Interview with Jeanette Bennett, a Utah-based magazine publisher, about life and business strategies. She describes daily mantras (e.g., "your actions are evidence of what you want"), recommends books like Good to Great and Who Moved My Cheese, highlights habits such as using drive time wisely and daily exercise, names investing in her health as her best investment, and summarizes her legacy word as "love."
Chapters
Thanks for joining. If you would. Would you take 30 seconds just to introduce yourself to our audience?
Okay. My name is Jeanette Bennett. I'm a magazine publisher. We focus on largely the Utah market. So we have Utah Valley Magazine, Utah Valley Bride Business, Q. And then we have some national products that we do, including Prosper Magazine, Celebrating Women magazine, and we do a lot of publishing for network marketing companies and Parade of Homes events around the country. Excellent.
Do you have any mantras that you find particularly relevant in your life right now?
Okay. One of the ones I think about almost every morning is I say to myself, your actions are evidence of what you want. So, for example, when it's five in the morning and I don't want to get up, I'll say, well, your actions are evidence that you don't want to go running or that you don't want to finish that project that needs to be done by eight. And so I think I need to have my actions be evidence of what I really want. So I remind myself what it is I want so that my actions will match it. I think of that almost every day. I also am often telling myself to slow down just because sometimes I'm in such a hurry that with people and with projects that I haven't always. I've always been happy, but I haven't always like, savored every moment. And so I've been telling myself to savor and to look people in the eyes and just to slow down.
Excellent. Two or three books everybody should read.
You know, the book that has probably come up the most when I've interviewed entrepreneurs is Good to Great. And I love that book too. Who Moved My Cheese is one that has been helpful. I'm a print magazine publisher. We also have things online. But the cheese has moved before we started our magazine or when we started our magazine. It was before Facebook, before Instagram. I didn't send a first text till about four years into owning the magazine. And so the world has changed. The cheese has moved. And so instead of just standing at the cheese station, being mad that the cheese isn't there, I've tried to be mobile and see where the cheese is and stay true to what we're good at, but also change things when our clients need us too.
Two or three habits that you think have just transformed your life, empowered your life.
Two or three habits, okay. One of the habits that I think is important is using your drive time wisely. And sometimes that is silence. Sometimes that is prayer. Sometimes that's returning calls. Sometimes that's preparing myself for the next thing. So if I'm transitioning from home to work or work to home, I want to decompress from it for a minute and then get my A game back on for whatever it is so that when I walk in the door as a mom, I can give them my best and not just come home and give them my exhausted self. So that's one of the things that I really try to do and have it be a life motto. I like to lift people up. I like to tell people what they're good at and focus on that rather than tell them one thing they could have done better. I find that it's just more helpful to motivate by positivity. And as a media owner, positivity is a big deal to me because the media is. Is painted as being negative. And that's often true, but I didn't want that to be true about me. And so I like to focus on what's going right. So it's kind of like there are the women's marches, there are these things, and there are things that are wrong. But my approach is more, let's talk about what's going awesome, because there's a lot going awesome. Excellent.
What's the best investment you've ever made? Not necessarily financial, although it could be, but it could be relationship, spiritual, emotional, whatever.
The best investment is probably in my health. So I about a year ago decided I've got to spend time on me and so I started blocking out about an hour every day to either go to the gym or go running. So I've been doing running and there's lots of things that could be. But for me, that has been a great investment because I'm able to take the brain that's been going crazy all day, turn the brain off, turn the body on and go out and hit the trail and just decompress. And then I come back and my brain is ready to be turned back on. Been a good investment in my future.
Excellent. Last question. Billboard. If you were going to put a word or a phrase on a billboard after you pass on, and that's a legacy sort of a question, what would that word or phrase be?
The word that comes to mind is love. That's really. We need to love what we do. We need to love our families, we need to love our co workers. And I think we need to love even people that we don't know. We need to look at them and say, you know, you're a child, you have a mom, you have people who love you. So there's something lovable about you. And I think our communication and Twitter and everything would be more civil if we could just see that people are worthy of love.
