was built for an Industrial Revolution worker with no caregiving responsibilities, if that's not going to change, then you wind up trying to figure out— and unfortunately, most women get to a point where they put it back on themselves. Am I just crazy? Am I the only one seeing this? And we don't realize that what it is is just the friction of you trying to be yourself in a situation that wasn't set up to design to bring out the best in you. It was designed to scale things, you know, across huge companies. And having run like big programs, it's really hard to manage down to something, you know, to the level of one when you're trying to scale this across thousands of people. So I understand why we're there. I understand it's very hard to drive profit but give everybody their own choose your own adventure. But that's kind of where we are right now is saying, are there different ways to lead? Are there different ways that let us combine the masculine and the feminine? The feminine— and by the way, I don't even mean gender.

Every one of us has that energetically. Yeah, exactly.

Masculine or feminine power, energy, whatever. So we've just decided, if you think about this, companies are just groups of people that decide to behave a certain way and agree to be ruled by market, right? So we've agreed that a leader is tall, has a dark voice, has a lower voice, is making sure that they're commanding and controlling just because those are the leaders we've been exposed to. Right. And so we've come up with this sense of that. And even the command and control, I think as we start to get into the next generation, whether that's millennial, Gen Z, Gen X, or past Gen X, they're actually asking for, hey, I don't want to be controlled and commanded. Like, that might have worked great for World War II. So thanks, boomers. I want something different. Right? And so I think we're in this tension of the world starting to shift to that. We're in the midst of it, and we're trying to figure out how do we show up as ourselves when some of those sands are shifting beneath us?

When I can even look at it from a cultural perspective of watching Mad Men and all of the movies about '80s Wall Street and corporate America, Wolf of Wall Street, whatever it is. That's even in the '90s, right? There's Wolf of Wall Street. But just that whole culture of this patriarchal dominant. Male-oriented— love the Wonder Woman mug.

Yeah. On brand. Yeah, there you go.

Shout out to Gal Gadot. So, right, just seeing these things, I remember watching Mad Men during the pandemic. I try— like, I'm like, it was so irksome. Yeah, right. And even though I knew it was obviously proving that point of like, that was what the culture is like, I can only imagine where like, even the women, yeah, got them— got themselves willingly like, no, this is your role when there's a woman in the higher hierarchy in the corporate place. No, this is your role. Don't try to step out of that line. But then, so it's kind of like, it was, it sounds, felt very disempowering to watch and experience. And obviously, that's a fictional show based on, based on what it was like in that timeframe. Right. But you know, the double bind, the double standards are still consistent. And I even see it, like, it's interesting, I saw it from earlier on in my therapy practice, or when I was in graduate school, like I was one of 3 guys in my cohort. Wow. So it's a very— so even certain fields have been very— in the flip, right? These emotional fields, these helping professions are much more feminine energy than masculine energy. And I remember realizing that some of the women that started their practices early on in their career, my bias was, well, because they have their husbands supporting them and they don't have to do this, they get to do this. Interesting. Yeah. Right. Versus someone who has to work. It doesn't mean they didn't have to work, but these things are like, well, it's easier for them to have a successful practice because they already have someone supporting them in doing this type of paradigm, which is still a different bias from a different perspective. Yes. Versus corporate America. Right.

Right. That's very true. Well, and I remember being— I rose through my leadership in the '90s to the 2000s and the 2010s. And I remember having that discussion, like being in a room where we were trying to decide on a promotion, and I had an older male colleague say, well, we can't give it to her because she's married and we got to give it to him. He's supporting a family. And I remember thinking, like, I can't believe you just said that. And he was like, we've got to get practical. This guy has 4 kids. And it was such an interesting moment. This was, I mean, 2004. It wasn't 1984. Not that long ago. Yeah, exactly. Right. So there is this pervasive, I think, these perspectives that that persists. And by the way, when we think about that, that shift, we're still mostly talking, you know, about white women in the workforce. You know, we're not even talking about the fact that there have been generations of people of color providing all kinds of labor in different places, unpaid and paid, you know. And when you think about it that way too, it feels like this is new because more women are in the workforce. But really what we're seeing is, you know, a group of women waking up to the fact that they can be more than the secretary and the nurse and the, you know, what have you, but still wrestling with all of the other roles or placement that, that if they feel that are part of their identity based on how they've grown up in society.

