“All the things I was afraid of are things I'm good at now.” - Jen Liddy
This Week on The Uplifters
Jen Liddy was really great at teaching but began to feel like she wasn’t making the impact she wanted to. The students were distracted by their phones and the administrative work was tedious and exhausting. But the voice in her head in the shower every morning, asking if she should just cancel class for the day, just couldn’t be ignored any longer. She had a lot invested in her teaching job (her lesson plans, her retirement, her two master’s degrees) and part of her wondered if all of that was ever going to be of any use again.
Ten years later, she has put all that she invested in her former career, and her natural skills, to use teaching experts how to harness their brilliance and their language so that their audience can hear them. These people want to be in the room with her and want to grow their audience online. This new career is everything she ever could have wished for about teaching.
She finally learned to stop downplaying and devaluing what came easy to her and learned to think of it as her magic instead.
In this episode you’ll learn:
How to be open to opportunity even though you may feel you are not qualified to take advantage of it. You can always learn new skills.
How to ask yourself if what you’re doing feels good to you
How to stop putting yourself second, third, or fourth
Jen was nominated for The Uplifters by
from episode Episode 6Learn more about the wonderful Jen here!
Messy Transcript
Aransas Savas:
Welcome to the Uplifters podcast. I'm your host, Aransas Savas, and you just heard the wonderful Julie Hughes from one of our earlier episodes introducing Jen Liddy. So Jen, 10 years ago, was cruising along as a teacher and somehow decided that she was gonna leave this world that was familiar and stable and predictable. And she was gonna go off and start her own business. And in her story, we'll hear what it was like to walk into totally foreign territory and try to build a new world and a new life for herself and all the ups and downs that come along with it. So, Jen, welcome. Thank you for being on the Uplifters.
Jen Liddy:
I'm so excited to be here, Aransas. It's fun to meet you too.
Aransas Savas:
So let's start with your teaching. What kind of teaching were you doing?
Jen Liddy:
I was a high school English teacher. I also taught at the college level. I taught writing, literature, and personal development, actually, at the college level, which was really fun because I taught at a community college where these were students who had very little background in how to be successful students. They had come from abusive backgrounds, for the most part, poverty. So being a student wasn't second nature to them. So the... college had this like brilliant idea to bring in this personal development thing. And we're talking like 2008, 2009 before it really had exploded in the mainstream. So I loved teaching high schoolers, but I also loved teaching kind of 13th and 14th graders because they were on the cusp of adulthood and they really wanted to be there for the most part. So I had taught. I mean, it feels like I taught for 317 years, but when it comes down to it, I started teaching in 1999, and I ultimately left in 2007, right before my son was born. I went back for a little bit in the mid 2000s. And so I probably have a total of 18 years under my belt as a teacher.
Aransas Savas:
Wow, that's a lot of experience.
Aransas Savas:
And one of the great things about being a teacher is there are always teaching jobs.
Jen Liddy:
Right, yeah. So, there are a lot of great things about being a teacher. My brain works that way. And I loved teaching. And I would say if it weren't for the grading, which eventually is a big part of what wore me out. Because I was an English teacher, so I'm grading essays, research papers, and I would knock myself in the head like, why did I assign another research paper? But if it wasn't for the grading, I probably wouldn't have left. But then this other thing happened. Along 2007, which was smartphones came out. And before that, my students would have their hands under their desk with their phones. Remember flip phones where you'd have to go like, H-I-J, like you'd be like, you know, doing the numbers to get the letters that you wanted. And they could do it under the desk. But now with smartphones, they were just like flat out distracted and always had their phones out. And I had my son in 2007. I only have one son, one child, and he's... now 16, and I just kind of used that as, like I couldn't go back, I just, I couldn't go back and do it anymore. Until he got, he turned, you know, until he was like three, four, five, and then I went back. But it was a different game when I went back, from leaving in 2007 and going back in like 2009, 2010, it had really, really changed. And that's part of the story that made me decide, like, I can't do this anymore. Because teaching, I would say is like breathing to me. It's very natural, it's fun, it's interesting, it's always different. I was good at it and I, you know, like I can really say that confidently, but it eventually burned me out and that's part of why I left.
Aransas Savas:
And is it fair to say that the burnout was caused? I mean, yes, there was the gratings of that sort of administrative work that did not light up your soul.
Jen Liddy:
Right.
Aransas Savas:
But then it was also just the lack of engagement from the students.
