EPISODE 192 WITH JESSICA HARRINGTON: YOU CAN’T OUTSOURCE GETTING OUT OF YOUR OWN WAY

Transcribed by Otter.ai

Erin Marcus  

All right. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to another episode of The ready yet podcast with my guest today, Jessica Harrington, and her business journey to yourself, which I absolutely love. And I have a million questions, but let’s jump into it like this really, your businessing reminds me of this. This was actually on a cover of a journal, I did not come up with this, I, you know, not going to claim that was my original idea, though no one would really know. Um, the idea of Journey to yourself, and then this cover this journal that really stuck with me is that it’s not about discovering yourself. It’s about uncovering what’s there before the world piled a bunch of crap on it.

Jessica Harrington  

100%.

Erin Marcus  

So tell me more about what it is you do, and all of the cool things and let everyone know, official official official and all that business.

Jessica Harrington  

Yeah, so my super nutshell story is I started my career in the drug and alcohol field. So I was working with men to reduce their senses from jail, and into rehab. So I did that for a couple years. I can imagine it was never a boring day. I loved every moment with them in group therapy, helped him get through CI DS, a couple other random things, and just loved it. But being there, I really learned that there wasn’t a prevention side, right? You go to rehab, like, here’s three days, they’ll go get your life together,

Erin Marcus  

good luck and mercy right back in the place that caused the problem in the first place. Good luck getting a different outcome. And then he’ll

Jessica Harrington  

believe in a rehab so many times, okay, well, how many times have you picked up a book? And how many times have you learned this new trick, and then you don’t apply it right. And so that’s kind of where my mindset went. When I was talking to my coworkers, I was talking to my classmates, I’m just thinking, we are all struggling with this one thing called stress. We’re just all reacting to it differently. But no one talks about it in that way, right? It’s just that poo poo go away type thing. So I went back to school and got a master’s in public health. And that’s actually where I learned about entrepreneurship. I learned about starting programs and doing things on your own. I’m going, Oh, wait, I can just make my own thing. Something crazy, right? This is amazing. So after I graduated, I decided that wasn’t enough debt. And so I decided to start my own business.

Erin Marcus  

So you’re gonna write, if you’re gonna do a Go Go all the way.

Jessica Harrington  

That’s what they tell you to write those damn goobers. Um, so that’s what I do. So what I do now is I educate others about stress management and burnout. And going back to what you were saying, with the journey to yourself, that’s exactly why I started the name journey to yourself, because a lot of times, it’s very easy to say, my kids do this, my boss says this, my husband does this. They don’t, I don’t feel supportive, kinda like you’re saying the weight and weight of the outside on me. But in reality, when I make one to five minutes with myself every single day, I really learn what I want to need, that I’m able to communicate whether I want to need and then I’m able to set boundaries for what I want to need. And you just start to see these things slowly transform into who you are, what you want. And a lot of times, we tend to be what others want, and what we tend to be what we think others want and need in their life. And so just really uncovering all of that and just showing up for yourself. One of the things

Erin Marcus  

you just said, that I really love, and I think this is one of the places people get messed up or, you know, derailed when they try to make these changes for themselves is slowly, slowly, because we read a book, we take a program, we listen to a podcast, whatever it is, and we go, that’s it. Right? That’s it, I’ve had enough. And what we do is we try to do such a 180 immediately. It doesn’t work, because you’re not the person you need to be to be there yet. The world around you is going Holy crap, what happened to Erin she’s lost her mind, right? And so they’re not reacting in a way that makes it possible for me at all, to stay where I said I now wanted to be, I don’t actually know how to be that person. Because I tried to jump the steps.

