Latest / Create The Best Me / Awaken Your Potential: Resilience Strategies for Women
Transcript
- 0:00Do you find that doing this helps you get to know yourself better or become more attuned to where you're making decisions that you're not regretting?
- 0:10Yeah.
- 0:11It's, it's like having a compass for life, for lack of a better word.
- 0:15You know, you just start to live in the flow and in tune.
- 0:19I think so many of us, Carmen, we feel like we're fighting against our husbands, our kids, our colleagues, our employees, whatever it is.
- 0:29And there's a way to have it all work.
- 0:32And the more that we're in the flow and in tune the less reactive we are then we're able to make proactive rather than reactive decisions.
- 0:41It's so cute I often I was somewhere lately and my husband called we were on the phone about something and a couple of the women were like do you and your husband always speak to one another that kindly and I said, yeah.
- 0:54Now, was I that way with my ex-husband?
- 0:56No, Hello and welcome to another inspiring episode of Create the Best Me, where we explore the power of pivoting in midlife and harnessing the wealth of our experience to forge new paths.
- 1:11I am your host Carmen Hecox, and today I'm thrilled to be joined by Jennifer K.
- 1:17Hill, an evolutionary leader, entrepreneur, author, and shining example of resilience for women everywhere.
- 1:27Jennifer has hosted luminaries like Dr.
- 1:31Deepak Chopra, Bruce Lipton on her podcast Regarding Consciousness, and has recently ventured into the tech world with her innovative company, OptiMatch.
- 1:44Today, we'll be discussing tools for resilience for women in midlife.
- 1:48And make sure you stick around because Jennifer has a special gift for our listeners and viewers.
- 1:55It's a valuable opportunity you won't want to miss.
- 2:02Jennifer Hill, welcome to Create The Best Me.
- 2:06This is an honor.
- 2:07Oh, Carmen, thank you so much.
- 2:09It's my pleasure to be with you and your audience today.
- 2:13Jennifer, before we get started, could you please share a little bit about who you are and what you do?
- 2:22You're going to make me blush, Carmen, to start the show.
- 2:24It's so funny whenever we talk about ourselves.
- 2:27I was just asked a question the other day as part of a a reflection and inquiry breakout group.
- 2:33And they said, what's one thing that you haven't thought of in the last year that you are proud of?
- 2:39And I realized one of the honors of getting to do shows like this is that you have to kind of toot your own horn every now and again.
- 2:44So I started off my career in the legal recruiting world, built and sold a company in that space in 2018.
- 2:50And then through a series of serendipities, the year I sold my company, got a divorce, got diagnosed as being high functioning on the spectrum and completely pivoted into an entirely new space.
- 3:02So, now I have the privilege and honor of getting to work with thought leaders like Deepak Chopra, Bruce Lipton, Gregg Braden on a show I host called Regarding Consciousness.
- 3:11And we've now developed a software to do what I've always intuitively done, which is bring human beings together and help crack the code of human connection.
- 3:20So that's my life.
- 3:22Holy moly, talk about, a high powered, overachieving woman.
- 3:27I think you were born that way.
- 3:30My mom says I used to suck all the energy out of a room when I was a little kid, but I think that was, I just didn't know how to manage energy.
- 3:37Nowadays, I live in a flow state as you and I were remarking on before we got on the show.
- 3:42I've realized that old Jennifer, I, oh my God, I apologize to anybody who went to school with me, worked with me when I was in my teens, twenties.
- 3:51I was that annoying know it all, Carmen.
- 3:54I was literally that person who had her hand up like this the whole time, because I just didn't, I didn't understand myself.
- 4:01I didn't understand human beings.
- 4:03I had a chip on my shoulder and something to prove.
- 4:06And now I just surrender and let it be.
- 4:08And if, if I can make a difference for you, great.
- 4:11If something I say lands for you, awesome.
- 4:13If not, I tell people it's like a coat, try it on if it fits, you know, wear it if not, throw it back in the closet.
- 4:19I don't need to be everything to everyone, and my only intention when I do a show like this is to be of service to one person.
- 4:25So if one of you out there gets a gem that makes a difference in your life, then it was an interview worth doing for me.
- 4:32So on a personal note, are you the middle child?
- 4:36No, actually, I'm the eldest.
- 4:38I have one younger sister.
- 4:39Love you, Erica.
- 4:40So I have one younger sister, and I'm two years older than her.
- 4:44Cause the way you described yourself as a young child, that's kind of who I was like.
- 4:50And I was a middle child and so was my husband.
- 4:53So that's kind of like how some people will say, Oh, that's middle child syndrome.
- 4:56So that's why I asked that question.
- 4:58Yeah, I think who I show up as today shows up completely differently than who I was as a child.
- 5:04Um I think I did fit into kind of the stereotypical first child um, you know, needed lots of attention and.
- 5:12You know, we're all doing the best we could.
- 5:14Now, looking back at my childhood through the lens of understanding I was autistic, I was like, oh, oh, uh, cause a lot of women don't get diagnosed with autism.
- 5:23So many of my friends now are in their thirties, forties, and fifties who are just getting diagnosed as women because their daughters got diagnosed or their children got diagnosed.
- 5:33And for me, it was very eye opening because my father, um, you know, they say autism is a genetic.
- 5:39And all of a sudden, one day, I was like, autism is genetic.
- 5:41And I looked at my mom, and I looked at my dad, I was like, oh, and then I realized my dad was autistic, and nobody ever knew it.
- 5:49So It was just kind of sweet and funny when we figured that out.
- 5:53It is funny when you find out that you have something and then you look at your parents, you look at your parents with a different lens.
- 6:00Cause I have adult ADHD.
- 6:03And well, I didn't get diagnosed until my son got diagnosed.
- 6:07And then I wondered, where did it come from?
- 6:09And I look at my parents and I'm like, oh, I get it now.
- 6:14Yeah, exactly.
- 6:15And it just gives you such deep compassion.
- 6:18That's the thing about my dad is like looking back at him all of a sudden, his social awkwardness or his, you know, tendency towards the same behavior.