But, and I still see it as kind of hierarchies, right? Because let's say I have multiple friends who are nurses or nurse practitioners, and there's still that hierarchy no matter what, even if they're like happy and they're willing to be there and they want to be there and they love absolutely everything about nursing. There's still power differentials that are at play in any one of these, uh, you know, where you're the employee. Yes, paradigm. And I think that's, you know, where the whole entrepreneurship mindset has become so cool. Like, what I love seeing, you know, uh, you know, women entrepreneurs and having those, those on my— such as yourself on my podcast— is that it is like we talked about before the conversation, it's not a voice that is heard often enough. And then when we do think about it, or we do, it's like, well, who's the first and most successful woman entrepreneur in the country? Like, we're still gonna— like, the person that is— I know to be that person is Blakely, which is still a white woman.

Right, right, right, right.

I mean, God, I mean, she's incredible and a powerhouse. Right, right, right. But you're still talking about a very specific cultural context. That's right. That, you know, and she did, obviously, she has incredible representation in her company and has done incredible things, both in public, in the company, and then charity and other stuff and women's stewardship outside of the company as well. It's like, she's like, I feel like Spanx is like the Patagonia of like women's stewardship. What Patagonia did for nature, Spanx, I feel like, did for women, which I think is really— I don't think anybody's really talked about that enough in that context. But it is. And I see it and I see it in all these different worlds. I see it with my couples, I see it with, like, young professionals. And talk to me a little bit. And I've had this conversation with a lot of 20s, 30s, early 40s where there's a stagnation or a willingness to stay in a career that without it coming from a place of judgment, which is how I don't want it to come across, where it's just easy and it's not full of risk. It's safe. The paycheck, you know, is coming. Yeah, but it's not fulfilling. And there's not a question of wanting to do different. Or take a risk to go somewhere else different, or to even jump ship and even do an entirely different career. And I'm not saying this doesn't happen to men, but I just have happened to have a lot of conversations with this within my practice. It is happening more with men who are more vulnerable. Yeah, not just putting their nose in doing the rise and grind culture, which we'll get into. But I find it more common with my, with my female clients that there's a willingness to just accept the status quo.

But I also see that in relationships, too. Yeah, that's an interesting point, especially making that connection from a relationship perspective. I think there's probably so many pieces of that that we could dig into. I think one of the things I see overall is that when we talk about those traits that are inherently feminine energy versus masculine, one of the ones associated with women is intuition and creativity. And when we think about that, that can go back as far as we create human life to, hey, in a meeting, I have a sense that this person's actually the decision maker in the room and everyone else is kowtowing to the, you know, the tallest man at the head of the table. And it's actually the woman sitting in the back who is making the decisions. That's a true story, by the way. I was in that room and thinking, hey guys, I think we're catering to the wrong person. And she did not award us that contract because people weren't paying enough attention. But I say that as a humorous example of what I see all the time, that there's this intuition that women tend to have, and it's probably available to all of us, right? But I notice it particularly with my female clients where they say something's off. There's something out of alignment, however you want to say that, right? And I think that it's very possible to find fulfillment or what have you outside of work. I certainly don't think that your work has to be the thing that lights you up. I do think that if you're going to spend 8 hours, 10 hours a day, and you better like it or else it's going to be draining. But I find that women are often in that place where they notice something is off and maybe there's something in a relationship that's off. Maybe there's something, you know, within the dynamics of power at work that's off. Maybe it's something where it's just as they've moved up in their career, the things that lit them up before, like the nurse example, getting to do the patient care is now replaced by 40% of your time doing the healthcare charts and the EMR stuff that drains you. Right. And so there's this— I think there's even teachers, right?

How much of a day of teaching paperwork and lesson planning versus and discipline versus educating.

Right. And I think that's where I find a lot of women come to. And what happens there, for a lot of reasons, is like their aspect and their awareness of choice just shuts down. They say things like, I can't leave. No other place is going to value me the way this place does. They jump right to logistics. So, you know, who— well, what, what really lights you up? Oh, I really want to go teach kids about financial literacy. And immediately, but I couldn't do that because it wouldn't pay enough, or who would pick up the kids, or all these practical things that unfortunately are very real. You know, if we had—

Very true. Yeah.

