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Hey friends. Today I'm going to be sharing a re release of a podcast I did with Jen Whitmer, where she and I have a conversation about the Enneagram. I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to the Live a Vibrant Life podcast. I'm life coach Kelly Tibbitts, and each week I'll be here to encourage and equip you with the tools you need to grow in self awareness and invest your best energy in your dreams and your purpose. I believe self awareness changes everything. Let's get started. Welcome to Coaching with Kelly. I hope that this podcast helps you, invest in your life and your relationships and in your dreams. Today I get to introduce you to Jen Whitmer. Thank you for being here today. Thanks for having me. I always love talking with you, Kelly. I love having conversations with you. If people haven't had a chance to meet you yet, what would you like to share I know we have one big important thing in common and that is the Enneagram. So I, for work help teams and leaders solve conflict and personality clashes. So I'm a leadership speaker. I'm a certified Enneagram coach, and I specialize in conflict resolution. I'm based in the Midwest. I live in St. Louis. I married my high school sweetheart when we have four kids. I drink a lot of coffee. I like being outside. I started my career as an educator. So I was, I started off in the music classroom. I'm that strange person who really loves junior high kids. And, but I've taught kindergarten through high school and, started my, like I said, started my career as an educator and then have moved into administration and now I'm helping other teams and leaders. Do good work in the world. That's really well. Absolutely. It's exciting. You mentioned being an Enneagram 7, I'm certified, I think we're certified together through your Enneagram coach. I think that's how we met originally. Yeah. So what have you discovered about yourself, marrying your high school sweetheart and being an Enneagram 7 and having four kids? Oh, there's so many things. I think it makes one of the things I love about the Enneagram. And I think we've talked about this before, is that it gives you language to talk about the things that you're like, Oh, that's how I felt what it was. And then it's also helped me. But put language to some of those things and really develop greater compassion for myself because I was, when I was rediscovering the Enneagram, I was going through a toxic work environment. So I had a lot of extra voices in my head that weren't really helpful and were harmful. And so the Enneagram helped me reset. Okay. Here's some of the things that I do when I'm healthy and when I'm not healthy, and I could identify the difference between someone else's issue and my own issue. That was super helpful. So that's, I mean, I think for any number for me specifically as a seven, here's what I know. I love joy. Yeah. I love it. And I didn't know that other people didn't as much as I did, right? Because some of it just comes naturally. Some of his, I felt like it was my job. Yeah. And so releasing that, releasing that part that I think it's my job has been really freeing. The thing that I am learning is that many, many people see Enneagram sevens in this. Well, they just want to hop on a plane and go do the next great adventure. I mean, hands up. Yes, I do. However, I am probably the most sacrificial person. I'm, I am the one that's going to give up for community, even though I'm in the independent stance, my particular sevenness shows up in let's have fun as a group. Let's have, be joyful as a group. Let's, I love that community aspect of life. I don't know if that comes from my church upbringing and immigrant community upbringing, that tends to be a commonality in immigrant communities. So I didn't ever identify with some of the funny memes about, they don't know where their bank account is. And I mean, I could tell you to the penny because here's what I also am learning is because if I didn't know to the penny, how could I have my fun? That would be limiting for me. And so not every person thinks that way. And so the other big learning I'm discovering as a seven and the way I do life is that I am always trying to avoid what's going to limit or cause pain. Right. And that shows up in tiny little ways, like the random person who calls and I'm, and I don't want to answer the phone. Like, I don't know who you are. What do you, what if you need something for me? What if I get stuck in this conversation? I don't, I don't know. Either it's just funny things like that all the way through avoiding conflict in different ways. I am recently discovering in my own business, I was facing some disappointment and it made me, made, I didn't want to show up because I wanted to avoid the pain of disappointment. Right. I wasn't scared of actually failing. But it didn't want to hurt the seven thing. The thing that I think as a parent that has been the most helpful than anything else is that discovering that Enneagram sevens don't have a place for illogical emotions. And when I heard that, I was like, immediately like, that's it. That's what it is because I feel terribly empathetic. I am very empathetic to people with