EP#6- The Hype Woman You Didn't Know You Needed with Jenna Todey, Entrepreneur and Women's Empowerment Coach

Hi everyone, welcome back to Everyday Endorphins. This week I spoke with a friend of mine, Jenna Toddy. Jenna is an entrepreneur, founder, and women's empowerment coach. Through her coaching program, she guides women back to themselves and into their worth. While running her fashion agency kindly coveted, she began building a blueprint for how to become the woman and founder of her dreams, which led her to discover her true mission of guiding women to do the same. Us women are constantly comparing ourselves against each other and competitive battles, and we need to foster that energy and turn it into something a bit more productive to really uplift each other and empower each other. And that's exactly what Jenna does. We talked a lot about what it means to cultivate and channel your own self-worth and reach your highest potential. In college, there's so many instances where we can feel really down on ourselves. We're not worthy enough, we're not smart enough, we're not doing enough. The good thing is that there are ways to combat these thought patterns. And honestly, I think it's just so important to really reverse that self-talk and speak to yourself in a more positive light and really empower yourself to keep striving to push farther and believe in yourself that you can achieve your goals. Colleges, as we know, if you're in college, it's definitely a time of stress and uncertainty and anxiety, but as is life, is I think we're realizing now, especially being in this pandemic. Before we actually get into the episode, going to give a little shout out to Incher, which as many of you know, is the app that I record these episodes on. I also want to give a little shout out to strive coffee. If you love coffee, if you love supporting small businesses, if you love sustainability and ethically sourced single origin coffee roasters, strive is exactly where you want to go. If you order a bag and use the promo code in Dorfins, you will receive 10% off of your order. So without further ado, I really hope you guys enjoy this episode with Jenna. You can follow her on Instagram @JennaTarry and she is the hype woman that you didn't know you needed. Hi Jenna, thanks so much for coming onto the podcast this afternoon. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited. Usually I actually end the episode asking this question, but I want to kickstart the episode with this question because I think it ties in really nicely to all the incredible work you're doing right now. So I'm wondering what is something that brings you a bit of endorphins every day? I have to meditate. That is like it's my must no matter where I am and I never want to do it, which is weird because it gives me so many endorphins, but every day I have to drag myself and really have the talk like you know you need this, you know it will make you feel so good. So that's my thing where after I'm done, I just feel like I can do anything at any meeting and just feel in my power and good. Yeah, oh my gosh, meditating it, it's hard because it feels so great after you do it and you know you should do it more often, but then it feels like there's never enough time in the day to meditate and you forget about doing it, but you know like after you even just carve out like five minutes, you can feel much more rejuvenated. Absolutely. Yeah, no, and every you'll know how much you need when you're in it. You might say I'm just going to do it for five minutes and then you're in it like okay, I need to stay here a little longer or sometimes I think all night longer and it's like no, I'm good. 60 seconds. Okay. Exactly. Yeah, I'd love to talk more about the empowerment coaching business that you recently started called Self-worth Lab. I know that you primarily help out women who are in their career already, but I truly believe that called students definitely need to hear all the incredible things that you have to say about finding your inner power and guiding you towards maximizing your full potential. So I'd love to hear more about when you've decided to start this. You are so correct, college students, every woman I feel like this is a message that we are not taught and I don't know why because it's so important to really get into our worth and to feel in our power and it's some this is my personal journey, right? So as you know, I'm an entrepreneur. I was running my fashion agency kindly coveted for the past four years and kind of came to a point where I loved running my own business. I loved being able to have that freedom, but I was really lacking fulfillment. I just felt like, okay, I know I have so much more to give and I feel that my favorite things to do really aren't being utilized in my current work. So it started to become like, okay, I'll do a women's speaker series, just like little things I started building so that I can just do this work and be able to speak to women and hear stories and truly just have honest conversations of how we can grow, how we can become our absolute highest dream selves. And so this is just, you know, the work that I was the most naturally interested in and would want to just talk to whoever would listen to me talk about, but I never thought of it as a career. I was never like, I'm going to be a life coach and coach woman on how to get into the worth and into the power. Like that was just not ever on my radar. It was just what I did for fun and wanted to read about and learn about the most, which is kind of ironic and funny now. It's like, that's probably the path we should go down, but we're most interested in. So