Jen Liddy:
That was a big thing. It was people who didn't really want to be in the room. And there was an exhaustion. I remember distinctly, and this was, I had gotten out of teaching high school full time, and I was only teaching at the college level part time at this point. And we had gotten to the end of a semester. It was December. We were about to have our final paper coming in next week, and I'm still teaching. thesis statements, which is the very first thing that you learn and the thing that you should get before you can write anything. And here we are four months in and I actually remember saying to them, I have tapped danced for you long enough and you don't care enough to take this and make it work for you. You don't care to make it, it's not important to you to have your ideas understood. And if you don't care about that. I can't make you care about that. And I remember the silence in the classroom. They looked at me like nobody had ever spoken to them like that before. Because to me, it wasn't about the grades. It was about, don't you want to be understood? Don't you want people to hear your ideas and hear your voice? And they just couldn't care about it because they were really only like 17, 18, 19, 20, right, for the most part.
Aransas Savas:
And they were distracted.
Jen Liddy:
they were distracted. Remember too, that the particular college I taught at, these were students who didn't really, being a student wasn't their top priority. They hadn't had a lot of experience being a great student. So they didn't probably understand the depth that an education could, how far it could bring them. There were a lot of things going on. And at the end of that semester, I was like, I can't stand up here doing my shtick and working so hard for people that just. don't really give a damn. That was December 2013 at that point.
Aransas Savas:
Wow. And a lot has changed in those 10 years, it sounds like. And you, like so many uplifters, are someone who, it sounds like, is highly motivated by impact.
Jen Liddy:
Yes.
Aransas Savas:
And that theme has come up already a few times in your storytelling. And I think that's true for so many of us who live service-oriented lives.
Jen Liddy:
Mm-hmm.
Aransas Savas:
we want that to be on purpose and impactful. And so when it feels like it's just getting resisted or it's not the right environment for it, it's really hard to stay motivated and energized by
Jen Liddy:
Yes.
Aransas Savas:
that purpose-led work.
Jen Liddy:
Especially when it was a part-time gig that I had to drive a really long way to do. I had to put my son in daycare to do it. There were a lot of things that I was doing on a personal level to make it happen. I wasn't doing it for the money. I could have done a lot of other things for more money. I was doing it because I love teaching. I knew I could help people. And these were students who were just like, they're kind of at risk students. They really needed somebody who could meet them where they were. And I was good at all of those things. But yes, I felt eventually like I wasn't making an impact. And I remember so, so clearly being in the shower, you know, it would be like, okay, I'm lathering up my hair, I'm shampooing, I'm like, do I go in today? Do I just cancel class today? If I cancel class, what does it matter? Do they care? Does the administration care? And after enough conversations like that with yourself, you start to realize something's wrong here. If you're constantly worrying about or doing the mental gymnastics in your mind about, I don't really want to do this. How can I get out of this? That's the tap that, hey, something's here to pay attention to.
Aransas Savas:
Yes, I agree. That I bucket as low engagement, right? And
Jen Liddy:
Yeah.
Aransas Savas:
we all go through periods in our lives where for various reasons, we feel disengaged from our purpose work or impact.
Aransas Savas:
And I work with so many teachers as clients. And so many of them are looking at career changes.
Aransas Savas:
And I think it's largely because of some of the factors that you're talking about here, a feeling unsupported, feeling that there's more bureaucracy and administrative work.
Aransas Savas:
And after a while, if we're giving, and we're not receiving back a sense of satisfaction and impact and purpose and energy. We run out. We feel depleted and exhausted.
Jen Liddy:
Yeah.
Aransas Savas:
And then it's really exhausting to tap into it. And like you said, in your case, there's all this other friction, right? So there's always friction and fuel. And impact is fuel.
Jen Liddy:
Mm-hmm. I remember when I was deciding to leave my teaching job at the high school level, so that was like a full-time job. I had been there a long time. I had a good reputation. Everybody knew me. It was a small school. And I remember my teacher friends saying, your salary, how can you give up your retirement, how can you give up everything you've sunk in? Not to mention the two master's degrees I have, right? Not to mention the years of lesson plans I've created. So I think that it's really easy to ignore the tap on your shoulder because you've got so many sunk costs already and you know how to navigate the problems and then it's a really hard conversation with yourself to have to say, is this really so bad that I'm willing to give up all of those, you know, all of those things I've already done and accomplished and achieved for something I have no idea what's next? And I did it. I did not know what was next. Um, but that, that inner voice, that little intuition that was like tapping on my every, I mean, every time I would take a shower before class, I'd be thinking about, can I just cancel today? That's like a big red flag for me.
Aransas Savas:
Yeah. And I think that sunk cost fallacy is one that stops a lot of us
Aransas Savas:
from making progress. And so I love that you brought that up because we feel like, well, I'm already this far in. I guess I better keep going.
