Chasing Financial Freedom
Chasing Financial Freedom
Ep 304 | 5 Powerful Strategies to Harmonize Career Success and Personal Wellness
Curious about the inner workings of the corporate world and the toll it takes on personal well-being? Join us as Jessica Tietjen, a remarkable workplace performance consultant and former corporate lawyer, shares her transformative journey from the high-stakes world of law to leading corporate teams. Jessica candidly discusses the impact of winning accolades like the Gallup Global Exceptional Workplace Award only to face burnout while balancing a young family during the pandemic. Listen as she reveals how a ransomware attack became the catalyst for a profound reevaluation of her life, emphasizing the crucial balance between career success and personal health.
Discover how stress management in high-pressure environments such as corporate America impacts decision-making and relationships. In this episode, we explore managers' everyday challenges, such as whether to focus on top performers or nurture underperformers, and how stress can trigger a fight-or-flight response. Jessica introduces us to the intriguing concept of the Multiple Brain Integration Technique, or Embraining, which aligns the neural networks of the head, heart, and gut. This approach offers a fresh perspective on personal and professional growth, shifting individuals from survival to thriving. Don't miss the insights and tools Jessica shares to create a harmonious balance in both personal and professional life.
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Hey guys, ryan Ament from Chase and Financial Freedom Podcast. Hope you guys are having a great day. Today on the podcast we have Jessica Tietjen. She's an exceptional workplace performance consultant, author, coach, executive, leader and lawyer. Jessica, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you, I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 1:Great. So I know it's a little bit of a wait, so thank you for waiting. But before we get into what you're doing, can you tell listeners a little about yourself?
Speaker 2:And then we'll get into what you're working on. Yeah, so my background I came out of law school, went into the corporate space, spent most of my career in that corporate space and, as often happens, if you do a good job, they just keep giving you more things to do. So I started with legal, took on HR and talent management, built that up the organization hadn't had that before Took on IT operations, a lot of the supporting functions in the organization, and I did that for a number of years until I started. I got married, I had kids and then I had a three-year-old son and nine-month-old twins.
Speaker 2:When we went into the pandemic and I survived 2020 pretty well, but it was really 2021 when we got hit with a ransomware attack and I say that was the thing that spilled my cup. It was just the thing that was just one step too far and put me into burnout. And that is really what has set me on my journey over the last few years to really understand the neuroscience of human performance, to understand how to put in place workplace practices and how to develop leaders who can really support people in the way in which it aligns with the science of how the human body actually operates and works, and so that's been like that's the quick version of my story, but yeah, it's been a journey for sure.
Speaker 1:There's a lot to unpack there. So how I'm guessing you went to law school when you were a lawyer before all this came play. What really triggered all these different items to pop up while you're? What type of law do you practice? First of all, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I went into corporate law. So I started in that space. I came in around a merger and acquisition and so I was involved in acquiring another company, then merging that company in, and then that's where I stepped into the HR talent management space, which is not uncommon. A lot of smaller organizations will have legal professionals bridge those two areas and I really fell in love with the people and performance side of things. That was really where I found my passion. Contracts wear on you over time, so really people is a whole lot more dynamic and fun area to be in. And then, as I did that, we became a Gallup Global Exceptional Workplace Award winner. We won awards for our programs. We did a lot of really great things and then that slowly then crept into other areas of the organization to lead and manage those areas and make those as effective as the areas I'd already been in.
Speaker 1:How did you balance all that while you were going through the pandemic three children and then also saying, hey, I'm going to go another route with my business life too?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so not well, which is why I ended up leaving, and actually I spent almost three months sleeping. I actually didn't know I was burnt out when I left. I thought I just needed a change, I just needed to do something different, and it wasn't until I was really hit by all the impacts of burnout that I realized and could find the language or be able to label it as such. I had learned in law school and then throughout my corporate career that the strategies that worked were just keep pushing, keep work harder, work longer, make it work, figure it out, hustle all of those strategies and eventually my body just couldn't keep up with that approach anymore. It just wasn't in balance with how the human body operates, and that was really what then sent me on this kind of expedition to try to figure out what is it that I wasn't doing?