that's kind of how it got started and then I began to do my own journey. So I have always felt really strongly that we focus so much on what we want to do, especially I'm sure you can really as a college student, it's like you turn 18 and you're supposed to have your entire life path figured out, which is so unrealistic. I mean, I was obsessed with like my high school boyfriend at 18 and that's all I could think about. I have no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life. So it's so much pressure to put on 18 year olds, right? So I feel like you know, this linear path where you go to school and you major in something and then you get a job in that and you feel like you have to stay there. And so that's where I was. My personal journey was like, I went to school for fashion. This is what I'm good at. I have built this company. It was the most successful the company had ever been when I was feeling like I can't do this anymore. I have to start my dream business and there was so much to lose there, you know, so it was really scary because I had never done this before, but I just this voice on my head just kept saying, you know what you need to do it. You know the gifts that you have and you know who you can help and I just started having moments where I couldn't ignore it anymore. How are you able to trust that gut intuition? Like you would build your own fashion consultancy kindly coveted and it was doing really well. Why not just stay in that space that's very comfortable, something that you know really well. And how do you make that rapid shift in your life without experiencing at least in self-doubt or anxiety about where it's going to take you next? Oh, I had so much self-doubt. It was, I didn't even tell my boyfriend who I've been with for five years. Like it was a voice in my head that I never admitted was a real voice until it got so loud and really the moment I actually remember the moment, I asked myself if you are doing this exact thing, having these exact meetings, the exact clients, everything's the exact same, 10 years from now. Will you be happy? Will you look back thinking I did the right thing? And I felt sick to my stomach. It was like no and my ego was so strongly trying to get me to say because you know this is my company. It's not, I didn't work for someone. I built this. I started it completely from scratch. So your identity is so rooted in that and it's what I was known for. So your ego's like no, you're doing great. Keep going. On paper you look amazing. Like keep it going. Do not get off track. But my soul, this inner voice was just like you know, you already know and we all have this inner knowing. And so for me that was, I had to do it. I could not not listen. You know, I love that point about saying that you have this inner knowing. Have you read Glennon Doyle's book, Untamed? I love her. Love, love, love. And I recently finished it and she talks a lot about the knowing. Her story is obviously very different than what we're talking about today. But as I was reading it, I kept finding myself thinking how do we get into touch with that inner knowing. What is that inner knowing? Is it a sense of bodily intuition that, you know, like that mind, body connection, really understanding at the root of your core, what's right for you, what you should be following? I think it's something we're all still trying to figure out and especially in college, there's so much happening, all at once, and they say it's the time where you're exploring and you're pursuing all these different interests and you're figuring out what you're passionate about. But where do you even begin when you don't even know like where exactly to start? - That's such a good question and I feel like this took me a long time and it sounds kind of weird because you're talking about this voice and you're like, is it my voice? Is it like, what is this, is it this divine presence? And what I feel like the best way to really deeply connect which this is just something that you can start today, to connect with this voice is to connect with your future self. So this isn't exercise I go through a lot with clients because I believe our future self is truly our highest self. Like when you think about your future, you're generally thinking about this amazing, successful woman who like has it all together. You all have this vision and I'm saying that you can maybe start thinking, oh yeah, I have this vision of this future self that I'm becoming. So if you connect with her, then you can kind of reverse engineer it where she can give you these answers or these you can start to ask for that guidance. So that's, I do got a lot of meditations where this inner knowing comes because I ask a question, I already know the answer to. I just needed it from a different perspective. - That's also kind of funny because I find when I talk to my friends about some struggles and when I'm going through or anxieties that I have, I feel like deep down I know the answer but I just need that external validation or someone else to listen and say, oh okay, it seems like maybe you're feeling this way and then I think a little bit more about it and I'm like that's exactly how I'm feeling. I just needed to verbalize it and have someone hear me. - And that's a lot of coaching. A lot of people think coaching is giving an advice and you're just like the one talking and truly going into someone and it's actually completely opposite. You are just asking questions and I always say I'm helping women come home to themselves because they are the ones that are extracting this out of themselves, all I'm doing is guiding. - Yeah, yeah, that's so nice. And