If we had some things that, that allowed people to, to make different choices. Yeah. But I think sometimes we don't spend enough time in like the why and what lights you up. So that we can actually remove whether you do have enough data to make that decision that you really can't get paid enough, or could, could you talk to your partner about doing daycare shifts or whatever it is that— what are those actual obstacles? And sometimes we trap ourselves by accepting whatever role has been thrust upon us and saying, well, everybody else is doing that, so I guess I'll stay too. So I think there's a lot there that goes into probably more of the mindset and some of the limiting beliefs that, that we carry around with us.

When you were describing the words, when you were literally saying the words that you have heard people say and we've all heard people say, I immediately flash back to every single female client that was in an abusive relationship saying that about their relationship. That, right, that an abuser says to the abusee, no one will like you or take care of you the way I take care of you. You're not going to find anything better. That's right. The abused also, like, how am I— if I leave, how am I going to take care of myself? How am I going to pay my bills? I've not been able to do this on my own. I have to learn a whole new skill set. And my partner has been taking care of this. And it's the exact same language, just a different context. And like, this is ridiculously profound because I'm looking at it from that perspective from the first time. I can only imagine when people put that two together of like, do you ever go to the— do you ever see the abuse wheel? It's so if you— so if anybody's listening and you Google the domestic violence slash abuse wheel, and right now it talks about and basically every category of control of money, decision-making, right? Um, you know, separating from Fred, right? But if you put that into— if you line that up with your job, we're really more screwed. Corporate culture is really far more abusively toxic than we might even let on if we just put that template places. Totally agree. Right. But it's just— I'm just having this massive aha of like, wow, if I give this to my clients, or if you gave this, like, okay, so let's just change the words for your job, your boss, your coworkers, your colleagues versus your partner.

Yeah. Yeah. That's so insightful. I haven't seen the abuse wheel, so I need to look that up because it's interesting. I wrote a post probably about a year ago at this point on LinkedIn saying, ladies, your job is a bad boyfriend. Because after I interviewed 300 women for my book and after you know, maybe 10 or 15 interviews about people who had gotten into burnout or left corporate and why they kept saying things like, I know this sounds crazy, but it was almost like that guy that, you know, you shouldn't be with when in your 20s, but he makes you feel good and then he ghosts you for a while. And then, you know, and it was literally over and over and over. They were describing an abusive relationship. And there's probably a million reasons why those individual women found themselves in those situations. But to your point, it just makes me question whether there's so much toxicity and abuse that's happening on a regular basis, whether we would categorize it as assault and actual abuse versus verbal— well, not actual assault and something— Controlling and verbal. Thank you. Yes. Versus something that is just ingrained in how we assume leaders are. I think there's a big issue. And it goes down to the fact that the rainmakers, as we call it in corporate America, the guys or girls who bring in the most money, their behavior is tolerated. I mean, I had an abusive boss for a project that I was working. I had several abusive bosses, but the one I was working with for a project who basically was, you know, we were staying up till 1:00 in the morning and everybody, you know, and finally I said, you know, to the business unit leader, like, this is really unhealthy. And he was like, yeah, but he's our biggest producer. So what are we supposed to do? Right. Well, the reality is you're supposed to have a conversation and say it's going to cost us so much more to lose everybody else, which it did. Yeah. The latest stats are burnout actually costs the US $150 billion a year in healthcare costs, and it costs you as an employer $3,400 of every $10,000 that person makes. So say they make $100,000, it costs you $34,000. Just to do, you know, to find somebody new to do— replacement costs. Yeah. You know, to lose all of the people around them. So, I mean, the reality is great, this guy was bringing in big deals, but you were— there was another hole on the other side of the bucket of 30% of your, of your talent is leaving. And then what does that do from a bottom line perspective? So I absolutely believe that. I think the other piece that's interesting about that when it comes to corporate culture Sometimes when you say those words, that the toxic place or the abuse, people have this—

So generic now. It's like—

Exactly. And they have this reaction of not here. But Donald and Charlie Soule did some really important research in the middle of the great resignation that really pointed to these toxic microcultures that all you need is one boss or one bad leader who's going to kind of spoil the rest of that line. And actually, there was a research that just came out a couple of months ago that that 70% of people believe that their boss has a more bigger impact on their mental health than their spouse or their therapist. So it just points back to these individual leaders can have such an outsized impact on someone's experience. And I think you're spot on that it's abuse that's throughout the organization.