Speaker 2:If I was doing all of the best practices that HR and Gallup and all the major consulting and thought leaders in the space were telling organizations to do, then how did I end up in the burnout state that I ended up in? And what I figured out over time is, while a lot of those practices do promote engagement and business results, they don't necessarily promote good outcomes for human beings. They don't promote good well-being outcomes. But it doesn't actually have to be that way. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. But we have to understand how to shape those work practices in a way and the way in which we interact and operate in the workplace in a way that supports both the engagement and business outcomes and the way in which we interact and operate in the workplace in a way that supports both the engagement and business outcomes and the human outcomes. And for me, I wasn't doing that. I was only focused on the engagement and the business outcomes and not necessarily the well-being and the human outcomes.
Speaker 1:How many days did you sleep for?
Speaker 2:Oh, it was at least three months where I was sleeping like 12 to 15 hours a week running call centers and everything where I've got 2000 people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know that burnout and it just it's crazy. And I know. When I got out of corporate America I jumped right into the frying pan into being an entrepreneur and I didn't sleep very well. And I've learned in this long road. I'm now 50, this year turned 50, and health is everything you got to find balance between the two. Working by all means, I agree, working hard, grinding it out, but there's a certain point in time. If your body's telling you you're tired, you got to walk away and be able to recharge your batteries, because otherwise you're just going to kill yourself literally.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and for me, my body broke down to that point right my body, especially with a twin pregnancy that took a lot out of my body anyway, and then my twins actually couldn't tolerate formula, so I had to feed them myself for over a year and a half before I could get them onto another supplementary type of milk, and so it was just. It was a lot, and what's interesting about the whole journey is now looking back, if I had understood that the messages that my body was trying to sell tell me. If I had understood what the neural networks in my human body were trying to communicate with me and listened to them and understood how to work with my body. That didn't have to happen that way. It didn't have to turn out that way. But we aren't really taught that.
Speaker 2:I went to school for eight years. I went through law school. Nobody taught me and I was an HR talent management person. If anybody should have known, it should have been me, and I take a lot of accountability for that, because I think we were missing some really key elements in the HR and the people space of what it means to really support human performance and not just for to make people feel good or to have better results for people, but because it actually then positively impacts the business. All that burnout and all that pushing and all that survival state of our bodies being in that fight flight free state wears down and negatively impacts decision makingving and communicating. It doesn't positively create results for your business. It's actually negatively impacting your business.
Speaker 1:I've always wondered and I've never dug into this, but individuals that go to medical school and the lack of sleep and the burnout that they put them through, and we're asking them to make effective decisions on us humans when they've been up for 48 hours?
Speaker 2:That's crazy around understanding the science of human decision-making and really studying the brain and having the imaging around the brain is really changing our understanding of the impacts of not just sleep Sleep's one component, and sleep is super important but also how much, how we're navigating stress and trauma and how that then gets stored in our body. And when we don't move it out, when we don't deal with it, when we don't process it, it builds up and then continues to impact us at a really high rate and high level, which is why you see so many healthcare professionals burning out of their professions. Because it's not sustainable. The human body hasn't adapted for that.
Speaker 1:I don't make this a trend, but the more I see it, either on social or YouTube or other video platforms, there's a lot more residents quitting practicing medicine and going into some other form of medicine where they're not having to be so burnt out and stressed out resident, and he said there was not a week that didn't go by, that he was working 100 plus hours a week and some of those were 48 to 72 hours in a row with no sleep. And I'm like you are operating on a human being. How can there not be some type of challenge there to where you kill that individual?
