Making It – Episode 162
Burnout to Breakthrough: The Power of Nervous-System Regulation (Jessica Rhodes)
Jessica Rhodes: I’m Jessica Rhodes and you are listening to Making It. I run a company called Interview Connections and we help entrepreneurs who feel like the best kept secret reach their dream clients through podcast guesting.
I grew up in a middle-class family in a suburb outside of Philadelphia. My dad lost his job and got cancer in 2001. So 2001 was like kind of a pivotal crazy year because obviously 9/11, my dad got cancer and he lost his job and had like a long time of unemployment before then starting his business. So my parents were scrappy, like they worked so hard. So I never felt poor. But I know they were deep in credit card debt and it was very, very challenging for them financially. But I had a wonderful childhood.
An experience I had in my childhood that really shaped who I am today as a woman in business, as an industry leader in podcasting, is that when I was in high school, I was very involved with theater and I actually helped to co-found our high school theater association. And I believed that I should be the president of the association because it was my idea and I was co-founding it. But they chose the male co-founder to be the president. This was just one of many stories in my childhood where I could see a little bit of sexism and I could see where men rose to the top when essentially there was an equal playing field.
But then there was some reason why the male in this scenario would rise to that point of leadership. And so this was just one example that fueled me into wanting to rise, to be a leader, to show women entrepreneurs, to show all entrepreneurs, but especially women entrepreneurs, how to break through that glass ceiling, to innovate and to trailblaze and to go places where so many women haven’t gone before. It’s really fueled me into founding and now co leading with my business partner, Margie, a seven-figure agency. I think only 1 to 2% of seven figure businesses are founded and led by women.
When they picked the guy to be the president, I responded professionally. Even as a teenager. I’ve always just bit my tongue and moved on because I did still want to be a leader in the organization. I’ve always had a certain amount of maturity, even if I wasn’t happy with the result, to still be professional and respectful about it. But it definitely put a little bit more wood into the fire and kind of fuel a fire that kept the urgency and the desire to grow into higher levels of leadership down the road into my life.
What prompted me to start my business was a desire to have a lifestyle where I could be at home with my baby and to be a stay-at-home mom, which actually surprised a lot of people in my life. My parents, my family, they were quite shocked to see that I wanted to have a baby at 25 and to be home and everything because I was, and I am so career minded. But stepping out of my previous leadership role into kind of slowing down and being home with my baby was a different type of fueling into my future success because it gave me new motivation to continue to grow, to always have my kids, to see an example of what’s possible.
My daughter now, who’s nine years old, is part of conversations when I talk about our sales goals and our revenue and our profit, like she’s there experiencing it, learning it. So that’s really what fueled me to start my business. And it absolutely fuels me to keep going even through challenging times.
One of the biggest mistakes I see people make on their road to making it is assuming that there is one destination. Sometimes you have to learn on your own. You could hear the advice a million times, but I’ll still say the lesson, there is no one point, there is no one goal that will make you happy. If you are not happy on your journey towards the goals that you’re setting, meeting the goal might give you a little burst of happiness, but you’ll fall right back into all right now I got to keep going for the next one. So focus on your happiness throughout the journey. It’s so cliche, but it’s so true that it’s about the journey and not the destination. There’s so much focus on the destination and there’s merit to that. I’m very goal oriented. I do focus a lot on the destination, but I equally focus on the journey as well.
I’ve received a lot of good advice over the years. Some of the most impactful pieces of advice that have stuck with me are from my dad when I was first starting my business. Business wise, he would always say, buyers buy when they’re ready to buy. And he would always say, follow the money. And what that really means is listen to the market. A lot of business owners are just kind of creating in a vacuum, doing things the way they want to do it, meanwhile bypassing what is the market actually saying. So there has to be this balance and this dance in business to trust your intuition, to do things the way you want to do it.
But also be listening to your audience, listen to your clients, listen to what leads are saying so you can adapt and innovate, to follow the money, to follow where people need. That’s why I launched my company. I followed the money. Everyone wants this service, so that’s what I’m going to launch because that’s what people want. It’s what I want to do, too. So it’s great when those two line up, but follow the money has been probably the best business advice that I’ve received.
What I think really matters in the journey of making it is what role has nervous system regulation played in your journey toward making it? I shout it from the rooftop. You really want to focus on the journey. You want to focus on your own happiness and burnout. All of that is because I have learned tools to regulate my nervous system. Burnout comes from a place of being dysregulated and being in a stress response, being in a trauma response, reverting back to old patterns.
So when you’re falling off your journey of making it, it’s almost all of the time because you have a dysregulated nervous system. I talk about it as much as I can because I would be burnt out if I never learned how to regulate my nervous system. Nothing else would matter. The nervous system regulation was the one thing that has made everything else so much better and more effective. Your nervous system is that centralized system in your body that is constantly scanning for threats of death. That survival brain is kind of an idiot. It really thinks anything could kill you.
So it’s scanning for threats. An email that has a negative tone is threatening, could it kill you? And so your nervous system is constantly scanning every situation for things that could threaten your life. But usually, it doesn’t understand what’s actually threatening your life and what just is throwing you off course a little bit. So learning how to train your nervous system to be more level, it dissipates threats. So there’s a great website called Brain Based Wellness that I use that teaches me tools to easily train my nervous system to reduce the number of threats and keep me more level headed on a day-to-day basis.