I'm just resonating on a client of mine who is just a lovely human being in a field that they the most passionate person about. Yeah. And they're in this culture of a small office, and the owner/director of this place is basically not stewarding leadership and has delegated and deferred to an office manager that doesn't— that tolerates another coworker's literally verbal and emotional abuse left and right and justifies it because it's a small town and there's not enough people that they can rehire that person. But yet their most passionate, best worker, my client, is like, "I don't know if I need to quit. I can't even go to my boss because I don't want to cause the friction of sidestepping this person." And this is in a 4-, 5-, 6-person business.

That's hard. Then, and then it just becomes so small that it's hard to— or people are, even if it's not as small, they're afraid that they'll be called out and have retaliation, right?

And then where am I going to go if I do choose to leave and all this? So it's kind of— I can see this as, and I know the mental health stress that this is, that this is causing. And even asking the question, have you proactively, lovingly sat down with your boss and express it from— and I'll help you like, yeah, you know, map it out for you. Here's the languaging and here's the thing without me telling you what to do, but at least being strategic language. So at least you can make an informed decision. And a lot of times when I hear that, again, I've heard this like, I just have to suck it up until we, you know, until something else comes along, or like, that's like putting yourself in— and I really do want people to hear this, like, there's a difference between like, you know, the joke about like, you know, the millennials of like, you know, what do you mean I have to I don't want to be in my office at 9 o'clock. I want to show up whenever I show up at whenever my Starbucks coffee is done. Like that YouTube video that was going around a few years ago, which I'm sure you saw, right? And there's a difference between that and people actually realizing that there is toxic culture. And again, there is room for improvement. There are bosses who are doing wonderful jobs and setting leadership examples. But one of my favorite stories, just to go back to prove your point of the cost of replacement, A buddy of mine who at the time his company was doing $100 million a year, went through this whole torch of his business and instilled core values where it wasn't like we're just going to put core values on the wall. Every decision and every person here is going to be going through this core value training and making every decision from those core values. And there was a person that wasn't aligning with it. He's like, from now on, anytime you're going out to a job, you have to wear the company company polo, and you have to wear dress shoes, or you have to wear even sneakers. And the person's like, no, I'm gonna wear my Crocs, and I'm gonna show up in whatever I'm wearing, because they're used to me for doing this for the last 10, 15 years. It's like, well, we're not doing that anymore. We, you know, we're looking down the road. I want to sell the company, and I wanted to be right. I wanted to be family culture about while still being corporate enough that the company's going to want to buy us out. No, I'm good. I'm gonna do— and, you know, it came back and forth. And he's like, well, if, you know, listen, you 2 weeks till I kind of get it together. Here's the new contracts for everybody based on these core values, and you can make a choice. And the guy kept saying, how are you going to fire me? I'm your largest producer. And he's like, it's up to you. Yeah. And he stuck to it, and the guy ended up quitting even though he said like, no, you're not gonna fire, right? And he's like, nope, you're, you're done. What happened was apparently 2 or 3 of the female office staff came over to him within a week and said, we're really sad that the company's losing X amount of dollars from these deals that he's right that we might lose in production. But he used to harass the hell out of us every day. And no one really knew. And we didn't want to bring it to you because it's like, we can handle it and we can put it off. But the culture from that was coming from that person. Right. So it manifests in multiple ways.

It absolutely does. It absolutely does. And it's interesting you say that piece too because I can believe that story. And the other thing that I'll hear women say, now that you've introduced the relationship dynamic, is not that different from what you hear an abusive mother saying. I'm staying for the kids. Yeah. Time and time again, the women I'd be coaching would say, I'm in such a toxic space, or this leader is so toxic, I can't get away from him, but I can't leave my team because who will protect them? I need to be the human shield that takes on the toxicity and protects the rest of this team. The scapegoat. Absolutely. And it becomes this example of how women in particular will just absorb the stuff around us to make things work. And in this situation, when you're doing that in a workplace, these women that came forward were just saying, oh, I can handle it. I'm strong enough. And putting up with crap they didn't have to put up with. And I wouldn't be surprised, actually, to check in with your friend to see if their profit or the revenue or whatever went down.