Speaker 2:unfortunately, and then that that it's a compounding problem, right, you have people in there that are struggling or dropping out of the profession, so then you don't have enough people to adequately staff the profession appropriately, and so then you end up with even worse hours and impact on patients because there isn't enough people willing to make those sacrifices or willing to go in at that level, and I think healthcare is one example. There's other examples, but we're at that precipice of really needing to rethink our human strategies and really needing to rethink how we implement our practices around people in all kinds of different professions in order to ensure that we have what we need to meet the demands of our society, of our people and the needs of people, especially in the healthcare and medical professions.
Speaker 1:Man that opened up a Pandora's box. You opened up a rabbit hole for me because that has a bunch of questions. I'm not even just medical. How about life in general? What typically happens in a space?
Speaker 1:And let's just talk corporate America, because that's our topic you typically have an 80-20 rule. 80% of your staff is really gung-ho and it's working well. That 20% is really your bottom workers that you spend the most time with. The challenge there is could you be spending more time with that staff that's performing well to get them to a higher standard, be more effective, more efficient, instead of spending more time with the individual that you have to either coach up or coach out? And that was a struggle that I always battled on it from a call center's perspective, because it was a high turnover position customer service, underwriting, collections who wants to be on the phones all day? They don't. So you have to find the right people, and to hire the right people is tough and then, like you said, it becomes a shortage and then now you don't have enough qualified or good people to take those phone calls. So now you're making your top people work overtime.
Speaker 2:And in my experience, most people come into the workforce, come into a job, wanting to do a decent job. They don't want to come in and fail, mess up, feel like they're not contributing Most people there's always an exception but for the most part people want to do a good job. What ends up happening is that when people are in or triggered by different levels of stress, when they're in high stress environments like corporate spaces, or they're triggered by high stress interactions like unhappy customers or dealing with conflict or even having to sit through performance reviews or evaluation, things like that that will trigger a fight-flight response in the body. It dysregulates their nervous system and then when you put people together especially when we had people in cubicles and big offices people are impacted by the people that are around them. So now, if one person's dysregulated, it can then spread to other people that are around them. So now, if one person's dysregulated, it can then spread to other people that are around them, because we can actually feel the nervous systems and the energies and the frequencies of people that are in the same space as us.
Speaker 2:And so what happens is then we're cut off from those neural networks in our body. We're cut off from the things that make us intelligent human beings, because our bodies are figuring out how do we survive. They're now in a triggered survival state. What do I know from all my past patterns and experiences that I need to do in this state to keep me safe? So if I'm triggered because I'm afraid I might be fired, if I'm triggered because I'm afraid I might mess up or I might make a mistake, and now I'm in a dysregulated state, I'm actually more likely to make that mistake.
Speaker 2:I'm more likely to mess up and make a bad decision or to get into conflict with someone else, and so what we end up having is a whole lot of people that are perpetually in a state of survival, and when we're in that state of survival, we're not optimized for making wise decisions, solving problems, communicating effectively, interacting with one another and building relationships All the things we want our people to be doing. They're cut off from the intelligence that's in their body that makes them capable of doing that. And so, instead of we've got to retrain people's bodies to, instead of, be focusing on how do I survive, how do I react in response to stress and in my environment to survive to, how do I put in place the practices that allow me to respond consciously in order to thrive. That respond consciously in order for me to make those wiser decisions, solve problems, communicate effectively all of the things we want our people to be doing.
Speaker 1:A couple of questions in there because we can go deep there. Is it a mindset issue? Where does it start? Because I know when you think negatively, unfortunately you track negative thoughts. That's just law of attraction, however you want to look at that. But once you're in that cycle, does it start out from a mindset perspective? Is the person I guess there's so many things about I can ask are they onboarded correctly, are they given the right tools, do they have the training? But the other thing is, do they have the ability to do the job? So I guess there's a lot of questions in there. I guess I'll back up and I'll start with the easy one Mindset. Where does this all play in this aspect?