Jen Liddy:
Exactly. Do you know how much getting those two masters degrees cost me? Right? Of course.
Aransas Savas:
And I suspect as we hear about what you're doing now, those two masters are serving you in new ways.
Jen Liddy:
They are, and I was gonna talk about that, but I didn't think they ever would serve me again. So I have a master's degree in teaching, specifically English, K through, seven through 12, and then I have another degree in adult literacy. And I just never thought, where are these gonna ever come in again? I'm gonna fast forward, we can go back and dabble, but to fast forward to where I am now, I basically teach experts how to kind of, harness their brilliance and harness their language so that their audience can hear them. So these are people who actually want to be in the room with me who are getting paid as experts and they want to grow their audience online, but they speak in a way that they don't understand how to do marketing in a way that feels good for them. They're not using the language that their audience resonates with all of that stuff. I could not have known in 2013 that in 2023, I would be using everything that I learned. and all of my natural skills, but in an online forum where I never have to grade another shitty Macbeth essay ever again, and nobody's coming in to observe how I'm doing in my classroom management style. It's pretty much everything I ever could have wished for about teaching, but I had no idea it was going to take 10 years to get me here.
Aransas Savas:
Okay, so I love that fast forward, but tell me about the 10 years in between. How did you get to this place?
Aransas Savas:
I want to say how grateful I am that you acknowledge that it's messy? Because I will tell you, I left an 18 year corporate job where I had a really wonderful career. And I'd gotten to that place where I felt depleted and drained and really needed to be reinvigorated. And so I started off to do my own thing. I'm three years in, it's an amazing three years. I have made, I won't even say mistakes because none of them like killed me.
Aransas Savas:
I can't imagine what I will know in 10 years. And so I wanna learn everything I can from you about the last 10 years to maybe fast track some of my own
Jen Liddy:
to give some good salient points. The first thing that I did was, I had been on the cusp of connecting with a friend who had her own fitness studio. And she really needed some kind of back end support. She was the face, she was the brilliant, like, you know, the idea person. I stepped in and became the operations person and the communications person. And we, along with a third partner, wound up building a brick and mortar fitness studio. It was like 9,000 square feet. And we built it kind of out of nothing. And I had, I just really want everybody to hear, I had no business experience. I was, I'm putting this in air quotes, I was just a teacher and I really struggled with a lot of imposter syndrome. Like Who the hell are you to be doing this? You're just a teacher. You should be in the classroom. You should be working with ninth graders, right? So there was all of this like invisible stuff, but then there was the business stuff to learn. And so we just learned by bumping into brick walls and figuring things out. So that business was really exciting and fun for a long, long time and we built it. I probably was working between 60 and 70 hours a week. We were making enough cover all of our costs, we were not making enough to pay ourselves anything. So eventually I was working and making no money. That's not eventually, essentially I was working and making no money. Eventually I woke up again with that tapping like, hello, what are you doing? Because now fast forward about three years in and the, remember you talked before about the fuel? For Impact, the fuel had just been the excitement for so long of building this thing and creating a community and making a business. I remember walking up the stairs at one point and going, this is my space, we made this. We did this out of nothing, it's incredible. And at the same time, a lot of what was taking the brunt of it was my family. I have a very easygoing husband who is wonderful. I only have one child, so I did have a lot of privilege in that way. But I was just not around. I was always at the studio, always, you know, I would get there for the 530 in the morning class and I would come home around 7, 730 at night with still with work to do. And you can do that for a while, but I was, let's see, 43 at the time. And eventually I turned 46 and 47. I'm like, what am I doing? I can't sustain this. anymore and so I had to have a hard conversation with my partners that I need to go back to work and make some money for the future of my family. I can't keep doing this. And there were a lot of signs along the way. I will say again signs I ignored just like I ignored those you know the shower gods who were tapping on my shoulder. I learned a lot about marketing that I and again we're talking like 20. 13 to 2016 is when I was really doing this. I had to learn about marketing, and that was a different time for marketing than it is now. I had to learn about how to communicate, how to manage people, how to put systems together. All of those things eventually turned into what I became really, really good at. All the things I was afraid of are things I'm good at now. and can teach other people how to do. I think this is why part of my platform as a content and copy consultant is that it is so important for people to learn how to do things in their business in a way that works for them and that feels good to them. Because a lot of what I learned during that time, 2013 to 2016, 17, especially online business strategies, like there's a lot of yuckiness out there and there's a lot of things that that throw people right out of their integrity. And that was questioned a lot for me. Is this an integrity? Can I do this? Can I do this and feel good about it? And it's such a big part of who I am now when I guide other people is it has to feel good for you or else, A, you can't sustain it and your audience can smell it a mile away. But you can't keep it up if it's just not serving you anymore.