Jessica Harrington  

Well, it’s that 100%, but also just making it super simple. Stress is a reaction to change. So even though it’s a good change, even though it’s me being positive, Justin, even though it’s me going to the gym and me starting a business, there’s going to be change, and I’m going to have a reaction. That’s that part where you’re just bringing up now is that I don’t know that I feel that reaction and because there’s that resistance because there’s stress. It’s Oh, that must be wrong. It must be

Erin Marcus  

right. I evidently can’t do it and we go right back. And one of the ways that I say a lot about business decisions is to put bumpers in your gutters so you don’t fall too far off either side. And then another way of saying this is kind of like what we’re describing is you can still move forward via the pendulum effect. But the wider your pendulum swings, the more it hurts when it hits you. Right, like, this is what you’re like, to me, what you’re describing is, how do we make it, right? The pendulum is picking up momentum, it’s either gonna slam in you and knock you off the platform, or maybe it just bounces against you because you’ve put bumpers in your gutters, slowly, slowly, slowly like funnel to get you where you want to be, instead of abrupt, abrasive change that just kind of like are where we started with rehab, you don’t stand a chance of it sticking. It’s too big a leap.

Jessica Harrington  

And the two ways it kind of went back to your pendulum, which I absolutely love, and I might still be like, so take away the two ways I try to describe it is one simple, like, non crazy is you don’t have to run a marathon tomorrow, you have to buy sneakers, you have to stretch you have to then exercise and you have to write you have to train me

Erin Marcus  

to get a new prescription for a better inhaler. But exactly.

Jessica Harrington  

But then the other thing too, is that it’s small steps. And it’s consistent. I think that’s the other thing too. We miss a lot when you’re talking about those books. We think it’s like working now. I can do it one day, two days, and then I should have an app. So the way I try to picture consistency is I tell my friends if I’m doing groups doing one on one clinics. How many times do you brush your teeth a week?” You do it every day, because you need consistency. But you don’t go to the dentist every day to get the big scrub down. Now because you’re brushing your teeth every single day. You tell your kids you have to brush them every single day, you have to show up every single day to take care of your teeth. It’s just like everything else we’re doing. It’s a daily thing that takes two minutes, find things that take two minutes, right on a daily thing. And then you can grow into that hour long morning routine. And then you can grow that 45 minute workout and then you can but you can’t just jump into Oh, I’m gonna start an hour more routine. That’s how you become a busier entrepreneur. No, no, no. That’s how you get that pendulum swinging out. Yeah,

Erin Marcus  

right. That’s how you feel like a failure when it doesn’t work for you. And two, you know, two days into it. you oversleep by 20 minutes. And you just give up you know, we you know, that’s one of the reasons we used to say in the gym, never skip Mondays. Because the way that humans work, like if you go Monday, there’s a good chance you’ll get to at least Wednesday. But if you don’t go Monday, you may know, now you have a 50/50 chance to go on Tuesday. And if you don’t go Tuesday, you’re gonna wait till next week. Exactly

Jessica Harrington  

what and that’s how the point is to the right. If I do the little things every day, I have something to fall back on. So for example with the gym, right? So if I go to the gym every day, it’s Monday, it’s Sunday. I’m Eagles over here. So Sunday night, Eagles games are like, okay, Monday morning, it’s hard. But maybe because I’m in that routine of just waking up, I put on my workout clothes. I can do stretches, I can do yoga, I have something where it’s still the routine, where it’s not a week of nothing. Maybe it wasn’t the cardio, it wasn’t the muscle, and it was, but I still moved my body. So even though

Erin Marcus  

it’s staying away from the all or nothing thinking, yes, it’s just minutes. Right. So okay, so going back a little bit to your personal entrepreneurial journey. I totally understand this aha moment you had when you’re like, wait a minute, I could do this for myself. But the other half of that is what makes you brave enough to do it for yourself. Because when you don’t know that that’s a thing. Like I didn’t know that there was this thing I could do and be where I didn’t have a job. Until I was in my late 30s. I didn’t know that was a path I couldn’t even entertain because it wasn’t in my purview as they grew up. So it’s one thing to create the awareness that it’s an option, but what creates the willingness to jump or get pushed off the cliff and actually do the thing.