Speaker 2:So the way that I explain this is a lot of people focus really heavily on mindset and mindset's important, but mindset's only one component. So we have neural networks in our head brain which everybody thinks of, but we also have neural networks in our heart and in our gut and you might have heard of like the gut brain connection or heart math talks a lot about. There's the HeartMath Institute's done a lot of research around the neural networks in our heart and actually only 20% of the communications in our body come down from our head to our body. 80% are coming up from our body to our head brain, and so, while shifting mindset is helpful, it really can only go so far and if you think about it, it's really logical, right? Have you ever known how to do something, why it's important to do it, what it is you're supposed to do, but you still just couldn't get yourself to do it? Just knowing it isn't enough. We have to actually embody it, and most of the things we do focuses on the head, and so mindset's helpful. It's helpful to shift your mindset, but your mindset isn't going to shift your body, so you actually really have to link up all of those neural networks together so that you can apply them and get into that state.
Speaker 2:But what I would even go is one step back from that. Is you started to get into like kind of all the things that could go wrong or all the things that could trigger somebody. If you were to try to fix all those, it would take. It could take a lot right it would. That would be a lot of potential challenges you'd have to overcome, but one of the things that's the simplest things people can do is just teach people how to regulate and balance themselves in response to a reaction. So when I feel myself go into a fight flight free state, if I can learn to identify that, if I can learn to identify I'm triggered, I'm flooded, there's emotions, I'm shutting down, whatever your reaction is, then I can start to learn how to then balance. That and that's the first, easiest step is okay. If I can teach people how to regulate and how to get into balance, that brings those neural networks back, at least back online so that we can make better decisions and figure out how to access them and move forward in a more effective way.
Speaker 1:And I'm presuming you actually can help with that and be able to channel that. So question what would? If people are struggling and they're going through this part of life but also mindset is just not getting them there, what would be three nuggets you could share with them today that they potentially could start working on to help them through this time?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the first is and it's free, it's super simple, it's super easy the fastest way to regulate and balance your nervous system is two and a half minutes of balanced breathing. So six counts in, six counts out, even for two and a half minutes. That will reset your nervous system. You'll actually feel your body shift. You'll feel that energy shift. You can even use this if you have kids. I make my kids do this now. If everybody's dysregulated and melting down, we're going to have a family breathing session before we move forward, before we do anything. So that's a way to get regulated and into balance. It's free, it's easy, it's the fastest first thing. So that's number one. Number two is, once you're regulated, linking up those neural networks.
Speaker 2:And so when I say that, what I mean is getting connected to and just spending 30 seconds even it doesn't have to be long to connect to the networks in your heart, in your gut and in your head brain, which is your emotion, your feeling At its highest expression, it's compassion. So get connected with that sense of compassion that you have for yourself and others With your head, brain. You want to connect with your creativity. That's where your head's working at its best, it's really creative. So connecting in with that creativity of our mind and its ability to think, to solve problems, to understand the meaning of things. And then to the courage of your gut, so connecting into the courage of your gut, who is responsible for helping us take action, keep us safe and maintaining our authentic, our core identity. So connecting with that courageous sense of self or that courageous gut, intuition and identity that we have. And then when you do that, if you take that minute or two to connect those, you're going to put yourself into a better state for making a decision, for solving problems, etc.
Speaker 2:And then the last thing I would say is that when you're stuck, when that doesn't work, when you want to make a change but you can't, then it's figuring out what is it that's blocking you. And there's all kinds of blocks and constraints that we develop because of our past patterns, because of how we've lived our lives, because of our ways of thinking, feeling and behaving that keep us stuck, that keep us from making change in our lives. And if you can identify what that is, if you can look at, okay, what's the root of this? What is it I'm really thinking? What is it I'm really feeling? What is it that's coming up, noticing where that is in your body. That is going to help you to then figure out how you might be able to move it or how you might be able to shift it.
Speaker 1:We could probably have a three-hour conversation on this. There's just so much that's in there. I'm with you. It's more than mindset and I know I like the breathing. I've heard of that, never tried it, but I'm going to try that. That's one big thing that I will do. Do you think everybody can actually connect inside? I call it a warrior mentality, a stronger side of you. Do you think everybody has that in them to be able to do that?