Aransas Savas:
I also think that we invent resistance when we are out of integrity in our work.
Jen Liddy:
What do you mean by that?
Aransas Savas:
we start to lean out just
Jen Liddy:
Hmm.
Aransas Savas:
subtly. We may look like, we may believe that we are all in, but if it's out of integrity, we just sort of subtly lean back and curl away from it. Maybe we talk about it less.
Jen Liddy:
Yep.
Aransas Savas:
we are in integrity and we are fully in, and it may be scary, but It's so, I agree with you, just absolutely essential to truly, honestly, authentically believe in what we're doing if we want to fully engage in it, if we want to put the best of ourselves. And I don't mean fully engage like 70 hours a week.
Jen Liddy:
No.
Aransas Savas:
I just mean honestly lean in
Jen Liddy:
Yeah.
Aransas Savas:
with our gifts.
Jen Liddy:
Well, that leads me to another thing, because you said, what are the things to learn? When I keep putting air quotes around, I'm just a teacher, that impacts me.
Jen Liddy:
at the table. That impacts what I think I deserve. I really thought that I wasn't bringing very much to the table. I really thought that I didn't quite deserve to get paid. It's okay if I'm not getting paid. It's fine. Like my husband makes enough money that our family can live. I just put myself second, third, or fourth all along the way. And that was because I didn't have a belief that I was really bringing any of my talents. I couldn't see it at the time, but I could not meld how all of my gifts as a teacher and an educator worked in a business. And now I see all of it. It's so clear to me how it all just meshes together. I couldn't give myself that gift at that time.
Aransas Savas:
the breadcrumbs of, oh, I'm pretty good at this. And oh, that was impactful. That was easy for me.
Aransas Savas:
feeling for me. It's like the things that people are like, wow, you can do that. And you're like, yeah, that's easy. To me, those are those little magic nuggets, those moments.
Jen Liddy:
Yes.
Aransas Savas:
where you start to find out what your gifts really are.
Jen Liddy:
What I have found, and I'm curious about your experience too, is women, when something is easy for them, they tend to downplay it. That's no big deal. It's not that important because it's easy. But actually because it's easy, that is your magical, that's your magic basically.
Aransas Savas:
Do that all the time.
Jen Liddy:
Do more of that. That's the thing that other people can't do.
Aransas Savas:
Correct, especially if you enjoy it.
Jen Liddy:
Yes, yes. And it took me, so all of the things that we're talking about, I can speak about them clearly now, but at the time, I don't even know that I knew I had such self doubt or that I didn't belong at the table or that I couldn't see my skills. I just had my nose to the grindstone and was taking care of shit, like just taking care of business, getting it done. And now I have the privilege of being able to say like, oh, all of these skills worked beautifully. And I can see now that I had so much. But whether I didn't have a coach or somebody to guide me or I didn't know, I just hope that the people listening can think about the things that come easily to them and stop downplaying it and stop saying, I shouldn't be rewarded for that because it's easy and start saying, that's the thing that makes me magical because it's not easy for everybody.
Aransas Savas:
Yes, yes, yes. I mean, like I said, I spent 20 years in a large organization working on global projects with all of these Ivy League MBAs.
Jen Liddy:
I think we spend a lot of our lives, I'm a Gen Xer, so I spent my whole life trying to fit into what everybody else looked like and was doing and weighed and all of the, I mean, the way that I see Gen Zers growing up now, those young women seem to be really stepping out and are willing to not look like other people and are willing and excited to do things differently. The way I grew up, it just wasn't like that. You were supposed to look like everybody else. So to say, oh, something that's easy for me, I just don't think it would be easy for a Gen Xer to find a lot of value in that.
Aransas Savas:
Yeah, I think you're right. It's really hard to shift that conditioning. And that's why I think stories like yours are so important because it's an opportunity to say, huh, let me sit with that for a second.
Aransas Savas:
What have I done that's different in the rooms that I'm in?
Aransas Savas:
How might that be of value?