Jessica Harrington  

I think it’s a couple of things right? For me it was that I always learned how to show up for myself. I grew up in a certain kind of household, you know, there was drug addiction, there was mental health, there’s abuse, all the things and so I had to learn how to show up for myself. And so I think when it came to taking that next step to the business, it was that it was I can go quote unquote, settle and find a job that where I would teach but I wouldn’t have the teachers that I do now I have to follow their curriculum, I would have to you know, pursue somebody else’s dream and I didn’t want to do that. It was my stop thought that I had to lose. I’m ready at the lows of my life and the sense of like, I don’t really have anything, right and so either I can just stay here and just kind of keep working at this or I can just make that strive for myself and see what I learned from about it and that’s kind of what I did. It was more of that, what do I have to lose? And I think sometimes we get really caught up in it, I can lose so much I can lose my house and I lose my this. And my mindset was, I bounced back from so many things that is, and we all have all lived the hardest days till today, right? You’ve lived the hardest day of your life and you have survived. And so that was my mindset too. I have lived the hardest day and I have survived, I can do another thing.

Erin Marcus  

And I think that is something that I come across in successful entrepreneurs is a self trust that you know, no matter what happens, you will be okay. That you kind of only learned from experience.

Jessica Harrington  

Right? You only because the thing is to even go back to those books. When you read the books or go on family practice habits, you still learn from yourself. So even just something doesn’t have to be like you said that pink jumper that, you know, with the pendulum, I’m just gonna learn that new habit. To learn something about myself, I get to try something like how cool is it that every time I get to do something new, I get to learn about myself, I get to push myself again to go, oh, I don’t like that. It was really spicy. I don’t like spicy food. I get to learn how cool it is that I give myself that option every day.

Erin Marcus  

But I totally agree with you. By the way, I absolutely agree with you. But I think most people are absolutely terrified to learn any sort of negative truth about themselves and it stops them right. Like the heavy lifting I, in my business. We do marketing and business strategy and strategy to scale and all those things. But the other side of the business is how do I help you be who you have to be in order to do the plan? Because the plan doesn’t work if you can’t do the plan. Yeah. And what you’re talking about is in the way that you’re seeing it, the energy with which you are seeing it is the same energy I had to learn. It’s just curiosity. And to me, the heavy lifting and the hard work is this part. Because you can pay somebody to do a business plan and do your marketing. You can pay somebody, you can’t outsource getting out of your own way.

Jessica Harrington  

For sure. And I think it’s going back to like, I didn’t just quit my job and say, Okay, let me just start like, which is great, right? Oh, no. I don’t. That’s that. To me, that was my story. It was nine to five and I did the bartending but if I was bartending, I wish I could keep them to this day. But you know, when people were writing it, like when you go to serve or the service, like right now notepad, there were no ads, I memorized your order. So that notepad was not for you that notepad was for when it was slow. And I was writing down all my different business ideas, and the different programs, the different outcomes. So I still wish I kept that, but I’m like, awesome, but that’s what mine was always filled with. That’s all I always knew it was my book because it had all my different ideas. Some of them I kept some of them. I’m glad. But that’s what it was. It was those baby steps. It didn’t just say, Okay, I graduated. Now let me start this business. It was okay, I graduated, how do you start a business? Well, let me get these ideas out. Let me do what I learned through my schooling plus, people I talked to. So what

Erin Marcus  

do you do to keep your because you’re right, this is the path, this is the way forward. And yet we are surrounded by Instagram, we are surrounded by everyone’s marketing. We’re surrounded by everyone’s highlight reels, which isn’t wrong for them to do. By the way, as long as it’s not lying. You got to market yourself in a positive light. Because if you marketed yourself in a negative light, nobody would hire you. I get that. Right. So how do you do it? Like are there tools and tricks and tips to how do you stay your path when it feels like your path sucks and isn’t working compared to everybody else’s path?