I think a lot of times people can feel, and myself included, we can feel very lost in the future, the uncertainty of the future. I think now more so than ever, especially. And when we're feeling very lost, we often seek answers from other people because it just takes too much effort and mental energy to keep thinking back and forth in your head, well what if this, what if that, I just want the answer? I love how you're mentioning that coaching really, it's not about providing answers. No one has the answers to the future. It's really having another resource to guide you along your journey of self discovery. And I think that, I feel like that never really stops honestly. Maybe there's a huge learning curve in college, but I feel like if you're never continually growing, then you're just very stagnant. And I can only imagine the unhappiness that arises from being very stagnant. - Absolutely. I mean, I always say what? Well, I think this is maybe a Tony Robbins quote, but what doesn't grow in life dies? Or just so true, it's such a human need that we always have to be growing. And yeah, that's absolutely in college. I think that's when I had my hardest years of trying to figure out who I am. There's so much pressure on the future and you feel like you have one chance. If I don't get it right now, I'm going to be so behind, I'm going to watch everyone else succeeding. I'm just going to be here failing, trying to figure it out. And we tell ourselves these stories and we play them on repeat, right? And in order to truly grow into who we want to become, we have to disassociate from this past story, that we are not enough or that everyone else is better than us and these thoughts that are looping. So that's, I really believe the best way to get on our growth path is to just start being honest with ourselves and start really discovering the hidden thoughts that are going on, the looping, the stories that are going on subconsciously, so we can just move forward on our honest truth and not these lies that we've been programmed to leave. How do we reverse that narrative? When there's all this constant self-talk about the way things seem to be or the way things that you believe them to be, how do you move past that mindset to propel yourself to move forward and advocate for yourself? So it's really important that we embrace our darkness, which no one really wants to do. I think in this industry, there's a lot of this positivity and think positively and you can extract, attract what you want. Something that I have found is the deepest, most meaningful work that I've done personally and with clients is we need to face the parts of us that we've abandoned, the parts of us that we just said, "Okay, you are not allowed here "and I need to just push you away." Those parts of us are coming in without us even knowing in little ways and they're, and we can all think of the thing, right, but we believe that we're not enough. Okay, no, I am enough. I'm not gonna look at that. And maybe it's attached to a childhood memory or your experiences, whatever. So when we try to run from that, we're in essence running from ourselves and it's nice is that maybe we need to really turn the other way and face all of us, like the complete whole version of us in order to work through these blocks or else they're just going to keep coming up and manifesting in different ways in our lives. So a really good way is if you're meditating, it's that I find this the easiest way to bring it up and to bring these blocks through is just to ask questions, like, okay, how am I feeling right now? Oh, I feel kind of overwhelmed actually. Yeah, I feel that you feel overwhelmed. Where am I body and my feeling this? And you can start to navigate and self-suit your body and your mind and just start asking questions and allow these things to come up. And you might go to a specific memory that you didn't even know you remembered. It's really powerful or you might just go through this, I've always had this general feeling, well, how is that affecting now? How is that affecting the present moment? And just start asking questions and go into it. Because we are always trying to become our best selves, it's human nature. So it's not going to damage you to look at the parts of you that aren't ideal. It's not going to make the pain worse. It's going to lessen us because a lot of our inner dialogue, it just wants to be seen. It just wants to be acknowledged. Yeah, and I feel like we don't even hear that voice until we realize we're at a breaking point or a tipping point. That's when we start to pay attention. Once it gets really bad or really intense. And I think in college, too, we're in this bubble. We're kind of adults. We're not really adults. We're navigating the social stresses, the academic stresses, being an impolian environment. And everyone is such an overachiever. Everyone's doing a million and one different thing. So it can be very easy to feel like you're not up to par with your peers or you're not excelling in the same way. And so how do you find that awareness where you start to notice that these thoughts are really detrimental instead of pushing you forward, they're pulling you back. How do you change those thoughts to then propel you forward? Something that I do, which this is a weekly practice for me, and I find it to be really helpful, where you're being triggered or they are usually manifested in your fears. So if something keeps coming up where you're like, I'm really afraid of this. And just look at maybe the past 24 hours. Like you can literally do this. Your listeners can do this right out to this podcast. You just get your journal