Jen Liddy:
I had this one experience that showed me this. I was 35 when I'm about to tell you the thing that happened that finally taught me that, 35. I was sitting in a group with my colleagues in the high school. There were 18 of us total. They were all really freaking smart people of all ages. And, but they were all kind of those thinkers like the swirly brilliant visionary thinkers, big thinkers. I am not that. I am a tactical, linear, get it done, put things together, synthesizer type of person. That's how my brain is more that way. But I pair up really nicely with those thinkers. But I didn't know that at the time. So we're sitting in another faculty planning session where 18 of us are throwing ideas up. And I am inwardly dying because I'm like, this is gonna be another hour and a half of idea generation that's gonna go nowhere and nobody's ever gonna take care of it. So I was like, screw this. I stood up in the middle of the meeting and I was only there for a few months at this point. So I was new and I was terrified. I stood up, I had my Sharpies in different colors and I started taking their ideas that they had thrown up on the board and sorting them and ranking them and putting them in ladders so that they could see how. this idea would lead to this idea, and then this idea would lead to this action, and this action would lead to this outcome. And I was terrified because it's that thing of like, I'm not smart like they're smart, but I'm smart like this. But because I did it like it was breathing, I didn't think it meant I was smart. So they stop talking, they're watching me do this and all the color coding, and they're watching it, and they're like, where have you been our whole life? And in that moment, I was 30 freaking five years old before I realized like, oh, I belong in the room. I'm just a different kind of smart than all of you. I have put so much value on your brilliant ideas and your ideation and your swirl and your vision because I don't have that, right? Like that's what I thought was valuable because I don't have it.
Aransas Savas:
And you have to have both to get anything done.
Jen Liddy:
Yes, of course. So what I'm not saying is I'm the brilliant one, I'm the right one. I'm saying together
Aransas Savas:
get a boatload done. But it is, I think about this all the time, so it's so funny that you bring it up. It is a balancing, I feel like. And we can get very overbalanced in one or the other and then feel imbalanced.
Aransas Savas:
And so it is, I think, a conscious choice to surround ourselves with people who aren't just like us, who don't
Jen Liddy:
Seek those people out. Which is why it's interesting when I think about my clients, my clients are those idea waterfall people. Ideas, I will say, almost plague them. They just can't get out of the way of the deluge, right? And so MyBrilliance is sorting through that, making it into a linear plan that fits your specific needs. And let's make it a reality. But it's so interesting. All of these little. things that happened along the way bring me here to 2023, where I'm really like, you know, I lean into this is what this is what I am. I don't pretend to be an idea person. You don't need me to be an idea person. You need me to be the action person.
Aransas Savas:
Right. And if you need an idea person, let me refer you to someone.
Jen Liddy:
I have a million of them I can refer you to. Right? Right. So, I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going
Aransas Savas:
So when you started your business, what sort of vision did you hold for yourself in the next chapter?
Jen Liddy:
Well, because in the fitness business, I had been at the front desk so much, I had gotten to know almost everybody in our fitness community. And a lot of the women who were mostly our clients, I'm sorry, most of our clients were women. So they're chatty and I would hear them at the front desk or while they're putting their shoes on or whatever. And I realized a lot of them were entrepreneurial, but they weren't quite taking action on their businesses because they were all stuck up in their head. first foray after I left was to work with those people and offer to support them in kind of taking action. And I called myself at that point an accountability coach and they really wanted accountability. And so I would just basically help them create systems or get clarity. And it was that morphed into kind of general business coaching over the years. So I went through this like 2017, 2018 at the end of 2019. I said to my business coach, I really, my favorite part of doing business coaching is the marketing and content piece because of course it's my word nerd, just shows right up and I can pull your words out of your head and make them sound awesome and then I can help you put content out into the world. So at the end of 2019, we're moving into a content explosion, but I don't really quite know that it's happening yet. And I remember saying, can I just? be a content person. Now of course just content people are everywhere, content copy people are everywhere. But at that point I was really scared just to limit myself. And so she was like, yes of course you can. Of course then four months later, this is December 2019, March 2020, the world explodes and everybody needs to learn how to do online content. And so that was the year that I had my biggest, my biggest at that point. revenue year and I really was just focusing on content and copy and messaging and I've honed it even deeper over the past three years. I'm still learning lessons about not overworking, not overdoing, but I did apply some of the lessons that we talked about earlier about like doing it in a way that feels good to you. For example, 2020 was the year that TikTok blew up. And everybody was lip syncing and dancing and pointing. And I was not having any of it. I was like, I am not a performer. That's not my personality. If you want to do that, that's fine. But I'm also not going to co-opt somebody else's lyrics and lip sync and edit to their words. I was not having it. And I just kind of stood my ground for three years about it. And this year, finally, we get a reprieve. That's not the kind of content that people really want anymore. The other thing was like I talked about I talked to entrepreneurs in general right and now I'm really at the point where I'm talking to women experts women service providers women coaches in the Wellness and health industries, so I'm really just getting narrower and narrower Because it's ironic for this doesn't work for everybody And I'm not going to pretend that it does but the more that you can be specific and a specialist in your field the more people are going to direct others to you. So I have resisted that for a long time, but my favorite clients are the ones who help other people heal and transform. They just don't know how to talk in an online marketing kind of way, in a way that feels good to them. So those are some of the lessons I learned in my previous jobs that I've just really leaned into, especially in your 50s. I'm like, I just don't... I actually can't wait for my sixties and seventies because I, if I don't give a shit as much as I don't give a shit in the, in my fifties, like I'm excited for the freedom that comes in my sixties and seventies, but I'm just trying to really lean into like doing what, what I enjoy doing. And that's all I want to do.