Jessica Harrington  

I think honesty I’m very honest. Like if so if you’re all my emails, like if I send them on the email, right? I’m very honest with what’s going on. I’m not going “oh my god this is my well ” but I’ll be honest, I’m like, I’ll I was driving someone gave me my little finger tape because I wasn’t paying attention driving. I’m very honest. I’m not saying these things don’t happen. I’m not saying they don’t experience stress. I’m not saying that. That’s because I’ve experienced life. Right? That’s, that’s true, kind of on what you’re saying. Everyday everyone’s experiencing life no matter what. But honestly, I have to be honest with myself. I was honest and trustworthy from others, I have to give it to myself first. So that I can expect that from others as well. But I think sometimes again, we look for that external, but we have to start within so I have to start with being okay, well, just you kind of started during your workshop today. Oh, just you know, your Invisaligns we can kind of like, you know right now, right? These are the truths. These are things that I’m hearing right now, but it’s not stopping me from getting my point out, it is stopping me from getting something that you can understand and your audience can understand. Right? So what’s the bigger picture and me coming to this podcast? What’s the biggest picture for me? For my

Erin Marcus  

for import, I break that down to priorities. I get real black and white on that in order to keep moving forward. or what’s more important to me showing up? Or being safe? Do I need to be perfect in my, you know, in my delivery, ask the perfect question, have the perfect hair X, you know, go on and on and on? Or is it more important that this message gets out to the person who needs to hear it?

Jessica Harrington  

And kind of think like, if I had everything put together, I’m gonna try now. I really

Erin Marcus  

just like the theme of our conversation constantly, right is laughing at ourselves about what’s not like, every time you and I talk, we’re laughing at ourselves about what’s not put together today.

Jessica Harrington  

But if everything was put together, we all have that person in our field that we look up to right, no matter who it is. So one of my people is Simon Sinek. I don’t know if you know him, but one way people love him is to have every one of his speeches memorized. But I can tell you how many times he says, I can tell you when he goes oh, what was my acronym guys, I’m what was I doing? What what? And he’ll be honest, and he’s great. Yes, Peyton buckos. Right. buckos. And

Erin Marcus  

the perfection

Jessica Harrington  

I don’t need perfection. I like him more. And I honor him more because of it. And there’s other people that I follow that do the same thing. There’s like, wait, I was talking Hold on guys. My brain just left me here. Alright, now I’m back. I want to be with somebody that’s real, and showing me the real ways and showing me because when I see that, I know that they have hit on thinking they go back and forth like I do. And that makes me feel seen and heard.

Erin Marcus  

100% so, so true. One of the things I try to help people and do myself is I own the crap out of what I’m great at. And I will scream just as loudly from the rooftops. About what I have no business touching.

Jessica Harrington  

Yes. Oh, yes, I can take it. Don’t give me the technology that remains.

Erin Marcus  

Okay. I gotta tell you because this just happened. I joke that I don’t touch the calendar, my calendar. I don’t touch my calendar. I don’t fill out forms. I don’t touch any of them. I don’t sign up for things right. And it can come off as Oh, I have an assistant who does that. And yeah, that’s what lets me focus on what I need to do. So yesterday, I thought I would just say some time I knew she was out for the day, I needed to sign up for this thing. Bla bla bla bla bla, I managed to sign myself up twice. I don’t even know how I did it. So now there’s already emails going back and forth about how there’s going to be charges that are going to be reversed because I did it wrong, because I don’t pay attention when I do, you know, whatever. And no, it doesn’t. But here’s the thing. Also, I know that the fact that I can’t accurately fill out the form doesn’t make me an idiot.

Jessica Harrington  

And there’s a difference, right? You’re not a dork. Oh, it was that? Right? It’s nothing wrong with you or anything like that. And that’s the thing too, right? Some people are great cooks and some people are great with money.

Erin Marcus  

Some people are not great.

Jessica Harrington  

But that’s the thing, right? And it’s funny because my brother, he’s a super tech guy. And so I probably call him on a weekly basis with a funny story, right? But he also knows that I can make a really pretty PowerPoint. But going to your office and presenting that gives me stress because I could think about the different wires and whatnot. But if I click it isn’t the whole nine yards, right? I don’t want that. So I don’t bring PowerPoints, right? So it’s not, it doesn’t make me better because I don’t have PowerPoints. It’s just, I just know, I’m going to not be me if I have that. Yep.

Erin Marcus  

And yeah, it really is. I mean, this all goes together, right? It’s the confidence and the self awareness that allow you, right, you have to have courage, you know, even if you don’t have the confidence yet have the courage to start on our side. And the self awareness and the self worth that allows you to take the risks to do your own thing, knowing that you’ll always be okay, that allows you to start on the journey to discovering yourself right, the journey to yourself that allows you to eventually get to the place where you can have a boundary and not feel everyone’s gonna hate you for it.