out. Think about the last 24 or 48 something two hours. What fear keeps coming up? And almost all of us can do this. You have so many fears going around. Oh, I feel like I'm going to fail this cause or I feel like my significant others going to leave me for someone else or blah, blah, blah. Whatever the fear is. And then write it down. And then once you have enough of them that are just getting out of your brain onto paper, then even you'll find the first step just seeing them is feels really nice just to be able to look at them. And no, okay, I'd like kind of have a hold on this. I see now and I can quantify what's going on. And then bring it through a process of worst case scenario. So you bring the fear all the way through, okay, if this were to actually happen, what does that look like? Okay, like my significant other, that example, he leaves and he does it and you pull it all the way through. And then you can begin to reprogram it. So you've now faced like your worst fear and then the next step is what is the best case scenario? And then you can bring it through that and you start to see how much power we have to reprogram what's happening inside. And it's also way to quantify the narrative that is already going on. So we realize how much power we have and these thoughts are going on. We can, if you just start to become aware of them, you will realize how much you are being moved in certain directions and feelings, just based on things but you're not even conscious of going on in your mind. Yeah, and I think I'm sure you would agree with me. This is why I really love meditation. It's because it's this practice where you're learning how to engage critically with your thoughts but not attaching to them. Not judging exactly what's going on throughout your mind, watching them pass by and just noticing where they go. And I think it's a great metaphor or at least, it mimics I think the way life is where so many things happen that we just can't control. So why attach so deeply onto them? Instead, just observe them as they are and just let them go if they're not serving you. Anything really. Absolutely. No, it is so powerful. You've made a lot of great points about finding ways to change that self-talk, the narratives that we create in our mind. And I think what you're also describing is ways to stay grounded in the present moment. Are there any strategies that you can offer to help stay grounded? This is something I've worked on a lot. And I mean, something as easy as just your bare feet on the ground and imagining light coming through the ground through your bare feet and a meditation is really grounding. And I think just really taking time for yourself. So we're all very busy. I mean, even when I was full on running my company in fashion, it was like no matter how many emails I looked had, I would not check my email. Until I would do my morning routine and give to myself first. Because on the days that I did it, I found that I was so all over the place, so just not in my power because you are giving to everyone else's needs and you haven't even given to yourself, which is the most important. So I'm really big on morning routine, giving to yourself and just taking a break at the name. You can go on a walk, listen to a podcast, put on at your favorite song, and feel like a different person in 30 minutes. So just the little things in your day, adding them in. Yeah, that's so true. I'm a big believer of having a structured morning routine that's very consistent and reliable to help just conquer the day without healing. I mean, some people actually, I've heard, do like a brain dump in the morning. So kind of what you were describing before about writing down your fears. Some people do it in the morning, the minute they wake up, they just write down a list of everything that they need to do that day or anything that's stressing them out. And that way it's like this physical manifestation of like dumping the thoughts out of your head and onto the paper so you can just leave it for the rest of the day and move forward. I love that. I also want to go back to a comment you made about visualizing your future self. And I love what you mentioned, but I also do think it's hard to be so future oriented when we're told to stay in the present moment. So how can you achieve that balance where you're visualizing the future and you're setting your goals and aspirations that you're going to constantly work towards, but then also being very focused in the present moment? Yeah, no, it's a really good question. And so we're always being informed by some point, right? So when we're in the present moment right now, we're being informed by most likely our past because it's what we can go to the easiest and our brain has such clear visuals. The reason why we might say we want to change or we want to grow, we want to become better. But we are in the past and we are staying there on this loop even for in the present moment. So you can be right now, we're here together, I'm looking at you. But I could be referencing fear-limiting beliefs that happened 10 years ago and they're being brought through right now on a loop. So the way to break that is I've found the best way is we have to start creating new, neuropath ways. And the easiest way to do that is through being able to visualize. It's really hard to visualize right now in this current self, being this version of us that we want to become because we're sitting with ourselves in the current moment. We're like, I can't really see that because I'm like, and myself hands watching Netflix. But if we can kind of have this visual and we can begin to see ourselves in the future, it's