I mean, yeah. 5 or 10x. I think the last time I heard it was 300. It took— I think it took him 20 years, 18 to 20 years to get to $100 million, and it took him another 16 to 18 months to double it.

Oh wow, that's amazing.

Once he instituted all of these, all of these things.

Yeah, right. And so often it's funny you say that too, because I feel like I'm, I'm impressed that he took that route. I feel that so many— I don't have empirical evidence on this, so maybe there's a study out there, but so often The guys who are working, who tolerate that toxic— this boss was one of them— are people who present themselves as super strong. And then when it comes to actually diffusing conflict like this and making the tough decisions, they back out. They say, I'm not going to be the person that makes that tough, that has that hard conversation and holds someone accountable. But I want to be perceived as this strong, tough boss. Well, guess what, buddy? It requires you to be strong and tough on the vulnerable.

In a different way. Right. In a vulnerable way. Yeah, of course. He talked about his own personal journey. Journey of what that took to be the type of guy where his family is his priority, all these different things. But so many different things happened around that time in his personal professional life that it gave him this foresight or this insight to change everything. And he's like, "I've become a better human. I've cleaned up my— I don't want to be the bull in the china shop either." Even though he's a very lovable human being and he would fight for his staff and do all those things to make sure they had whatever it was, But he even admitted, he's like, I'm a far better man, boss, leader, dad, husband, whatever, because of this journey. And this is one of the byproducts of making these decisions that made the culture of my family business, my business that's a family, different than the family that's my family. So I think that level of self-awareness goes really far.

Yes. Oh, yes, I totally agree with that.

So I know just being mindful of time, I know there's this idea of relighting the spark and we're talking about burnout. How are you taking and approaching that? I know we've had the grand resignation, what's the term that everybody's using?

The great resignation.

The great resignation. It's pretty grand. And I see this where people can be returned on. I see this in marriage, all the time. I just had a conversation with a client about this, of like being returned on by their partner after 30, 40 years. And like, well, I'm not feeling it the way I used to, and I'm not as attracted to say— but well, okay, but if you looked in the mirror, you know, you was turned on on yourself as you are about— like, you can point the finger at your spouse for like, you know, gaining weight after 30 years of marriage, and you know, that being the person you married in 1982 or whatever it is. And yeah, but are you that fine sexy specimen that you're— you're complaining about the other person? So it's always about cleaning up our side of the field and a perspective, but I'm wondering, like, when you're talking about helping people heal from their own burnout, what are, what are some of the tips and tactics that you're kind of leading them to? Yes.