- 6:28Like my dad and I were identical, but I never saw it as that way.
- 6:31Like I have a two hour spiritual practice every single morning and my dad has his practice or had it, you know, before he passed where every day he had to have his this first.
- 6:41Followed by the coffee at exactly this time, and when I would call my parents every morning, I couldn't interrupt him during the middle of it the rigidity of it, and now.
- 6:49I can have a little giggle about it because I definitely see those traits in myself.
- 6:55Hum, that's similar to adult ADHD.
- 6:57Cause I have this ritual.
- 6:58I have to do things in this order.
- 7:01If anything falls out of order.
- 7:03I'm almost like, I don't know if you ever saw the movie, I think it's Ants or Bugs where the ants are walking in this line and this leaf lands in front and they're like, what do I do?
- 7:12What do I do?
- 7:13Because the chain's been broken.
- 7:16I I get it.
- 7:16And that's, you know, I know we're talking a little bit about resilience today and that was the hardest thing for me growing up and not knowing I was on the spectrum is I used to have what is called, now I know it's called an autistic meltdown, is if something didn't go according, like, God, please forgive me, Ian, my ex-husband, for all the times we traveled together because I would just have these meltdowns and freakouts because I didn't have tools for self-regulation.
- 7:43And I want to, you know, bring the whole audience in here that it's not whether you're neurodiverse, neurotypical, neuro whatever, neuro human.
- 7:51It doesn't matter whether you classify yourself.
- 7:55We all have these things that can trigger us.
- 7:59And if we don't have the tools for resilience, and if we don't have the self regulation tools, then we actually lose connection to our higher brain function.
- 8:09Some people might not know this, but we have like a three brain system.
- 8:12The lowest part of the brain is the amygdala, which is that fight, flight, or flee.
- 8:18Fight, fight, or flee.
- 8:20And if we're in that phase of that, we literally cannot access our higher brain functioning.
- 8:26What most people don't know is that our higher brain can't function until our lower brain feels safe.
- 8:33And the middle part of the brain is the mammalian brain.
- 8:36Am I safe?
- 8:37Are you like me?
- 8:39And so we're constantly going through this process.
- 8:41And that's why I love to teach executives I work with and do talks and help people when I consult to understand how do we get ourselves out of that reactive, the sky is falling, the house is burning down.
- 8:54I'm not going to survive this.
- 8:56Into, oh, well, if I had every potential choice available right now in front of me and I could choose with conscious awareness, which choice would I make?
- 9:08Yet we don't have that same access when we're coming from that amygdala reptilian part of our brain.
- 9:14Yeah.
- 9:15And that takes me into my question, because you transitioned from selling your company in 2018 to starting a new venture, that must have been a difficult pivotal point.
- 9:26I I would think, because it changes the flow or, or the ritual.
- 9:30Can you share what inspired you to change and how you navigated the uncertainties involved?
- 9:39It was quite a rollercoaster.
- 9:41You know, it was both miraculous and challenging at the same time.
- 9:45So in 2018, we got acquired by a subsidiary of a very large law firm.
- 9:50And we had had a team and our team was so close.
- 9:52We were like a family.
- 9:53So the team was a part of the acquisition.
- 9:56And fortunately for us, one of our key team members had been an early, early team member from almost day one.
- 10:01And another gentleman had been with us.
- 10:037, 8, 9 years.
- 10:04So both people have been with us quite a while.
- 10:06And I was given the opportunity in late 2019, instead of having to run the company for a full five years and be the president of their California offices, I was given the opportunity instead, if I wanted to, to only consult for 10 hours a week remotely.
- 10:21And I was like, pick me, pick me, that sounds awesome, world travel.
- 10:24And this was right before COVID.
- 10:25So I've always had the travel bug ever since I was very young.
- 10:29Actually, funny little story.
- 10:30When I went to open my first company in ah my late twenties, I remember the CEO of the old company I used to work for.
- 10:37He said, oh, Jennifer, you don't know what it's like to run a company.
- 10:41You like to travel.
- 10:43You will never be able to travel running your own company.
- 10:47And for me, there's always been the side of me, Carmen, that says, oh yeah?
- 10:51Watch me.
- 10:52So the minute it was like gauntlet thrown buddy.
- 10:55So I made a deal with myself internally and I shared it with a lot of people and that's one of the secrets that I love to share with people is that if we have an intention, speak about it out loud to have friends around you to hold you accountable around it.
- 11:08And so at that point, I made a decision and a choice that I would go on at least one trip every month.
- 11:13Some are tropical every year and somewhere I'd never been every year.
- 11:16And that was my late twenties.
- 11:17And I've averaged about 20 or more trips a year ever since I made that choice.
- 11:21So fast forward to now late 2019, where I'm given the option to be in the same role, keep running the company forever and ever until death do us part.
- 11:29Not really, but it felt that way.
- 11:31Or let our executive vice president and VP take over, who are amazing and totally capable, and I could consult from anywhere around the world for a couple hours a week.
- 11:40I was like, I will take door number two, please.
- 11:43So as challenging as it may have seemed, the hardest thing was actually deciding to go back into corporate because here I was, I was with my husband, it was Paris, we were so lucky that this all happened, Carmen right before COVID.
- 11:58So I made this transition in November of 2019, which is when I was offered the chance to co-moderate the first panel I ever did with Deepak Chopra.
- 12:06So all of a sudden my life did this 180.
- 12:08Next thing you know, I remember I was sitting on the couch in Paris, March 6th of 2020, and it's when stuff started to get really hairy and I had just become friends with Deepak and I called him up I'm sitting on the couch in Paris, overlooking the Eiffel tower and reading a book by Greg Brayden.
- 12:23Who a few years later became a dear friend.
- 12:25And I'm reading this book and it says the square root of 1 percent of the population meditating at the same time can shift the consciousness of the planet.
- 12:34Well that choice point, at that moment, Carmen, I got a download, I like to call it a divine intuitive download, and I immediately chose to call Deepak.
- 12:43Now we barely knew each other, I just met him like two months ago.
- 12:46I said, Deepak, it's Jen Hill.