Speaker 2:In my experience yes, in my experience that we're born with those neural networks.
Speaker 2:They are in there and it is a matter of what gets in the way.
Speaker 2:Typically is that somebody's had some sort of trauma, and I don't necessarily mean like big, huge traumas, but when we're children, things that are small can be imprinted on us as traumas, even though they're not what necessarily an adult would think of as a trauma.
Speaker 2:And it's those things, those residual patterns, that get built in there. Because as a kid, in order to survive recess, for example, if I'm going to survive recess and I'm getting bullied or picked on and my way of surviving is to shut down, is to not feel my feelings, is to not be in my body, to just push away from it, and I keep that pattern throughout my life. Now that becomes a block for me that prevents me from being courageous, that prevents me from stepping into challenging situations, because I've got that pattern. So most of the time it's these early life patterns that we have to eliminate out of our bodies, that we have to reprocess and move through our bodies, and then, once we do, people have so much more capacity and intelligence and capability to perform. I would venture to argue that most people are performing at a very small percentage of what they're actually capable of being able to do because they're so constricted by these patterns that have gotten embedded in their bodies, by these patterns that have gotten embedded in their bodies.
Speaker 1:So I'm guessing that's something you work on initially when you bring a client on is to be able to get through that and understand what's holding them back from earlier in their lives.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, and it's not necessarily that we have to get into what that situation is.
Speaker 2:It's not therapy, right, we don't have to go through that situation, but what I found and I've got senior leaders who will things that are preventing them from, say, meeting with their teams regularly have to do with something that very early in life, a pattern that they developed around their identity and who they are, and when we can rewire that, when we can reconnect their neural networks. And what we do or what I do, that's a little bit different is we focus on inner wisdom or insight. So what does your intelligence tell you need to do to move through this? What is your neural networks have to communicate, and then that is always the best next step for people. So we work with both individuals and leaders in particular, and then organizations, on how to put in those practices so that they are not triggering people every day, so that they're not putting people in fight, flight, freeze. And then how do you develop those skill sets in people so that everybody is aware of and making those shifts to be able to perform at their best every day?
Speaker 1:I love it. We're coming to the bottom of the hour, so I'll have a couple more questions and we'll have to wrap it up. So I'm guessing and I'll ask the question you are working with clients nationwide.
Speaker 2:Yes, yep, nationwide.
Speaker 1:Is everything remote? I'm guessing too.
Speaker 2:Everything is remote. We do everything virtually Yep.
Speaker 1:Okay, any in-person stuff at all, or is it just all remote?
Speaker 2:So we can do in-person work, but my approach is a transformative approach, which means that it requires it's not a one and done, it's not a come and do this training that then doesn't everybody forgets in 10 days. So it's I will come in person if we're going to work through something in particular or bring some sort of value. But our programs are really meant to create longer term transformation which happens over time, versus all at once.
Speaker 1:Okay, and if somebody is interested in working with you, where's the best place for them to reach out?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you can reach out on our website, evolvingtoexceptionalcom, or I'm on all the social media channels as Jessica, teej and JD, so you can find me on any social media channel as well, if you want to find some of this information and some of the resources around this.
Speaker 1:Great. What I'll do is I'll put a link to your website and your social in the actual show notes so people can get ahold of you. Thank you for coming on. I love what you're doing. It's a different approach that I think is needed in this space because, like me, I only think mindset. Now you've brought up a whole nother aspect. I'm like, oh, I got to start reading on this. So, by the way, before we go, are there any good books that you potentially could share, that people could read up on what we've discussed today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there is a book called Embraining and it's called Multiple Brain Integration Technique, which is the approach that we use or that we've incorporated, and it was based on a bunch of research done by some Australian folks that did behavioral modeling, so that it's called Embraining and it's a really it's a powerful approach if you want to read into it.
Speaker 1:Cool, I will find it and put a link in the show notes, so that might be something I'm doing. So thank you for coming on, thank you for sharing and it was a great conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, same here. Thank you for having me.