people, not to people, but with people. And, my friends will, will talk about my empathy and compassion and, and all that kind of stuff. But I also know that I don't have patience for people when they complain about something over and over again, and they don't want to do anything to change. Like, I don't know what to do with you. So I'll just make a joke or change the subject. I'm getting better, I'm getting better, but when it comes to parenting, I've said for years as a child development expert, kids are least like us in their logic and most like us in their emotions. And yet I never connected the dots, but the thing that drives me crazy is illogical emotions. Yeah. That's amazing. It's amazing. Yeah. So when that like little plunko board came on down, I was like, Oh, so it was so much easier for me to give myself grace and set healthy and kind and loving boundaries to know if we engage in this conversation, I'm probably not going to be helpful. And I could probably be harmful. And, and having that type of. Conversation with my husband. So we could do some tap in, tap out, but it made me feel less guilty. Like I'm not just avoiding it. There is something that I could do that caused my child harm, not just offhandedly hurt somebody. But I know if I put myself here that I won't be able to cope because of whatever reason, because I don't have the reserve to handle illogical, negative emotions, if I know I'm going in. To handle illogical negative emotions. I've got a lot more capacity, but if you catch me at the end of where all that's gone, right, right, right. So that little discovery, I think as a parent, as an Enneagram seven parent has been so transforming in the way I help my kids. My mom's an Enneagram seven and my middle daughter is a seven and I'm a two. And so, you know, I can sit in that emotion differently than they can. So that is really helpful. Yeah. Which is such a great pairing for us. Like any pairing is great, but for us discovering the two different things has been so helpful. I love that so much. So four kids, a husband, a job that, is home a lot with COVID. How do you balance everything? I do love on Instagram, you talk about your porch life a little bit, but how do you balance everything? I do. I love my deck and my office. I'm so So lucky that we transformed our guest bedroom into an office. Our kids are fairly independent. I, Having been a teacher for five or six years before I had kids and teaching all kinds of age levels, I had a lot of ideas about how independent I wanted my kids to be. Yeah. Mostly knowing now that I didn't want to be limited, that I was willing to put in a little bit of effort when they were younger for them to really develop a lot of independence. So that has proved to be incredibly helpful. And, so they really have done a lot on their own. When it came to home learning and that type of thing. So, but when it comes to balancing it all, I think the biggest things are the conversations with me and my husband, what's the purpose of our family? Yeah. Like, what are we, what do we want here? Then who does the best job at that? And then who has the best. The capacity to do that, because sometimes, I mean, I am by far the better cook in our family. No one's going to argue with that. But right now for the past year and a half, My Michael has done it all. Okay. He's done all the cooking and, and most of the, I would say 90 percent of the grocery shopping as well. And because that's who had capacity. Right. And that hasn't always been the case. We've traded off, but we first got married. We were in college. We lived in married student housing and he did the laundry. Yeah. Because I was. Student teaching and doing all this kind of stuff. And he worked early morning job. He would come home, throw laundry and go nap, you know, like it was about capacity and function of our family. So we try really hard to balance that first. And then because there's parts of running a family that are just like running a business, you know, like. Asks that just got to get done and nobody loves them at times. We paid when I was in grad school, we paid our 11 year old. She was 15. Now we paid her to do the laundry. Yeah. Or she was totally capable and that worked. And she was like over the moon. I 30 bucks a month. Are you kidding when you're 11? Awesome. It's so creative. 30 bucks a month for a laundress. Right. She did a great job. Yeah. You know, and, and so different things have come out in different ways. I try with teenagers and social media, it's always interesting. And so I try to respect their boundaries, but also invite them in as much as possible and let them into, let them into what I'm doing. So they are not listening to coaching calls, but they might be listening to a clubhouse room. Right. You know, they might be listening to when I'm, they have been listening to when I was negotiating speaking contract. That's awesome. You know, so just like, this is the work that I do because it's hard for them to grasp. I mean, I love my parents. They are amazing. They have no idea what I do, no concept of what it means to be a speaker or a coach, especially when it's a virtual world. And they just don't, my dad was a superintendent of a utility. My mom was