- 12:48I'd seen him at his house one time in New York since then.
- 12:50And I said, I think we need to do a global meditation for peace, given what's about to happen with the world.
- 12:55Like it was before the world got shut down before COVID, but we've kind of felt it.
- 12:59And so Deepak and myself and the Kabbalah Center and HeartMath and a lot of other thought leaders, we got together and got over 100, 000 people meditating together on March 9th that Deepak facilitated, then other people facilitated globally.
- 13:13And that just completely changed the trajectory of my life.
- 13:15So around that time, I was invited to do a radio show.
- 13:19It was actually out of that, I was invited to do a radio show with another thought leader.
- 13:23And she then, two months later, into COVID, invited me to a private online retreat with a lot of these famous thought leaders.
- 13:30And one of the people I met there wound up being our original co-founder for the company, who we were just referencing, uh, Om Heals, which we originally created to begin testing this algorithm for matching people.
- 13:41And Moon and I met in a Zoom room just like this during COVID in June at sister Jenna's private retreat.
- 13:47And she was like, oh, I'm looking for an advisor.
- 13:50And a couple months later, I'm walking, you know, through Paris every day, enjoying kind of my sabbatical, semi retirement, whatever you want to call it.
- 13:58And one day Moon says she's looking for an advisor.
- 14:00And then she's like, well, what if, you know, you could actually be a co-founder for this?
- 14:05And I'm like, ooh, I don't know.
- 14:06We're building another company, I swore I'd never do that again.
- 14:09Cause for any of you out there who are entrepreneurs, it's both a love, hate relationship.
- 14:13It's, you know, you're building something, you're giving birth to something.
- 14:16It's probably like a mother giving birth to a child.
- 14:19It's like in the midst of it, you're like, once the child's out and it's growing up, you're like, oh, it's So beautiful.
- 14:25When you're given birth, you're like, oh, I don't want to do this again.
- 14:28That's kind of the analogy I would say with building and selling a company.
- 14:33So eventually I prayed, meditated, reflected on it, and I heard it was in my highest and best good and then that's been the last three years of my life has been building OptiMatch, which we're just going to market with it.
- 14:44And it's a software for matching people based on our algorithm that aligns two people in high trust relationships based on motivators.
- 14:51So been the last three years of my life, gave up on the sabbatical and I still get to travel the world, though now I'm doing it while I get to build relationships and help people reverse the accidental adversarial relationship between human beings.
- 15:06So you're used to things not being in a ritual per se.
- 15:11It's yes and no.
- 15:12It's such a great question, Carmen.
- 15:14It's I have learned how to be ritualistic wherever I am.
- 15:19So people are like, how do you go back and forth?
- 15:21I remember there was one time in August, I think of 2022, where I literally hopped on a plane to marry one of my best girlfriends to her husband and officiate their wedding, hop back in a plane to spend my anniversary with my husband in Italy, hop back on a plane straight back to the same place I had just left to go facilitate another talk with Deepak on the beach somewhere in Laguna Beach, then hop straight back on a plane again.
- 15:42And as long as I, as long as I apply these tools, it's the structure, it doesn't matter where I am.
- 15:50I've learned that what I need is structure, and I need structure the way I need it and I provide it with myself.
- 15:57So my two hour, I might sometimes condense it down to one hour.
- 16:01If I'm on a plane, then I'll condense it down maybe to 45 minutes or an hour instead of the normal two hours I would have.
- 16:07Though I just find ways to make it work.
- 16:09I think our whole life, Carmen, is designed where we're either the designers of our lives or we're at the effect of it.
- 16:16And most of the most successful entrepreneurs I've known, thought leaders, scientists, brilliant minds, they'll tell you that we have a say, we get to design our lives.
- 16:24So I can either be at the effect of autism and my need for structure, or I can be the designer and the facilitator of it, and embed it wherever I go.
- 16:33Yeah.
- 16:34What misconceptions did you encounter when starting your new company and how did you overcome them?
- 16:41When I was, when we began building, it really has been a wee thing from the beginning.
- 16:46I couldn't be doing this without Julian and Moon, who are the co-founders who helped kind of bring this baby into the world.
- 16:53I know nothing about software.
- 16:55In fact, it was kind of ironic.
- 16:57So misconceptions, I thought, oh, this will be easy.
- 17:00The company I'd sold before was legal recruiting.
- 17:02So it was a services based company.
- 17:05I had never had to build a product.
- 17:07So one of the greatest tests of my endurance and patience has been software, because for me, I'm an idea person.
- 17:16I could just sit around.
- 17:17If somebody wanted to hire me and put me in a room just to come up with ideas, that's why the coaches I work with in companies I work with consult with me because I can sit down and literally brainstorm ideas like nobody's business.
- 17:28And yet When you go to build a software company, there's technology, there's code, there's bugs in the code, there's rewriting the code, there's features you didn't know that the clients wanted that you then get to go rebuild the product or add the features.
- 17:43So it has been very, very humbling to be a non-technical CEO running a software company, though I couldn't do it without our team.
- 17:52We're so lucky to have our CTO, Julian, who is a software engineer, in his career before ah joining us.
- 17:58And then our COO, David, who's a technical COO.
- 18:02So thank God I'm surrounded by people much smarter than I am otherwise all of my hair would be gray.
- 18:08So you would say it's more of a adaptability.
- 18:11And I remember when you and I spoke previously, you had talked about, human design, you know, that everyone has a, particular way of, learning or functioning.
- 18:23That's what it was.
- 18:24Yeah, that's, that's exactly what we've studied at OptiMatch.
- 18:27It's what I learned first, uh, over a decade ago from Julian introducing me to human design.
- 18:33We treat each other, Carmen, whether it's our spouse, our children, our colleague, our friend, we treat one another as if we're misbehaving.
- 18:42And yet, what if we're actually all designed differently?
- 18:46And we can't cultivate compassion for our differences with others until we can first cultivate compassion for ourselves and realize that, yeah, we might have our quirks.
- 18:55Can we allow for those?
- 18:57Our quirks, our shadows, our idiosyncrasies.