Aransas Savas:
and I got to have a lot of impact with people I was working with. However, it's difficult. It's so much easier when we get specific about who it is we're talking to because as you said, it's easier for the people who need you and your gifts to find you and your gifts because it's recognizable.
Jen Liddy:
The other thing about that, and I know this isn't an entrepreneurial podcast, but I think about all the people that I work with. Copy and content, that's my thing. I don't use the word messaging, but essentially that's what it is. If I only worked with nonprofits, I would have the system that worked specifically for nonprofits. I would know their jargon. I would know their style. I can get so
Jen Liddy:
Exactly. And I can do it much more quickly. versus like, okay, you're a product provider, you're an online course creator, you're a nonprofit, you're a holistic health coach. I can help all of you, but it will take me a little bit longer. It's almost like that idea of toggling between, things to do, when you're just focused on one thing, you can get more done. I have found for me, the way my brain works, if I'm really honed in on one person, one type of person in one type of industry, I can work a lot faster. And for me, we talked before about impact that fuels you. That fuels me because I'm making a better impact, but also I'm working a lot less hard. And
Jen Liddy:
that's kind of where I am at this point. I would never work 70 hours a week. I would hope I would never have to do that again. That would be a huge boundary for me. And at that point, I didn't have those boundaries that I have had. I guess I would say I have to have them now because it's so easy for me to overwork and overdo.
Aransas Savas:
of impact. So we've talked about you as a business woman, we've talked about you as a woman, as a person who is doing this work. How do you take care of yourself?
Jen Liddy:
I have a therapist who is a tapping therapist and
Aransas Savas:
EFT.
Jen Liddy:
EFT. But when I found her, I was kind of all talked out. I couldn't do any more talk therapy. But I knew that everything I wanted was on the other side of some really deep-seated garbage, and I knew it was all subconscious. So a lot of my self-care or how I take care of myself is... Because self-care always sounds like I'm getting manicures, and that's not my self-care. Is subconscious kind of rewiring work that comes from just stuff I know that my body is holding onto from childhood or from my teens and 20s and 30s or 40s? And so my therapist is a tapping therapist. I work with a woman who does subconscious rewiring. She creates hypnosis that are specifically designed for my specific needs. And I do a lot of spiritual healing work. So like energy medicine stuff, I am not versed in it at all, but I really lean into it and just go with it. And it is a lot of the subconscious stuff that I know is, because I did talk therapy since I was 20 and my parents got divorced. And so there's every week I get on the call with my therapist, she's in Connecticut and I'm in New York. And I'm like, How is there still stuff to talk about? I'm 50 freakin three years old. How is there another layer? She's like there's always another layer Jen
Aransas Savas:
Just like everything else we've talked about, isn't that funny, right?
Aransas Savas:
That there's always another lesson. There's always another layer.
Jen Liddy:
And you know what else, this is funny, when I'm thinking about what I really do, I rest a lot, that I never was good at resting, I was never good at napping. Again, I'm curious if other Gen Xers listening relate to this, but there's always this idea of doing, there's doing, doing. And I did, did. And I found when I got into my 50s, especially because that's when COVID hit, I had long haul COVID, and I just had to kind of acquiesce to the rest that my body needed. And I have learned that a lot of the rest that I need is just like, it's kind of for healing. So I don't over schedule myself anymore. I don't say yes to things I don't want to say like hell yes to. I don't talk myself into things and I generally won't go to something if I feel obligated for it. So those are other ways that I take care of myself. And again, that's been a lot of relearning. Like what does it really mean and what does that look like? But a lot of just rest.
Aransas Savas:
What does rest look like?