we can start to really deeply imagine that. We can start to feel, oh, what would that feel like? To be this person. Your brain starts to create pathways in a more futuristic sense. So we can begin to break this attachment with the past, especially if it is not serving us. So this is really powerful work if someone's been through trauma because it's re-coming up in maybe every relationship if you've been cheated on before and you're dating like an angel on earth, he's still going to get, or she's still going to get that trauma coming back into the relationship because we need to heal that. And in order to do that, we need to begin to see a version of us that is healed, that is thinking new thoughts, that is walking in a different way. So that's, it really does actually root us in our present moment, but we need a different focus point. - Yeah, and I love how you're talking about the brain actually changing so that you can visualize your futuristic self. There is a study I read about in one of my previous neuro science classes at WashU. I can't recall the name of it or the specific details, but it was really about how basically what you were describing if you can visualize something, your brain is actually changing as you're producing those visualizations. And I think it was like human participants, but basically they were asked to imagine like a monkey or a dog or some sort of animal, and then they recorded, I believe using like an FMRI, they looked at the brain as it was changing through this visualization process, and the neurons actually fired in the exact same pattern as these objects or animals they were asked to think about. So I just think that's really, I remember reading that and discussing about it in class and just thinking how fascinating that is that our brain can actually change the firing patterns of the neurons based off of what we're looking at and what we're thinking about. Maybe not so much what we're thinking about in a general sense, but in this particular context, I just, I thought it was so interesting, and I think it just shows that we do have the power to change these narratives. And oftentimes we can feel so powerless because there's so many forces at play that pull us in one direction versus another. - Absolutely, no, we are very powerful, and the sad part is so many people stay in the same, the same way of thinking because they don't think there's another option for them. And you'll start to hear this in a little ways, like, oh no, I'm just not the limit blank. I'm not someone who could ever speak in front of people, but you can talk to the same person, and they have this dream of being this influential, powerful person changing people's lives. And so these limiting beliefs aren't even attached to our higher purpose or our deepest desires. They're so rooted in something that doesn't belong to us anymore. And the best part, I want everyone to know this, you can just let them go. You do not have to be who you've been before, especially in college, you may have been someone completely different in high school, and you go to college, you're like, okay, this is my chance. This is my chance to become who I want to be. But you can do that over and over again in your life. You can always recreate yourself. - Yeah. And what I kind of hear you saying is adopting more of like a growth mindset, just telling yourself that you want to grow and you want to improve and you want to keep yourself on that self-discovery journey. And it's something that I've heard a lot through undergrad and even in a more professional setting through my previous job internships, I've always been told that it's important to have a growth mindset. And I think as young college students, we're often struggling to even grapple with what that really means. - I think as a society, we're really obsessed with this linear path, which is like, we've kind of mentioned it earlier, but you know, you go to school, you might get your job. And this is where we've taught, I think very, it's actually, I think, a really harmful message, which is that we have to stay on this linear path, but multifaceted were always evolving as humans. I would our path not evolve with us. So I think first, this is associating from the fact that your worth is based on what you do. That's really big. And that's, I want to be the most successful version of myself and I'm really successful oriented. But the second you say, if this job was taken from me, if this title was taken from me, I am less than your screwed. Because we've just seen in the coronavirus, we have no idea what external factors are going to come in our lives. And so I think when you ask about growth mindset, the first part of it is getting so rooted in your worthiness and knowing that nothing outside of you is necessary for you to be fully worthy, like 100% fully worthy. And then from there, we can start to build who we truly want to be and what feels good and how are we aligned with our true mission or true calling, all of the things that we say and feel that we really want more than anything. And we have this visualization, begin moving towards that in a way that's fully aligned. Because the second you start to do something to people, please, which I could tell you all about, I complete people, please, are in recovery. It's really hard because then you're always constantly thinking, what do people want of me? What will people think looks good? How can I make everyone around me happy through my life? Which is crazy that we do this. We only get, as far as we know, one shot at this to live our most fulfilling lives. And our true north is within ourselves as nothing to do with what