- 19:00And going back to the human design point, I was introduced to human design by Julian.
- 19:05It changed my life and changed our company.
- 19:07Every time we would hire somebody, we would do their human design.
- 19:11Now, here's a funny story to tie back in to the sale of the company and how I was able to make this transition.
- 19:16One of our team members, the one who had been with us from day one, almost didn't work out.
- 19:21We were literally close to not having her stay with the company because I was treating her like a worker bee.
- 19:27She and I had worked together at another company and I was like, produce, produce, produce.
- 19:31Well, I didn't know until Julian came in and did our human design.
- 19:35She was a projector like me.
- 19:36She was meant to be a leader and a great one at that.
- 19:38She's still running the company even better than I was.
- 19:40It's more profitable now than when I sold it.
- 19:42And they're doing greater, better job than I did, which is amazing.
- 19:46But had I not known her human design, I might've thrown the baby out with the bath water and been like, oh, she's not doing this, but that's not what she was designed to do.
- 19:56The moment we put her into a leadership role, she just soared.
- 20:00The team loved her.
- 20:01It was the best thing for her, the best thing for the team, the best thing for me.
- 20:05And that's why I've become obsessed, for lack of a better word, thank you autism, you know, for those of you who are familiar with people who are autistic, is we get very narrow focuses on things we like.
- 20:15And so for me, how we're designed as human beings, whether it's human design, gene keys.
- 20:21I'm a huge fan of some of the other tests out there, like Myers Briggs and Enneagram.
- 20:26And we just designed our software.
- 20:28Ours is completely proprietary, it's LAMP.
- 20:30We call it our LAMP assessment.
- 20:32It's Lychee, uh, Lychee, Apple, Mango, Pear is what it stands for.
- 20:36And those are the four types of motivators that we assess.
- 20:39And it is so helpful, Carmen, to understand if somebody is motivated by like what we call Apple, which is facts.
- 20:46And I'm motivated by Lychee, which is what is like being driven, accomplishing, getting things done.
- 20:52If I'm working with somebody who's a, um, you know, more of an Apple motivated person, it just helps me to cultivate compassion and to, to greater align teams.
- 21:01Like we have one executive, um, out of a company that's using our software that says now when she's looking to promote team members, she looks at how everybody's designed and then she actually promotes based on who's going to be most aligned because it all comes down to psychological safety, Carmen.
- 21:17Um, I'm not sure, did you ever hear of Google's Aristotle project?
- 21:20Did we talk about that?
- 21:21No, no, no.
- 21:22I've Oh, great, great study.
- 21:24I highly recommend looking it up to you and your listeners.
- 21:27It was about 10, 12 years ago, Google did a project called the Aristotle Project.
- 21:33Where they studied, I think it was thirty eight thousand people and hundreds of teams across the company.
- 21:39And they wanted to find out what has teams be most successful.
- 21:45Now, a lot of people were, had hypotheses.
- 21:48They thought maybe it's the people who are closest in age, or like to go out for drinks, or, you know, live in the same area, same race, whatever it might be.
- 21:56It turn out, what had teams be most successful across the study with psychological safety.
- 22:03And so that has become my personal bugaboo and soul obsession, having felt like somebody who didn't belong, and now seeing this loneliness epidemic where 24 percent of people surveyed across a hundred forty two different countries around the world, stated they felt very or fairly lonely.
- 22:21This was October of 2023.
- 22:24And so it's my personal passion, it's our vision at OptiMatch, how can we cultivate and create greater alignment, harmony, and trust, and most importantly, psychological safety to build better teams, so that way people can flourish in this loneliness epidemic that we find ourselves in.
- 22:44So would you say that women in midlife is, you know, who are the people that, listen and, and watch.
- 22:51our show, would you say that if we're a woman in midlife and we're kind of lost trying to figure out where do we fit in because our life has shifted significantly, would you advise that maybe you figure out how do you function best?
- 23:08So that you can kind of pursue whatever passion it is that you want to pursue or, kind of get a better understanding who you are so that you can figure out what your passion is.
- 23:19A 100 percent Carmen.
- 23:20For any of you out there listening, this is why it was so fun speaking of which, I had a friend, I was meeting for coffee today for the first time, middle aged woman in the midst of her career.
- 23:28By the time we were done, she was like hugging me and in tears and like, oh my God, you've changed my life.
- 23:33Cause I love it.
- 23:33I pull out all these tools, whether we're talking about our tool OptiMatch, Human Design, Gene Keys.
- 23:39Human design, Gene Keys, totally free.
- 23:41Go pick up a book by Robin Winn called"Understanding Your Clients Through Human Design," it'll help you understand your spouse, your kids, your colleagues.
- 23:49This is where awareness comes in.
- 23:52So many of us, we go unconscious, it's not a slight against us.
- 23:59We're all doing the very best we can.
- 24:01And yet I had to do all of this out of survival.
- 24:04So people say like, why did you create OptiMatch?
- 24:06Why did you create the algorithm that matches people?
- 24:10For me, it was not of like, oh, this will be fun.
- 24:12It was literally, I had to do this out of survival because to me, Carmen, it was like, you got a book on how to be a human being and you got a book on how to be a human being.
- 24:21And when I was a young kid, mine was blank inside.
- 24:24And so I've looked at human beings now for the last 20 years of my life as a science experiment that's like, well, how are we motivated?
- 24:32So it's been both my greatest achilles heel, where if you talk to people who knew me, God forbid, oh my God, our team members, I was, such a jerk.
- 24:39One day you'll find my memoir, it'll be called The Recovering Jerk, you know, because I just didn't know I was that big of a jerk.
- 24:46I didn't understand.
- 24:47All I could do was mimic characters I saw on TV and I didn't have any good female role models.
- 24:52So I was pulling straight and devil wears Prada.
- 24:55I was awful back in the day.
- 24:57And yet I can laugh about it now.
- 24:59And I've apologized to the people who I cause pain to and, you know, have great compassion.
- 25:04I work with a lot of CEOs.