So, um, we are talking about this a lot lately. I really felt that in this part of the business cycle, we'd be getting past the burnout of Great Resignation and kind of getting into new topics. But it's kind of interesting to me that I think, just to back up for context, you know, we all went through some version of volatility the last 2 years, whether that was issues, you know, with actual impacts to yourself from pandemic, whether that was the volatility in the marketplace, whether that was volatility in your home. I mean, people had really different politics, everything, right? Every politic— yeah, you're right, we didn't even add that to the, to the pile. Um, but regardless of where you personally were, I mean, we can agree that there's just been this like constant change and uncertainty and volatility these last 2 years. And we're now at this place where we're seeing tech layoffs and recession discussions and all these other pieces, and companies are saying, okay, you know, pandemic's over, we're back to business, we're all back to the office, return to work, let's drive these huge goals forward. You know, it's January, time to turn the page. And the problem is their, their people, you know, are just depleted. And so we're saying, hey, it's, it's time to run that marathon and we need you to sprint it again. And people are saying, oh my gosh, I have nothing left to give. I just made it through this. And, and so, so much of what we're talking about right now is basically resetting mindsets and behaviors when we're kind of healing from the burnout and looking to turn that corner, getting out of survival mode and into thriving. And so one thing I'm doing a lot with companies and individuals right now is running them through this framework called SPARK, where SPARK stands for safety, purpose, ambition, reset, and then know and grow. And so safety is the foundation. If you don't have the psychological safety to stick to, you know, talk up and say, Hey, here's what I need to do, or here's what's messed up about our meeting norms. For the last 2 years, we've all gotten cameras on every day, and I'm, I'm, you know, trying to talk to China at night and California in the morning, and I'm exhausted. We got to reset this, right? So it's that, it's that safety to be able to say, hey, something's off, right? And this can happen at an individual level or a team level. So I'm having both levels of discussions. P is purpose. So once it's safe to speak up, how do you find purpose in the work that you did? And what really made you fall in love with your job in the first place, to use your relationship example, and reconnecting to that. And that can be at the company level, but often it comes down to what lights you up as a person. Back to that nurse, like if it is that customer care, getting back in touch with that stuff. So you know the stuff that gives you energy and what drains it. Sometimes we're doing this at the team level, that if it's a digital team or a customer care team, kind of reconnecting with what purpose they're serving. A is ambition. So once you know the things that light you up, how are you pointing all of that grit and hustle and determination towards the stuff that's really meaningful, as opposed to getting stuck in the hustle culture, as we call it, which is just productivity on steroids where you're rising and grinding and staying at 100 miles an hour versus modulating that a little bit. So how are you pointing that ambition that you have towards things that will really move the needle, as opposed to having a calendar full of meetings from 8 to 5, but not actually making progress on the goals that you're setting out for yourself. R is reset. So what gets in the way from doing all of that? So resetting boundaries, resetting relationships, resetting, you know, how you're actually spending your time. And again, this is an important thing at the individual level to say, am I allowing too many meetings on my calendar? Am I doing too many coffees for potential partnerships and not actually making the moves in the business that need to happen? Am I working too much? In the business and not on the business, which is a big thing that happens for entrepreneurs where you just get so involved in the delivery that you're not actually scaling and growing. And then also at the team level, sometimes that happens, you know, from a, from a larger perspective. And then the K is knowing and growing. So one of the things that happens for burnout is we get disconnected from the things that make us grow and learn. And so if you can think about what are the things that you know will light you up, for some people that's doing something outside of work and running a cherry blossom 10-miler. Uh, for some of us, it's learning something new and saying, what's the role of AI or ChatGPT or whatever, and how can I use that, that new learning to kind of infuse some excitement, um, back in my job? So I'm leading so many people through that right now, to how to relight their spark and their own leadership so they can actually, you know, take control of the things that they can control in the language of corporate rehab, um, and change things around them as they can, and accept, you know, have the wisdom to accept the difference if they can't, but really empowering them to make some of the choices that they gave up control of that they really can own.

That's amazing. Yeah. And I know we were talking a little bit about this, you know, the hustle culture versus rebalancing it out. And there's been a big push, I think that the duality of the world of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, whether you're working with somebody that my friend defines as intrapreneur, he has a whole thing of intrapreneurs, that you're right, you do have this leadership role, you do have influence, you do have the ability to help grow a larger company. You're not like low at the lower end of the totem pole where your influence is felt and there's impact. There is an entrepreneur and people shouldn't— and some people are like really gifted entrepreneurs and they shouldn't go out and start their own business because they're such an expert in that area that can add so much impressive value to a business that already exists or is getting created versus the entrepreneurs who are really good at hiring and delegating and all those other things. And I don't think there's enough talk about that also. But I, but I see now, like as I started, like I don't know how many years ago, 5, 6 years ago, maybe a little bit more at this point. It has to be a little more at this point where I started going to entrepreneur business conferences and the rise and grind and the hustle and all those things that are like, you can describe that as all that alpha, you're an alpha or you're a beta, all the stuff that's still coming from a lot of the toxic places as we just saw someone who was just arrested in that world who talks about alpha males and everybody else is— And just the abuse, the levels of abuse that are there. And even though some of those people may not be abusive and they might even be well-intentioned, but how it had to be the mindset in order to succeed is that you do have to step on everybody else to get there versus the rising tide raises all ships mentality. Yes. Oh, my gosh.

And there's so much I could unpack in that. I mean, one of the things— and I go into this a little bit more detail in the book— but the hustle culture is really fed by this false sense of scarcity. And it runs on this fact that you have to be first in line. And if you don't get the promotion, someone else is going to take it from you. And if we approach the world that way, where resources are always scarce, and then we're going to constantly be beckoned towards that place where you have to put you first. And there's real times where that's absolutely the case. If you're in war, if you're in something where you really do need to survive, Yeah, great recipe for survival. But that's the preface.