Jen Liddy:
It looks, it can look boring. And if you're a person who loves like activity and action and input and fun, what I'm about to tell you sounds like I'm the most boring person on the earth, which I really might be, but like laying in the hammock or taking a nap, I'm a big like Saturday afternoon napper. It means not going to, not like moving heaven and earth to go to like a networking event when I really just wanna lay on the bed and watch, you know, season five of Sex and the City or something like that, again for the 18th time. Um, it, it means it mostly for me, it means not overdoing laying around sometimes.
Aransas Savas:
Mm-hmm. And I think that helps to be specific about it. And when we share these things, I think we just create a fuller picture for people about what the possibilities and the options are. So I think it's useful stuff to talk about. Ha
Jen Liddy:
Well, I'm so glad you said that because I'm sitting here thinking like, Oh my God, I'm feeling kind of embarrassed about how much I'm talking about being lazy and resting. I'm going to have to bring this up with my therapist because
Aransas Savas:
ha
Jen Liddy:
there's clearly some more junk here that I need to let go of about feeling
Aransas Savas:
I'm going to go look into that a little further because
Jen Liddy:
Yeah.
Aransas Savas:
I have this hunch that maybe I'm doing all right.
Jen Liddy:
Right, it's working for me. And nobody in my house is complaining, so it's just this little inner mean girl that I have to talk about with my therapist next week. Ha ha ha.
Aransas Savas:
Okay, so you just brought up one of my favorite things to talk about here.
Jen Liddy:
Okay.
Aransas Savas:
What you're alluding to there is, you said, nobody in my family's complaining. So that is a measure of success for you.
Jen Liddy:
Mm-hmm.
Aransas Savas:
You know things are going well when your family's not like, Jen, you're never here. You're always working. And I think we all have measures of success and we rarely name and measure them.
Jen Liddy:
Mmm.
Aransas Savas:
And so one of the things I often do with clients is we over the course sometimes of a few weeks really get clear on like, how do you know things are going well? And then we measure them and we say like, oh, well, that was an eight this week,
Jen Liddy:
Right,
Aransas Savas:
that was a
Jen Liddy:
right.
Aransas Savas:
six. So what can we learn from this? So I'm curious. What you would say are your measures of success?
Jen Liddy:
It's really funny that I said nobody in my house is complaining because nobody in my house ever complains. I don't have a husband who's needy or complaining. I don't have a kid who's needy or complaining. Even when I was working 70 hours a week, nobody ever said to me, you're never home. They just kind of took care of it and we have a system and it worked. The only person saying these horrible things to me is me.
Aransas Savas:
Yeah.
Jen Liddy:
And so when I say nobody's complaining, well, really nobody is complaining, but the only one who would be the inner mean girl inside my head going, you know, you're not doing enough. You're living a boring life. Other people are out there like, you know, doing something more fun. That's the, that's the measure of success. When I can just say this is exactly what I want to be doing and I don't feel bad that I'm missing out on anything else. That's when I know I have succeeded.
Aransas Savas:
And if you were to turn that into a metric, would you call it inner peace
Jen Liddy:
Hmm
Aransas Savas:
or positive self-talk? What would you call it?
Jen Liddy:
It has something to do with just acceptance. Like just fully accepting and liking my choices without comparing them to somebody else's choices. Or, you know, where this shows up sometimes is like, you know, sometimes on Facebook or social media, you'll see one of your friends has gone on a huge vacation with like their extended family and they all seem to love each other and they're having so much fun and they're just doing all these awesome things. And you're thinking, I'm thinking, when I go on a vacation with my extended family, I find people annoying, and I think it's annoying that I have to do X, Y, and Z, and that they're doing this, and I don't enjoy it all. And it's like, oh, that comparison. If I could just get good with the comparison of like, whether what they said on social media is true or not, this is what my truth is, and I'm okay with that. I have not achieved that level of nirvana yet, but that's the inner work I do to... achieve success, which for me is peace and quiet and ease. Those are the things I'm always going for. Ease, ease, ease. Those are
Aransas Savas:
Yes,
Jen Liddy:
my things.
Aransas Savas:
yes. So there you go. I mean, I think you just named yours. And you could tell, right, on a scale of one to 10, week over week, like, how was my sense of peace this week? How was my sense of ease this week?
Jen Liddy:
Mm-hmm.
Aransas Savas:
What about physically? What are your physical measures of success?
Jen Liddy:
When I don't feel... I haven't been hung over in a long time, but you remember like that hung over feeling when you feel tired and your eyeballs ache and like your whole body just wants to like crawl back under the covers? When I don't feel like that, when I feel like energized, not like you know a ball of... I don't need to be a ball of fire energized. I want to get through my day. I want to go for the walk. I want to do yoga. I want to... get on a call and have an energizing conversation. Like I want to not be waiting for the end of the day when I can go to bed. That's success to me. Because what I'm striving for again is ease and my other thing is energy. Those are the two things I haven't had
Aransas Savas:
There you go.