- 25:06I remember there was a CEO I was working with lately and he's like, I have to be a jerk to get things done, otherwise people don't listen.
- 25:12And whether you're a man or a woman, you know, we have these limiting beliefs programmed in our minds.
- 25:18So I love it, it's like, what would it take, Carmen for us to number one, do a deep dive into ourselves.
- 25:24I call it the triangle of connection.
- 25:26First step is getting to know ourselves, getting that really deep inner knowing to get to know ourselves.
- 25:32Step two.
- 25:34That knowing of ourselves then allows us to connect more deeply to others.
- 25:38In fact, I'd like to suggest, I just gave a talk on this the other day in Porto, I do a lot of keynotes around the world, and I was just talking about this and I said, before you get on a call with a team member or your loved one or a friend, pause.
- 25:52Allow some slow, deep breathing, calm that, calm that amygdala.
- 25:58And then even write down one or two things you appreciate about or think about one or two things you appreciate about the other person before you get on the call or go into the meeting.
- 26:07So when you do that, step one, connecting to yourself.
- 26:10Step two, connecting to others in a meaningful way.
- 26:13Step 3, then we can begin to connect to a higher purpose, which I know is the question maybe on a lot of the women who are listening and watching these minds.
- 26:22And the last thing I'll say about that is, before you get out of bed every day, ask yourself and let this question inform you.
- 26:31What matters to me?
- 26:34What matters to me?
- 26:35Ask yourself that question and let that question and that answer inform how you interact your day and live your day.
- 26:44That's really good advice.
- 26:48I love that because I always say, you know, if you, before you have any type of discussion with someone, maybe someone said something to you and it didn't sit right with you, pause, take a breath, think about in your mind what you're going to say if that was said back to you and how would you sit with that?
- 27:11Great advice.
- 27:12It's, it's about that pause and giving that moment.
- 27:15When we pause, we're giving ourselves that millisecond we need to go from here to here.
- 27:23So tell me, I know you mentioned that this didn't happen overnight.
- 27:28This was something that you have spent years figuring out because you wanted to figure yourself out or figure out how you worked.
- 27:39What steps did you take to get there?
- 27:43Great question.
- 27:44I would say the first step that I did is I began my journey with personal development work in my 20s.
- 27:50So I started off just understanding what I didn't know.
- 27:54I was a personal, you know, personal transformation junkie in my 20s.
- 27:59So I spent probably seven, eight years, doing everything from M I T T, working with Alison Armstrong, doing work with Landmark Worldwide.
- 28:08And then I started to bring in the spiritual piece, I was very grateful two of my girlfriends at the same time introduced me to something called Kabbalah in my early 30s, so over a decade ago.
- 28:18And Kabbalah really changed my life.
- 28:20So then I started studying Kabbalah, working with my dear friend and ah business partner, Arthur Samuel Joseph, who trained Tony Robbins how to speak and Pierce Brosnan.
- 28:30And so all of the, it's kind of like that old adage, when the student is ready, the teachers appear.
- 28:35And so all of these extraordinary teachers kept coming into my life through different spiritual disciplines and trainings.
- 28:42And then it's been a lifelong journey.
- 28:44So as I, as I learned from each of these teachers, I still pull tools from Landmark, I still pull tools from Alison Armstrong.
- 28:53I'm still a huge fan of Kabbalah.
- 28:54I listen to their podcast weekly"Energy Boost," every single week.
- 28:58It's the only podcast I personally listen to every week without fail.
- 29:01Because it gives you kind of a forecast of energetically, even if you're Atheist, whether you're Christian, Atheist, Muslim, Jewish, doesn't matter.
- 29:09And it's just beautiful tools for how to win at the game of life.
- 29:12So now, over the last eleven years, I've evolved this tool set where my morning starts.
- 29:18with I sit down, I write down ten things I'm grateful for.
- 29:22I then journal.
- 29:23I reflect on any dreams, anything I might ask questions of my higher consciousness or the universe, of anything I want to know.
- 29:30Then I sit in quiet meditation, normally for thirty plus minutes, depending on how much time I have.
- 29:36After that, I immediately go into heart focused breathing.
- 29:39HeartMath has been a game changer for me.
- 29:41I'm a certified HeartMath trainer and coach.
- 29:43And anytime I work with anybody, I teach it to, like, Uber drivers.
- 29:47It's so powerful.
- 29:47It's a great, really easy tool for self-regulation and resilience.
- 29:52So then I go into HeartMath, heart focused breathing, immediately following my meditation.
- 29:57Then once I've done that, then I immediately go into inner child work, and I spend time talking to my little girl, who's about five years old.
- 30:03And just cultivating deep love and appreciation for myself and finding out that's another thing about being autistic.
- 30:10And for many of us, whether you're neurodiverse or neurotypical, we don't realize how we feel.
- 30:15We've been so anesthetized to suppress our feelings.
- 30:19So half the time I'll put my right hand on my heart to talk to my little girl, you know, right after the heart focused breathing.
- 30:26And I'll say, sweetheart, my love, how are you feeling?
- 30:29And I am floored every single time Carmen, sometimes she'll say, I'm sad.
- 30:34And I'll be like, 43 year old Jennifer isn't sad.
- 30:37I was like, what are we sad about sweetheart?
- 30:39And she's like, well, I'm really sad that blah, blah, blah happened yesterday.
- 30:42And so at a conscious level, I've had no idea about this.
- 30:46And then all of a sudden I'm like, well, tell me, what do you need about that?
- 30:50And I like to often share this with executives that I'm working with, that like when we're dealing with an upset 40, 50, 70 year old or 22 year old, we're actually dealing with an upset three year old or five year old oftentimes.
- 31:01So I address the inner needs that I have and then I don't get my stuff all over other people.
- 31:08So after I do the inner child work, then I talk out loud.
- 31:12I like to talk out loud to the universe and just ask questions and work on fine tuning my intuition.
- 31:18I get a lot of people who ask me like, how do you harness such powerful intuition?
- 31:23I've used it to navigate everything from business to traveling to choices I make in life.
- 31:29And so I'll ask myself a series of say 20 yes or no questions.