I’ve learned a lot about different energy modalities. I’ve gotten into a lot of different things like that that keeps everything balanced as I continue to uplevel in my own leadership and growth. I do think there’s a benefit of burnout. I was just reflecting on this today because burnout and stress causes physical impacts on the body. And I was actually, you know, dealing with this knot in my back which is always an impact of stress. You know, stress tightens the body up, creates knots and tight neck and things like that. And so I was experiencing that over the last 24 to 36 hours, I’ve had this really tense neck.
But as I loosen it up, as I do my nervous system work, as I do my meditation and my breath work, and I use my ice wraps, which can really help reduce inflammation, it actually feels so good that I’m like, yes. Like, there was a time when I dealt with this pain all the time. I always had a knot in my neck. Like, that was just life. I’m like, well, I guess this is life running a business. Constant pain in my neck and shoulders, constant stress and tension. And then when I learned how to work out of it, yes, tension happens. Yes, the stress comes back. Yes, you feel the pain. But now I know how to get out of it so much faster. And that feels really good.
My mentor, Melanie and Leia, always says, evolution and growth over a lifetime. I really resonate with that because not every day is the same and perfect, but on most good days, it feels fully in alignment. I feel that I’ve made it, and I feel that sense of satisfaction in my heart and soul, in my journey, when it wasn’t in alignment. There were many moments over the course of 2022 and 2023. We experienced quite a bit of turbulence in the business through a couple of simple decisions that had pretty big ripples that took quite a long time to even out.
We changed some marketing strategies that took a long time to recover and build to a new place that is strong again. And there were many moments in that challenging time that I did not feel satisfied. I did not feel happy. I felt really shameful and angry at myself because it was decisions that I made as a business owner and as a leader. Ultimately, through that experience, I grew so much more than I would have if I just kept going. You know, my business partner and I would always talk about, like, absolutely grateful for the journey, grateful for the growth, wouldn’t do it again.
But you can’t go back in time. You can’t redo past decisions. So grateful for the growth and the journey. But there were some very challenging moments that were get me the F out of here moments for sure. And I’m so much more happy and so much more grateful now to be on the other side of the challenging. Like, my cup of gratitude is so much bigger than it was before. There’s a lot of benefit to going through hard times. It really makes you reconnect with gratitude in a much deeper way.
Making it to me means that I feel fulfilled, that I feel satisfied, happy, and that I’m growing I have learned time and time again, there is no destination in success. There’s no point at which you hit a goal and you’re like, did it. I’m happy now. I’ve experienced that from growing the company from zero to six figures. Okay, what’s next? Bring in employees. Okay, brought in employees. What’s next? As soon as you hit a goal, you’ve got a little bit of time to feel good about it, but then there’s always another goal.
So as long as I am feeling happy and seeing the growth and I feel really good about my work, that’s making it, because again, there’s never going to be a point that it happens and then you’re good. That doesn’t happen until you’re dead. I think there are times where I take my eye off the vision or I lose the vision. And that is what I believe causes burnout the most when you lose sight of the vision. Where you don’t know where you’re going, the work feels like a grind, and it just drains that tank so much faster because you don’t know where you’re going. You’re like, I’m going, I’m going, I’m going. But I don’t know where I’m going.
And then I lose the motivation for it. And it’s not the number of hours that causes the burnout. It’s how you feel about the work that you’re doing. Are you connected to the vision? Can you see what’s possible on the other side of those hours that you’re working and the work that you’re doing? When I really see what the work is producing and I feel connected to it and I feel satisfied, I feel fulfilled, I see the impact it’s having, I can work crazy long hours, and I feel energized. And on the flip side, when I’m not feeling good about it, I’m frustrated, I’m tired, I don’t have a clear vision for where I’m going. I could work half the number of hours and I’m burnt out.
My definition of making it has actually been the same since the moment I founded the business. And I remember this so vividly because I used to listen to the podcast Entrepreneurs on Fire quite a bit in my early days when I was first starting out. John Lee Dumas interviews entrepreneurs about their journey. And that’s one of his main questions, is like, do you have a made it moment? What would I say as my answer? And I think about that every so often. I’m like, yeah, my answer has stayed the same. I felt like I made it when I was working from home as a virtual assistant.
I didn’t have a six-figure business yet, but I was working at home. I had my beautiful little baby laying on his blanket. The sun was coming in. I was setting my own hours. I’m like, I have made it. This is the dream. And I have felt like that throughout the journey. What it all looks like is different, but I’ve always maintained that the making it feeling is like this is a dream.
I’m Jessica Rhodes and you’ve been listening to Making It. You can find me at interviewconnections.com. That’s interview connections.com and you’ll find the link in the show notes.
Danny Iny: Making It is part of the Mirasee FM Podcast Network, which also includes such shows as Just Between Coaches and Once Upon a Business. To catch the great episodes that are coming up on Making it, please follow us on Mirasee FM’s YouTube channel or your favorite podcast player. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a comment or a starred review. It’s the best way to help us get these ideas to more people. Thank you and we’ll see you next time.