112. How to tap into your superpower as a highly sensitive person with Jo Peters

Today, we're excited to have Jo Peters, a highly sensitive person (HSP) and expert leader, join us. With extensive experience in top companies like Goodyear and PepsiCo, Jo brings invaluable insights to the table.

In this episode, Jo shares her journey of embracing sensitivity as a strength, not a weakness. She discusses common challenges faced by HSPs and highlights their unique strengths, including empathy and creativity.

Jo emphasizes the importance of redefining success on our terms and offers practical advice on thriving as an HSP. She encourages listeners to build supportive communities, honour their feelings, and embrace their sensitivity as a gift.

Join us as we explore the power of sensitivity and learn how to tap into our strengths.

Chapters
00:00 - Intro
03:01 - Jo's life story as a highly sensitive person
06:33 - What success meant before and now
09:12 - What's the biggest challenge for sensitives in business
11:41 - How high sensation seeking impacts business and life
13:35 - What's the one thing that triggers depression...
14:29 - How being highly sensation-seeking plays a great role in life
19:01 - How to use sensitivity as a superpower
22:42 - How can we have it all without doing it all
28:18 - Business advice from Jo Peters
34:32 - Outro

Know more about Jo's work at:
www.jounicorncoach.com

Connect on her social media account:
Instagram: @jounicorncoach

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Transcript

0:00

The new research are showing that highly sensitive people are only 20 percent of the population in average. That means that we are the uniques. We are always thinking about the unicorn, the people that is unique. If you talk about only 20 percent of us have that, that means that we are special. And part of that is special is that yes, we need to, everything that we said before, learn to handle it, but that highly sensitivity allows to be more empathic, have amazing problem solving skills. Because we are able to see things not only from our way, but from a lot of other perspectives and views. Welcome to the Sensitive Success Podcast, where we explore the unique challenges and opportunities that comes with being a sensitive changemaker in today's world. I'm your host, Frida Kahlbo, and I have spent the last decade recreating my life. I moved from Sweden to New Zealand and now live in the beautiful bush with my husband and two kids, homeschooling and creating a life and business that works for me with the help of my sensitivity and support others to do the same. I'm excited to share conversations with experts. Thought leaders and fellow sensitive people who also see the world through the lens of sensitivity. Thank you so much for being here, because it means that you are creating sensitive success too, which is precisely what the world needs. Let's get started. Welcome back to the Sensitive Success Podcast, and today we say a special welcome to our guest, Joe Peters. Hi. Thank you so much for having me here, Freda. Yeah, I'm so excited to have you here. And Jo is a highly sensitive person and a high sensation seeker, just like me. She is an experienced and passionate leader, speaker, coach, transformational trainer, mom, wife, and friend. Not to mention a best selling author of two books in seven countries. She enjoys helping women to discover how to have it all without doing it all. Sounds good, right? Joe has over 17 years of experience working with Fortune 100 companies like Goodyear and PepsiCo and leading personal development companies like Mindvalley. She has coached and trained over 15, 000 people on four continents and in more than 25 countries. Welcome Joe! Thank you for having me here and as we were talking in the backstage, I'm super excited because what you are doing in the world is so needed. We need to normalize the concept of highly sensitive people and highly sensitive to sugar people, uh, because that is how we are going to go from feeling that something is wrong with us into knowing that that is part of our superpower. So thank you for having me here and for all the work that you do every week with your podcast. Thank you so much. And yeah, the same to you. I'm really excited to have you here to talk about this. Uh, so tell us a bit more about your journey and how you come to do what you do. Okay. So, um, as a highly sensitive person, I start my journey with trying to be The perfect daughter and the perfect friend and the perfect everything. I finished my career in engineering and my master in strategy. Took me into working for Goodyear and then PepsiCo in the manufacturing world. And all of that, if you see it, is very not highly sensitive person. So I face all of the things about, like, getting triggered and having tears in my eyes, but then learning how to fight it because If you cry, then, then everybody's not going to take you serious because you are crying at work and then you are not tough enough to handle the demands. So for many years, I went and that is why I call the unicorn coach. I really forgot about my own magic and I start behaving like a horse trying to feed into that world. Because, uh, one of the things that I learned later on is. highly sensitive people are only like 20 percent of the population. So we are literally unicorns is really, really rare. But then instead of using it, seeing it as a strength and a superpower, I was ashamed of it. And I was trying to fight it and fix myself and get tougher and figure out a way to just, uh, Be normal like everybody else. Why I need to be so easy to cry or to be triggered, or how I can feel all of these things so hard. And I spent almost my twenties in that journey. And then in 2019, I went into that transformation in to say, no, I'm not a freaking horse. I am a magical unicorn. And was that journey of remembering that porn that I had. And then I am the unicorn coach