a nurse, like very concrete jobs and my kids understood what I did when I was a teacher, they understood when I was an administrator at their school, like they knew the work that I did. And so integrating them in. and And pulling them in. My husband took our oldest couple of summers ago. You know, when we got to go places and on a trip, I mean, we paid for him to go, but he went on a tour with a client tour with my husband to do some scouting and video shoot for, A client. And so we got to see what it, how boring a video shoot is because he's like, Oh, dad's always traveling. He's going to these cool places. And he's like, yeah, it's a lot of hurry up and wait. And here we are, but like that kind of thing to invite them in. So I don't, I think more about how do we integrate. And be intentional more than I think about balance. Oh, I love it so much. That type of areas when I think about our family. And I love that for, I'm a little bit older than you, and I love that my children's generation, that's what we're going to do. They're going to be looking for who has capacity, who has ability, and it's not going to be, although there's still a lot of statistics out there that COVID has been very hard on moms, and that they've borne an unnecessarily high burden in trying to balance everything. So I love that you have that. Well, you are full of joy. You are on mission. You are purpose filled. So you must invest in you to keep this joy going. What are some of the ways that you have found that really serve you as an Enneagram 7 to be able to still keep your joy? What do you do to invest in you? I think for me One of the, for me, keeping my faith and, and, and my relationship with, with God active is really important to me. Like, I don't know quite how to say it because it's a lot of what people are like, odd words, like dwell. I love the word dwell, you know, like I want to dwell. I want to dwell. Well, how about love that? Love that. Which is hard for an Enneagram seven, but I have found that that, that making sure that I'm dwelling first with God is, is what keeps me really stable. And then that back to that intentionality, like, my, I, I happen to work with my husband at times in a certain client capacity. And. Keeping that I've seen you all day, but I haven't really talked to you. And like, how do we be intentional about that? How do we be intentional with our kids and that type of thing? I think for me, as an Enneagram 7, the hardest has been to learn silence, but the power. Of learning silence has been transformative almost more than any other spiritual practice. I know that sounds really crazy. Cause you think, I mean, I, I still dream of being a Bible teacher, but like, I love reading the Bible and I love doing it, but there is something about silence that has changed me and learning how to invest in silence, which sounds a little weird, but. That has really altered the way I approach life. It keeps me a little bit more stable. And I now I used to always have music going, I mean, and when I was a music teacher, I always had on the news because I'd done music all day. I needed a switch, you know, so I was listening to NPR and, I would have on other, uh, a book, a podcast. Like I've been listening to podcasts since like. 2002. I can remember having infants. And so I've always had that, but learning how to create that margin of silence, one has let me see what my real anxieties are and to allow space for them to go away. And that. I don't think I realized because I was just so afraid of it first. It's like, Oh my gosh, what a silence, uh, that learning that they can come up and go away. That I actually have more freedom. And when they don't go away, okay, now what do I do about that? I have a little bit more. I always left strategy. Always. I'm always about the strategy. And the idealistic way to do it. So if I can figure out how to then cope with that, that's been really powerful. So those are some practices. I also try to move my body every day. Like I used to, I was an athlete in high school and did all that. Now, no one would consider me an athlete, but I do walk our neighborhood just to be out. I love doing that. And it has, I started doing that probably the end of April during the pandemic. And it, I think it changed, like just, it changed the way I felt about everyday life in the middle of what no one has ever gone through before. Right, right. Well, no, I think that's huge that you value enough to see, okay, I'm going to try these spiritual practices and even if they're hard, I'm going to notice the beauty. Yeah. I know as a two, solitude is one of the recommended, you know, practices. And that was the gift of last year is to be able to Lean into that because here we are. And yeah, I think one of, and then when those things are all in place, it's a lot easier to choose those other investments. Like I noticed, I noticed last year I was like, Oh, right. I'm a business owner. It was an educator for 20 years. Like then I was doing my thing and then like, Oh wait, I own a business. And I am now responsible for my professional development and my IT department and my, I get to fix the printer. And so what do I want to invest in my business? And, so there's practices of solitude