I think they're even— I mean, I think that whole mindset, I think you really hit it spot on with that without even realizing that. That's what you were— um, is I think these individuals or cultures that are promoting that is looking at entrepreneurship as war. That's right, right? It's the do or die. Either you're gonna get the money or someone else is going to get the money, and you should get the money. Why should they get the money, right? Even if you're not the best at it, it's just you have to do what you have to do to get that money. And that's a little scary. And I've realized that, like, seeing a lot of that and seeing what that's led, especially when a lot of the politics have come in over the last couple years, where that genetically predisposes a lot of people to, to, you know, to hang in. We're seeing this very—

even entrepreneurship has become so damn political. Yes. Yeah.

Versus this beautiful, organic authenticity of like reaching purpose and potential and core values and stuff like that, that everything has just become gentrified. In this like us versus them thing.

Right, right. And it's losing. It should be a path that someone can choose. And frankly, they should be able to go out and get an equal shot at funding based on their own merit or based on what they're bringing to the table. The way when we look at even the funding resources of what people can get, you know, and how that's dispersed, we need to look no further than And no disrespect to him, but the founder of WeWork who had this failed venture and then wound up getting another hundreds of millions of dollars. And I'm thinking, wait, where's the accountability for all the other entrepreneurs that have amazing ideas that are actually going to do something to change the world and not just make profit?

Or just make that their motto that we're here to change the world, but still be not doing that. Yeah. Well, I mean, I've been talking about this theme and topic with multiple people over the last number for months that we're in the age of the narcissist, right? This is our— I think this is the generational, like, right now these last couple years. I think we're seeing it in politics, I think we're seeing it in the entrepreneurship world, I think we're seeing it in religious spiritual worlds. Narcissism is becoming the fundamental role of leadership, of corporate greed, of political whole, you know, advantageousness, right? It's, it's on both, on all sides. But I think that we're, what we're really seeing, if we can run it through the psychological lens of what it's a clinical— I'm not saying, oh, they're, that person's a narcissist, like everybody's, you know, generically talking about that. But if you really do look at the lens of where narcissism shows up, and I do see it in the entrepreneurship world big time, especially in all those like podcast, you know, the podcasts and the, you know, there's a certain culture of certain community in that where it's that, again, it's that alpha beta, it's that, you know, raw, pure testosterone, you know, push and push and push and push and push. It's okay if you're bleeding, that's just weakness leaving your body, right? Type of thing, mentality. That's not— and that was sexy for a while for a lot of people, except, you know, it's not healthy. Yeah. And it's not good for us as humans.

Yeah. Or society. Or society.

Right, right. So, so that's that. So, so just as we wrap up, I mean, one, we have the book, but two, who should be reaching out to you? Who— obviously, anybody in the corporate world or anybody in entrepreneurial space should be reading the book. Who should be reaching out to you of working with you and any of the other programs or anything else that you're doing? Who's the absolute, like, OK, I'm listening to this and I know that I need to talk to you?

Yeah, I would say any leader who wants to try to have your people lead at the next level without losing themselves in the process or losing them to burnout is definitely an audience. Where we're doing workshops, we're doing discussions, we're doing training, any of those types of, of, and pretty much everybody would fall into that category, I think, because we're all experiencing some level of burnout. And then for my private coaching, I'm still working just with women in a one-on-one space and in a group space. So certainly women who are looking to either make a change in their career or want to learn how to thrive in their leadership. I've got a course called Thrive where are— we're focusing on leading at the next level, uh, without losing yourself first. And I've got a course on Rehab and Reset where you're trying to reset some of those mindsets and behaviors and understand what you can do to empower yourself if you're approaching burnout. So both of those things are, are definitely part of the ideal audience. Awesome.

So for everybody listening, if this is you, someone you know, obviously, you know, there's the book that we talked about in the intro, but Corporate Rehab: Ditch the Hustle, The Hustle Culture and Thrive Again. And obviously you can reach out to Jenny directly through all of her things, which we'll put in the show notes. And again, thank you so much for— I mean, such an important topic. I know, um, probably will have to be around too because there's a lot of stuff we didn't get into and we can go a lot deeper with. But I really do want to thank you for all the powerful work that you're doing and the important work that you're doing for, for our community.

Thank you, right back at Jason Wasser. Thanks so much for having me.

Of course. Thanks for listening to the You Winning Life podcast. If you are ready to minimize your personal and professional struggles and maximize your potential, we would love it if you subscribed so you don't miss an episode. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at You Winning Life.