- 31:33Is it in my highest and best good to, you know, get a massage day?
- 31:38Is it in my highest and best gut and will I do a show with Carmen today?
- 31:41And I actually will write down all my answers and I'll check and see how aligned my intuition was.
- 31:47So sometimes I'll ask really deep questions and then I'll check what percentage right I am to see how accurate my intuition is.
- 31:54And the more we do this work, the more we all have amazing intuition and inner knowing great business leaders will tell you this too, great CEOs.
- 32:03However, there's so much noise and static that's why we can't normally hear it.
- 32:08Which is why it's the very last thing I do as I'm finishing part of that morning practice that I do, because then I'm in this beautiful, quiet place where I can really go internally and hear that you are knowing higher self.
- 32:21You can call it whatever you want.
- 32:23Um, you know, people call it by a lot of names.
- 32:25And I just find that that's how I live my life.
- 32:28And then I do one more thing before I go to bed is I reflect every night.
- 32:32How could I have lived today better?
- 32:35What am I proud of myself for?
- 32:37And what are three things I'm grateful for?
- 32:39So I always kind of bookend my day with them.
- 32:42Wow.
- 32:42Do you find that doing this helps you get to know yourself better or become more attuned to where you're making decisions that you're not regretting?
- 32:53Yeah.
- 32:54It's, it's like having a compass for life, for lack of a better word.
- 32:59You know, you just start to live in the flow and in tune.
- 33:03I think so many of us, Carmen, we feel like we're fighting against our husbands, our kids, our colleagues, our employees, whatever it is.
- 33:13And there's a way to have it all work.
- 33:16And the more that we're in the flow and in tune the less reactive we are then we're able to make proactive rather than reactive decisions.
- 33:25It's so cute I often I was somewhere lately and my husband called we were on the phone about something and a couple of the women were like do you and your husband always speak to one another that kindly and I said, yeah.
- 33:38Now, was I that way with my ex-husband?
- 33:39No, I owe a lot of this to Alison Armstrong, who I studied with and to the self development work and other things.
- 33:45But ninety seven percent of the time, my husband and I only speak to one another in a kind and loving way.
- 33:51Then we get the best out of each other.
- 33:53Same thing with employees or friends or whomever it is.
- 33:57You know, it's about being each other's cheerleaders while still holding healthy boundaries.
- 34:00You know, I teach a lot of people how you can hold a healthy boundary without having to be a dick.
- 34:06Now, it took me fifteen years to learn that, but you know, it's a work in process.
- 34:13You know, and it's funny cause I met with somebody today.
- 34:15And he always wears cute shirts and on his shirt, he had like stick figures of a man and a woman getting married and the bottom it said game over.
- 34:25And I just kind of made a comment.
- 34:26I said, hey, you always wear funny shirts.
- 34:29And I said, but that message on your shirt does not resonate with me.
- 34:33And he says, oh no, once you get married, game is over.
- 34:37And I said, tell me why you feel that way.
- 34:40And so he told me.
- 34:42And I said, you know, I was married once when I was younger and I remarried at the age of 38.
- 34:48And I said, and I will tell you that the marriage that I have right now is solid.
- 34:55It is good.
- 34:56I said, and I don't know if it's because my husband and I are in different places mentally, you know, we're more mature, There's a lot of things that, we're not interested in.
- 35:06We're not interested in the superficial luxuries of life.
- 35:11We're more interested in the intimacy, the love, the support that we give each other.
- 35:17Yeah, it makes a huge difference.
- 35:18I'm going to do a shout out for Alison Armstrong.
- 35:20She taught me something I will always remember this moment.
- 35:22It was seven years into my relationship with my ex-husband, and Allison was teaching a class, and she was talking about transition time, and she said, well, sometimes, when a man is in a masculine mode, or a woman could be in masculine mode, and let's say they're coming home from the office or whatever it is, they need time to transition out of kind of that logical brain into like maybe being present with you or whatever it is.
- 35:46Well, I swear, this is, so embarrassing to admit, so please don't judge me ladies for this.
- 35:52I was such a capital B I T C H with my ex-husband.
- 35:56I took it so personally.
- 35:58I'm young, I'm in my 20s, no excuse.
- 36:00He would get home about an hour after me.
- 36:03I'd be like sitting in the kitchen, being a good wife, cooking dinner.
- 36:07He comes in and say, honey, how are you?
- 36:08How's your day?
- 36:09And I'd be like, uh, right.
- 36:11And he'd go like, sit down on the couch.
- 36:12I was like, hey, how are you?
- 36:14And I'm just trying to engage.
- 36:15Uh, and he's like going and playing video games or doing whatever he was doing.
- 36:19And now, fast forward, here I am seven years into my marriage and Allison mentions transition time.
- 36:25And I'm like, wait a second, you're saying all those times I was withholding sex, metaphorically spitting in his food, angry, judgy, not fun to be around.
- 36:36He was just transitioning, it wasn't personal because then often 30 minutes later, he'd want to engage.
- 36:41And then that changed my whole life.
- 36:43So when we, there's what we don't know, we don't know, right?
- 36:45If we don't know something, we can't be angry at ourselves that we didn't know that transition time is a thing.
- 36:52When we do know it though, then we have a choice, oh, okay.
- 36:56I know I might be able to interrupt my husband when he's in the middle of a meeting or something he's really, focused on, and I also know I'm not going to get the best out of him.
- 37:03So I have a choice point now, and I'm no longer going to be at the effect of my decisions or somebody else's behavior.
- 37:11That is, that is really really true.
- 37:13And that is really good advice For women that are feeling overwhelmed right now, because life is crazy.
- 37:21Your body's changing, your mind's changing, everything is changing, and it's, out of your control.
- 37:27You can't control what's going on.
- 37:29What piece of advice would you give them to help them get quiet, centered, and make sense out of all this craziness?
- 37:39If I may, Carmen, I would love to take everybody through heart focused breathing by HeartMath because it's a really simple technique and you can do, it with your eyes open.
- 37:48I have used it in the middle of arguments with people because when you're getting activated and you're like, oh my gosh, my hormones are going bananas.