Jessica Harrington  

Yes, anything you’re getting when you do this and I think people will automatically get upset when I do this are gonna be upset if I communicate this. What you do when you set boundaries, what you do when you communicate your feelings, what you do when you say things like, I don’t like this or I want more of this. You are also now creating a relationship where they can come to you and see the same thing.

Erin Marcus  

That’s the key by the way between self value and entitlement. That’s the difference. And I think that’s what confuses people. We are a little too inundated with crazy people all over social media and a very ridiculously entitled society. Having boundaries is not the same as just giving me what I want when I Want to and it’s not, you know, it has to be a two way street.

Jessica Harrington  

Two way street as 1000s goes to the point of taking that part out, but just like having the relationship, right, I mean that person where they’re where they’re at, right? Now when you’re still so your person’s not gonna come home like you didn’t cook lasagna? No, because that’s not who you are. But did you buy pizza tonight? Because they’ve worked late for sure. Right? So it’s just meeting you where you’re at? So I’m still providing me they’re like, Hey, can you have food ready when I get home? Sure. I can’t click Zanya. But I can have takeout, I know, their favorite Chinese place. So it’s just meeting yourself where you’re at? I think we get really lost not to like, oh, well, I have to make this big thing. Now, if that’s not who you are, so

Erin Marcus  

So who do you work with? Now? I mean, are these the people who used to work with you out in the world working with you? Or who do you usually work with now? Yeah, of course. So

Jessica Harrington  

my one on one has been a lot of business owners focus a lot on that work life balance, even mindset, right? And just kind of figuring out, hey, now this is getting busier, which is great. But now I want you to hear this a lot. Now, I want more flexibility. But how do I create that? Where do I set those boundaries? How do I put the away message on how to do all those things, right? So how to find that work life balance, I get that a lot. But I also get to talk a lot with college students as well, too.

Erin Marcus  

Oh, wow. Nice. When one of the things goes back to who you know, working with folks in jail, addiction and all those things, we can get all judgey. But for the most part, there’s one life incident between most of us and being in that situation.  100 members, and so

Erin Marcus  

it would be very self, you know, it’d be very safe to be able to say that these are very different populations, but they’re really not.

Now, it slipped by her. Well, that was my next piece too, is that like, my six month series program. So I do speaking, but then I also do my six month series program, where I go into the office once a month for six months. And that has been blue collar dominant. So I’m in a lot of construction on one and the H fac. And a lot of

Erin Marcus  

well, they don’t have I didn’t you know, I grew up in a blue collar world. Now, here’s the thing, I’m older. So this was, you know, when I was a kid, there was none. Like there was none of this. There really wasn’t much access. Not to mention when our parents were younger, one of my friends and I say if you look at the environment our parents grew up in, it’s amazing. We’re not worse than we are like, seriously, didn’t stand a chance type of situation. But I know from the blue collar world they didn’t. They were slower to have access to this type of knowledge, then in an office versus on a manufacturing floor. Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. So if people want to continue this conversation with you and learn more about what you do, and have you come to their office and speak about this, because again, in my world, this is what I see. I see amazing, amazing, amazing, brilliant people not getting anywhere near where they could. And it’s not because they don’t have a marketing plan. And it’s not because they don’t have a strategy. It’s because of this piece that you’ve been talking about, and needing to get this dialed in in order to be able to be the person like that’s where this whole podcast came from. You’ll never do what it takes until you become the person it takes to do it not in a negative way, but in a positive way. So how do they reach you? How do they find you? How do they continue this conversation?

Yeah, of course. So everything from all the different ways I can work with you from my podcast that Erin is also on to any events that I’m hosting, etc. It’s at my website called Journey to yourself.net make sure it’s dot net journeys. yourself.net

Erin Marcus  

awesome. We will make it easy and include the link. Thank you so much for sharing your time, your energy, your story, all of your insights, all the things I love about chatting with you. Love you. Thank you