and dwelling and, and. intentional community with my family and friends and church and other things, then allowed a lot of space to figure out, okay, here's what's missing over here. Yeah. I love my intentional community. They can't be my business coach. Right. Right. Or your circle that are helping you move forward. Right. They're just different. Yeah. They're just different. You know, my business coach to be able to coach me in the Enneagram, coach me in understanding social media and like, like all kinds of different things. And so I had this idea that I was going to find the one ideal person to invest in all the things. And cause I was feeling guilty about. Like, well, if this wasn't enough, why do I need to invest in more? Tom Brady just doesn't have one coach. Right. He's got the head coach. He's got the offensive coach. He's got the nutrition coach. He's probably got some kind of yoga coach. And, and I was like, oh yeah, oh yeah. I think about how I need a community outside of my business. All the time. I know, you know, all the time, but didn't think about how that meant investing in my own professional development. I needed a wider variety of, of people. And when I was planning professional development for faculty, I always thought about that. So, yeah, that's super powerful. Well, one of my favorite things about you is your passion about women in leadership. You, understand that conflict is something we can all do. Even if we haven't learned how to, there are tools that we can get. They're just as important as understanding the Enneagram. So if you don't mind, I'd love to hear a little bit about how you continue to help people reach out and have those hard conversations that actually move life forward. Yeah. So when it comes to the women leader circle, I really wanted a place that didn't feel uber professional. I wanted it to feel like the couch at the bar at the conference. Like after you go to the conference, everybody's sitting around the couch and they're like, okay, so this is what I learned from that speaker and it's so great. But wait, what lipstick are you wearing? That's amazing. Yeah. And that's, and the reason it was actually very intentional because Idea of integration. I want people to live whole lives. Wherever I go, there I am. I'm always around. And that is who we are as people. And I think in our world's culture, we really like things in buckets. And we, Our culture is coming out of an industrial age where everything was about widgets, right? Like we created that, but we are, people are not widgets and we need to recapture actually some of the idea of an older age where the family and the business were all together. Not that we need to go back to an agrarian age, although God bless the farmers who give us food, but the concept of Oh, this, our whole lives are involved in all that we're doing. Yes, we need to have boundaries. Please hear that. The idea is that we don't have to have separate spaces for all the things. And I think as women in leaders have special challenges, we've got, we have more cultural expectations on us. We have more second guessing because we don't want to be that whatever, right? Like it doesn't, we've got a, that, and then there's a noun or a few other adjectives afterwards. And. Those are unique to women and I wanted a space to be able to talk about that and to just have fun because I just kind of need that as a person. And I want to be with those people who can hold things that are serious and deep and have fun at the same time and be okay switching back and forth. I just really liked building a space. for women to be vulnerable, to talk about the leadership struggles that they've got, connect with other women that can help them, and also continue learning. So the, the group itself is about using the Enneagram in our lives and in business. And I talk about conflict in that space as well. Well, and so I offer training and that community. So it's like, it's both, it's not, I love that. No, that's what I love about you. You are, and you are the fun. And the Enneagram is like. transformative, right? Like once people understand why they think they'll do life the way they do, it helps them in their own life, their families. So I would love for people to be able to join, how could people find you if they wanted to learn a little bit more? Yeah. So the best place that's always going to have the most up to date information is Jen Whitmer. com you can go there. If you're like, I would like to talk to you some about conflict, which we haven't totally talked about a lot, but I do a lot of help with training on conflict resolution and specifically how the Enneagram informs how we approach conflict. So thank you so much for being here today. I love learning from you too, Kelly. It's great. Thank you for joining the Live a Vibrant Life podcast. I hope our time together encouraged you, and will equip you with the tools you need to move into the vibrant life you desire. I'm here to help you live a brave, creative, purpose filled life, and if you'd like to learn more, you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook, Kelly Tibbitts Life Coach, or visit my website, kellytibbitts.com. com. I look forward to connecting again soon.