- 37:55I've been going through that myself, it's not fun.
- 37:58Then you need these tools where we can re-regulate, create greater coherence physiologically, not just as like a, hey, nice to have metaphorical thing.
- 38:07It's actually a physiological state that, you know, our Apple watches or Rings and Whoops and all of that can measure.
- 38:14So do you want me to go ahead and take us through that?
- 38:17Please.
- 38:18Okay.
- 38:19So, I invite everybody to uncross your arms and legs.
- 38:22If you're driving, you can do this with your eyes open.
- 38:24You can do it with your eyes open regardless, or you can do it with your eyes closed.
- 38:29And I want you to focus your attention in the area of your heart or chest.
- 38:36Imagine that your breath is flowing in and out right through the center of your heart or chest, breathing a little slower and a little deeper than usual.
- 38:56Find an easy rhythm that's comfortable.
- 39:03Imagine that your heart itself is doing the breathing.
- 39:11See if you can breathe in to the count of five and out to the count of five.
- 39:22Let's do that one more time.
- 39:24Breathing slowly and deeply right through the center of our heart or chest.
- 39:31Breathing out.
- 39:36How do you feel, Carmen?
- 39:37Do you feel a little quieter, a little more clear?
- 39:40I do.
- 39:41I feel calm.
- 39:42Yeah, it's believe it or not, found it kind of challenging to do five seconds.
- 39:48Work up to it, ladies.
- 39:49It's, it does take, I, it's still, I'd be lying if I'd say it's not a struggle.
- 39:53My friend, Roland, who's the head scientist at HeartMath, will tell you five seconds is like the, the pinnacle to go through.
- 40:00But that's why we start off by saying, find an easy rhythm that's comfortable for you.
- 40:04For you, it might be two or three seconds.
- 40:06Though to get the greatest amount of physiological coherence according to what they've studied, they've been studying this for forty years scientifically.
- 40:13They've used it with doctors, scientists, business people, firefighters, police officers.
- 40:18That's how I got introduced to it.
- 40:20As I was invited to host a series of shows with them in 2020 with first responders during COVID.
- 40:26And I was blown away by the fact that these nurses and doctors who are in there with the COVID patients were using the self-regulation tool to be calm in the face of all the craziness we were faced with.
- 40:36So that's why I love it.
- 40:38You can do it with your eyes open.
- 40:39I remember I had a challenging conversation with my co-founder one day and I literally just dropped into heart focused breathing and where years ago I would have gone into an autistic meltdown and felt oh my God emotional.
- 40:51God forbid, like hormones are raging, whatever it is.
- 40:54That's a really quick, easy way to regulate your nervous system.
- 40:59Who is a woman that has inspired you with her resilience and what lessons did you learn from her story?
- 41:07I'm going to do a shout out for a friend of mine, Melissa Bernstein.
- 41:10I am so grateful.
- 41:11It was actually another podcast I was on two years ago called Back to Basics with Leticia Latino.
- 41:17And one day she says, oh, you need to meet this woman, Melissa Bernstein.
- 41:20I just interviewed her she's amazing.
- 41:22And Melissa, you probably heard of them because you have children, right Carmen?
- 41:26Yes, I do.
- 41:27So anybody who has kids, many of you ladies out there may have heard of this.
- 41:30So Melissa is the founder of Melissa and Doug Toys.
- 41:33Have you heard of them?
- 41:34They're like some of the most famous toys out there next to, you know, next to Barbie pretty much.
- 41:39And Melissa became a friend of mine and has been mentoring me now for about a year and a half.
- 41:45Her story blows my mind.
- 41:48Much like me, you know, we both went through existential crises.
- 41:52She felt like she didn't belong.
- 41:54And instead of letting the darkness devour her she put all of her heart and soul and darkness into creating toys for kids around the world, and she said they've sold over a billion toys and impacted over a billion children.
- 42:09And to me, it's, I want to be her when I grow up, her.
- 42:12And she has six kids of her own, and she ran the business with her husband, Doug, for all these years, and now has a new business called Lifelines.
- 42:20So I just really deeply respect and admire her.
- 42:24As a creative person, as a businesswoman, and as a soul sister who struggled with her own existential dilemmas and yet pushed through it and still continued to create beauty and magic for the world.
- 42:38You talked about your company OptiMatch, I'm sorry It's okay.
- 42:41worry about it.
- 42:43Is, this something that is for people just like myself, or is this something, is this a product that would be used for businesses?
- 42:52Great question.
- 42:53So we designed it.
- 42:54We have a lot of individuals who want to do it.
- 42:56So if you go to om.app/survey, go ahead and answer the questions.
- 43:03I will give you a free report.
- 43:04If you came on through the show, it's fine.
- 43:06I'll give you a free report out of it.
- 43:08Um, we didn't design it originally for, you know, individuals.
- 43:12So we've had so many people, we have people who want to use it for dating.
- 43:15So it's originally designed, uh, it began being tested for therapists and coaches.
- 43:20So I personally had struggled with all, I had had an eating disorder for a decade, between 15 to 25.
- 43:26I could never find the right therapist.
- 43:28And we began vetting it originally by testing it with therapists and coaches.
- 43:32And ironically, my coach and therapist who recently passed, but was one of our advisors for our company, he was so excited, Carmen, about the product.
- 43:40It was one of my proudest moments.
- 43:42So Dr.
- 43:42Mark Goldston was his name.
- 43:44God rest his soul.
- 43:44He passed away December 31st of 2023.
- 43:47And he was like a father to me.
- 43:49He basically saved me when I was going through depression, divorce, and everything.
- 43:53And I remember exactly where I was, Carmen, when he answered our matching questions.
- 43:58Because I'm sitting there going, oh, oh God, what if Mark and I don't match?
- 44:01He saved my life, like, what am I going to do?
- 44:03And real time, Carmen, it pulls up your results of who matches with who.
- 44:07And so Mark finished his answering.
- 44:09And there in real time, out of over a thousand people in our system, I pull up as his number three match.
- 44:16And Mark just starts crying.