anyone else wants of us. And especially if you have parents or someone in your life that's always kind of drilled this like, you need to be a doctor, you need to be a lawyer, you need to do this path in order for fill in the blank as to love you for you to be successful for you to be accepted in society. So we have to start to break this down because none of those things define who we are and how worthy we are. And I think until we do that, nothing else matters. That's step one. And then we can begin to grow in alignment. - Yeah. And you're so right. I thought life was always very much this linear path. I thought I would go to college, I would study one thing and then I would have one job. That was a direct reflection of what I was studying. But that's just not the case. I mean, my major is a combination of three different things and I'm not even going into either of them, at least not directly. So, and that's been really exciting for me. At first it was pretty challenging because I wasn't exactly sure how my studies at Wash You would directly translate into a career. But I'm also 21 and my career doesn't need to be my career forever. It changes just as you said, as you change the external environment and changes around you. And it took me a while throughout college to come to that realization. It's something I hope younger people in college start to understand because I think a lot of the anxieties revolve around what do I choose to study, what job am I going to find? Well, my peers are doing this, why am I not doing that? But it's not like a competitive game. It's not you against them or vice versa. It's really your own individualized path that's going to constantly evolve. If something doesn't feel right, go with that intuition that's telling you, really follow the things you're passionate about, whether that may be a class that you're taking or an extracurricular you're involved in, that will inform the shape of the path that you're on. Not like what people tell you or what you think you should be doing. Exactly. And especially, I think with your generation, like Millennial Gen Z, we are constantly comparing ourselves with social media. And it's such a damaging thing. I just saw-- Did you watch the-- I think it was Netflix, the social dilemma. The dilemma. Yes, I watched that. I-- Oh, my gosh. That documentary. That rocked me. I like teared up a little when they were talking about the self-worth issues that are cupping and how this is like the most insecure generation. And that made me feel more than ever. Like I am doing the work that I'm on this planet to do because that is just such a lie that's been fed to us that we need to be like the person that we're seeing online. I've worked with a lot of different people. And you would be surprised at how people-- you would think have it all together and are, like, just the most confident, happiest person. They're also struggling. And they have their own struggles. And not that we don't want that for anyone. But just it's really important that we're honest about the fact that we have no idea what's going on in other people's lives. And to just stay in our power, stay on our mission. And I think the second we start to do things based on looking good, that's when we go down a dangerous path of wild unfathomment. Because we're not listening to our calling at all. We're not listening to our instincts. We're just doing things to get approval. And then we need that approval. We need to keep going. And that's where it gets dangerous. Yeah. And like in the documentary, they mention our phones are literally programmed to constantly seek that need for acceptance or validation. The endless scrolling on our news feeds, constantly looking for the next big thing or the next something to occupy your mind in your time with. Even like Instagram and all these other social media platforms, it's really this double edged sword. And we're constantly, especially young women, too, the competition and the games that are played between young girls. But we really need to support each other and empower each other. And I think, as you said, even the people who seem to be the most put together, there's always going to be an insecurity or fear or something that's holding them back, even if it doesn't appear that way on the outside. So having also an empathetic mindset and knowing that everyone has struggles, you're not going through things alone, I think can make the world feel a bit more manageable. Absolutely. It's so important. One last question I'd like to ask you is, if you have any advice for college-age students, recent graduates, for tapping into their fullest potential, pretty open-ended question. Oh, I love it. I would say that we become very clear on where you're at. Do this, do a self inventory, which is what I call it. And just be righted all out of who am I right now? And then have the clearest version of what it would look like for you to become the woman of your dreams. What would that look like? How would she go through her day? Who would be her friends? What would her job be? And rather than going through this fear-based, how do I be successful, which can cause a lot of anxiety, go through it with joy and love. How can I live a life that makes me so excited to be alive that I will just like radiate and be the highest version of myself? What does that look like? Once you start to connect with that, everything else will start to fall, because you will have very clear yeses and very clear knows of what is aligned with that vision. And just surround yourself with people that are good, people that want you to win and be that for other people as well. [MUSIC PLAYING]