Jen Liddy:
in a really long time and those are the things I've been working on for the past three years, ease and energy.
Aransas Savas:
I love that so much. This is such a beautiful example of this. And I think for everybody listening, I can't tell you how invaluable it is to do this with yourself, to ask these same questions and say, So what would my measures of success be? And maybe there's two or three. I never go beyond three because then I
Jen Liddy:
Mm-hmm.
Aransas Savas:
think it gets overwhelming. And I think they have to be something that we can really own. And you just did such an awesome job of that. You were like, well, it's not this. It's not this. It is this.
Jen Liddy:
Mm.
Aransas Savas:
And then the more you kind of talked through it, and that's why you like either doing it with someone else or writing it down can be helpful, the more you talk through it, the more you started to synthesize your superpower there. and distill it into a single identifiable nugget
Jen Liddy:
Mm-hmm.
Aransas Savas:
that you can check back in on.
Jen Liddy:
Right?
Aransas Savas:
And when we go back to everything we talked about in your career, you can see over time how you were working toward ease and energy.
Jen Liddy:
Totally. But for so much of my life, I didn't even know that was possible. I didn't even know that was allowed. I didn't even know that was okay, right? It was all about giving myself permission to, like say I wanted ease, because when I was growing up, if you wanted something easy, what was the matter with you? Are you kidding me? Your grandmother
Aransas Savas:
Slacker.
Jen Liddy:
worked so hard. Yes, if you can lean, you can clean. Like, you didn't need, who the hell are you to want ease? And I remember my grandmother saying, who do you think we are? We're not rich people. So it's fighting against all of those things that are so embedded in us. And I don't wanna say fighting against them, it's really like unworking them and letting them go, which is the work I have found
Aransas Savas:
Yeah.
Jen Liddy:
works best for me.
Aransas Savas:
Again, it creates resistance, I think, to
Jen Liddy:
Yeah.
Aransas Savas:
push against it, to fight it. That inherently, even if you picture the act of pressing, right? It's an act of tension. And what you were working toward is greater acceptance and
Jen Liddy:
Mmm.
Aransas Savas:
ease, which is the opposite of tension and
Jen Liddy:
and trying
Aransas Savas:
pressing.
Jen Liddy:
to be who everybody else is. Yeah,
Aransas Savas:
Yeah.
Jen Liddy:
yeah, yeah.
Aransas Savas:
And I keep talking about the inner mean girl. And like now that's all I can picture is this like little blonde and hot pink suit sitting on
Jen Liddy:
She's
Aransas Savas:
your shoulder.
Jen Liddy:
wearing Jordache jeans.
Aransas Savas:
And she grows up to be Elle Woods.
Jen Liddy:
Yes, the Jordan S jeans I never had as a child. Ha ha ha.
Aransas Savas:
Jen, this has been so much fun.
Jen Liddy:
It has for me too. I hope somebody got something out of that very long, windy conversation we had. Okay, good.
Aransas Savas:
I did. So we
Jen Liddy:
And
Aransas Savas:
know
Jen Liddy:
it was really fun for
Aransas Savas:
there's
Jen Liddy:
me to unpack
Aransas Savas:
at least
Jen Liddy:
it.
Aransas Savas:
one, two, there were at least two people
Jen Liddy:
Woohoo,
Aransas Savas:
who got something out of it.
Jen Liddy:
we had a great time.
Aransas Savas:
Yay. For those of you listening, you'll hear more about Jen and about the Uplifters over at theuplifterspodcast.com. So head over there after you listen to this and Let us know what your personal success metrics are. Let us know what brings you a greater sense of ease and peace and utter delight. Where you're finding that space of greatness in the rooms that you're in, those places where you can be the balance that is needed in that space, where you are able to refine and amplify your impact. to acknowledging that it's impactful and that it's needed and matters. Thank you for listening, Jen. Thank you for being here.
Jen Liddy:
Thank
Aransas Savas:
I
Jen Liddy:
you for having me.
Aransas Savas:
am so glad to know you now
Jen Liddy:
Me
Aransas Savas:
and can't
Jen Liddy:
too.
Aransas Savas:
wait to continue the conversation.
Jen Liddy:
Thanks for the coaching too, Arances, you were great. Who knew that's what's gonna happen
Aransas Savas:
Who knew? All
Jen Liddy:
today?
Aransas Savas:
right. That was super.
Stop downplaying your gifts and make them your magic