- 44:18He, he was one of Marshall Goldsmith's top hundred coaches in the world.
- 44:21He starts messaging and introducing me to all of Marshall Goldsmith's top hundred coaches because he's so excited about it.
- 44:27So to answer your question, marketplaces use it when they're looking to match coaches or therapists.
- 44:32Communities are now beginning to use it.
- 44:34We're about to do a partnership with a 6,000 person community to match members amongst each other because there are all these great communities, but nobody knows how do I connect people.
- 44:44And then the third one is we have a lot of consultants and HR companies that are using it.
- 44:48Like I used it to hire my own assistant.
- 44:50So we found I was getting ready for a huge conference.
- 44:53I had zero time to hire.
- 44:55Went to an agency I said, I want your top three candidates to answer our matching questions.
- 45:00Boom, selected Albert.
- 45:01He's been with me seven months now.
- 45:02He's fabulous.
- 45:03So works great.
- 45:04It's a, we've been overwhelmed by all the ways that people can use it.
- 45:08And so, yeah, if anybody wants, you can go to om O M.
- 45:12app.
- 45:12And again, if you want to try the survey, it's om.app/survey.
- 45:17I'll make sure to include that in the show notes because I'm pretty sure a lot of people want to just fill it out, see what kind of results you get back.
- 45:24Yeah, it's fun.
- 45:25Here's the thing.
- 45:26It's totally fun.
- 45:27And, you know, we have these reports that help you understand.
- 45:30That's it's self learning, self understanding, be compassionate.
- 45:34Don't make yourself bad or wrong.
- 45:36If you're too this, too that, not enough this.
- 45:38I remember I answered, we do due diligence on other tests and there was one called Kolbe and a brilliant guy I love, shout out to Justin Breen, who we introduced each other to a lot of visionaries.
- 45:48And Justin, before we meet, he likes everybody to take Kolbe.
- 45:51So I was like, okay, it's good due diligence for me for OptiMatch anyway.
- 45:54So I go take this Kolbe test, and one of my scores, I was like a 2-3 10-4 and 10 was the highest you could get.
- 46:00And I'm like, uh oh, Justin's never gonna speak with me again because I broke, like, I was worried I broke the test.
- 46:06It turned out he was very happy and it meant I was a visionary or something like that.
- 46:10I say that because don't worry about your results.
- 46:12Whether it's Enneagram or our test or any of it, be compassionate.
- 46:16The more we evolve as human beings, the more I've noticed that we can be with any one of these.
- 46:22We can be with any one of the disc types, any one of the, you know, Myers Briggs types, any one of our types.
- 46:29As we evolve, we allow, we have bits and pieces of all of this.
- 46:33And the things that maybe we resist, like I used to resist people who were super into facts, like my co-founder Julian is very analytical.
- 46:40He's a software engineer.
- 46:42And since we've used this on ourselves within our own team, it's helped me to cultivate compassion that he needs more information versus I'm more action oriented.
- 46:51And so when you do this, you just have an opportunity to cultivate compassion.
- 46:55Jennifer, what current projects are you working on and when will we expect to see them?
- 47:02So the biggest one is OptiMatch.
- 47:04Right now, OptiMatch, our partner portal, which means um companies can pay $299 a month.
- 47:10Our first 50 clients get the preferred pricing on it.
- 47:13And then they can go online and have their own partner portal and do as much or as little matching as they want.
- 47:18So that's been my baby that we've been birthing and doing the software and working on that now for a year and a half just getting the software ready.
- 47:26So that's been the big, big project.
- 47:28And yeah, aside from that, the big thing that I'm working on otherwise is just speaking around the world.
- 47:33I'm being invited to speak a lot.
- 47:36I'm working a lot with Deepak's organization and helping them here in Europe to grow And uh, yeah, just being of service to humanity that's my goal.
- 47:44Perfect.
- 47:45Where can people learn more about you and your company?
- 47:49And so for the OptiMatch side of things, you can go to O as in Open, M as in Mary, dot A P P, A as in Apple, P as in Paul, P as in Paul, and that'll give you all the information.
- 48:00You can find media appearances our interview will show up on there.
- 48:03We're just updating our media page, and you can find out where I'm doing speaking there.
- 48:07And then if you're interested in booking me as a consultant or as a speaker, you can find me there at my full name, Jennifer K as in kite K Hill, H I L L, and that's also my YouTube channel, so you can find a lot of great interviews we've done at Jennifer, K.
- 48:22Hill as a lot of my social media channel handles.
- 48:26Great.
- 48:27Jennifer, thank you so much for coming on the show.
- 48:30I will make sure to include the link to your free analysis and anywhere and everywhere where people can find you.
- 48:40Thank you.
- 48:41so much, Carmen.
- 48:42It's been such a pleasure to be with you and with your audience, and just remember, ladies, you're doing the best you can, and so is everybody else.
- 48:49That's my mantra.
- 48:51Great.
- 48:52Thank you, Jennifer, for sharing your incredible journey and insights with us today.
- 48:58To our listeners and viewers, I hope you found this discussion as enlightening and empowering as I did.
- 49:06Remember, Jennifer has generously offered a special gift to all our listeners and viewers.
- 49:13Don't miss out on getting your free report by visiting om.app/survey.
- 49:22For more details on today's episode, links, and information about Jennifer, head on over to createthebestme.com/ep074.
- 49:34If you enjoy today's episode, please don't forget to subscribe to our channel or podcast.
- 49:40Join us again next week, where I'll be discussing the core philosophy of our show.
- 49:47What is Create The Best me and why creating the best version of yourself is important.
- 49:54This is a conversation you won't want to miss as we delve into the heart of why and how we can strive to be the best versions of ourselves.
- 50:05Thank you for tuning in.
- 50:06And remember, midlife is not just a period to endure, but a stage to thrive.
- 50:13Until then, keep dreaming big.
- 50:16Take care of yourself.
- 50:17And remember, you are beautiful, strong, and capable of creating the best version of yourself.
- 50:26Thank you for watching.
- 50:27Catch you next week.
- 50:29Bye for now.