now, because now that I remember the herd, my job is going around and helping those horses to remember that they are not horses, that they are freaking unicorns and embracing that. So I quit Pepsi and I did a very scary movement from a quarter million dollar household to in the first year in my business, it was like 3, 000. But it was about I cannot keep sacrificing who I am and my magic and keep that fight because it was exhausting and I think that every highly sensitive person will agree with me that it's freaking exhausting to try to be somebody that we are not and fight with Our sensitivity and our emotions. So since 2019, I dedicated myself into just doing it my way, creating my own rules, creating my own game and start helping, especially working moms and females into embracing their uniqueness and their personality and their archetypes to actually being able to have it all without having to do it all, that will end in the same cycle of burnout. That is where the journey became. I love that. I love the analogy with the horse and the unicorn. I tell my husband I'm not a working horse, so now I can say I'm a unicorn. Definitely tune into our magic. Love that. So what is success to you now? Well, that is a fascinating question because that is one of the questions that I fight the most with. And I fight the most with because the majority of the Education and literature and information that we have about success have two gaps in my opinion. And that is vast majority is reading by men for men, but then the other one is, is reading for just two or three of the eight personality traits that exist. And one of the things that I have true belief is that success is a very personal journey. What means success for you means success is completely different than me, even in your own life journey. What it was success for me when I was in my 20s and single and traveling the world and partying, success back then was completely different than what success for me means now that I'm a mom of a toddler and a wife and I'm running my own business. No success for me means that you balance the areas of your life. Mainly your health, your relationships and your finances to a place that give you a sense of. Peace, calm, joy, and happiness is success is that place where you woke up every morning and again, it's not, it's not all pink and rainbows. It's not that you woke up that somebody, some people say, Oh, you woke up happy every day. I call that bullshit. No, you don't wake up happy every day and you don't go to bed every day happy, especially when you have kids and they are in a sleep regression or they are sick or they were suspended from school, not happening, but it's not that you are happy all day, every day. But when you make your check on balances. The majority of the time, you're in a state of joy and, as Mr. Hicks called it, satisfaction with your life. That you feel fulfilled and satisfied. And that is success for me. And why I say it like that? Because to get to that. End result is going to look different for you and me and Carol and Stephanie and Peter and Matt, because depends on our lifestyle, where we are in our life journey, what are our personal goals? So that is success for me. I love that. Love, love, love that you've had your business now for a while. And what do you see as the biggest challenge for a sensitive for you in business? The two main ones for me are being. The first one don't take business personal and I think that is very similar to when you are when I was in corporate working for a business. And that is as a highly sensitive person. How I start to explain it is. Our energy field is completely open all the time, so it's very easy for us to not only absorb our own feelings and our own things, but the people around us. And because of that, we feel the highs higher and the lows lower. So part of the business, and especially when you are running a business, is that you have highs and you have lows. The most difficult one is remember that the lows are not as low as I am feeling them because I'm a highly sensitive person. So when I'm in the lows and I'm like, Oh, this is the end of the world. And this is not going to work. And I need to go back to corporate is getting that mindfulness. I was like, no, I am a highly sensitive person. So this is actually not as strong and as painful as I am feeling it. I am feeling it in that intensity because of my superpower that is being highly sensitive and being very aware and very open to sensations and feelings. Um, and then the other one is putting healthy boundaries, especially around customers, because as a highly sensitive person and highly sensitive people are all is, is very. difficult for me as a highly sensitive person knowing or feeling that I let down somebody. And because of that, sometimes It's challenging to say no or say, Hey, this is my boundary because I don't want to feel that feeling that pain. Uh, 1 of the things for me as a highly sensitive person is, and I'm a highly sensitive person and an empath. So it's very easy for me to feel the disappointment and the frustration of the other person. And when I know that that is because 1 of my healthy boundaries, the 1st couple of years was very challenging for me to learn to handle that and to. Not taking it personal and still walk my talk into, I have to put my max, my oxygen mask first and every no, every yes required a no and in balancing all those balls in the air to be able to show up in the best personal way so that I could help you. My client is in the best possible possible way to so important points and you're also a high sensation seeker. So we talk a lot about sensitivity on in this podcast, but high sensation seeking, we haven't talked about that much. How do you feel that that is playing into your business or your life? It was a game changer when I found the highly sensitive person description and then I start exploring the sugar, you make a complete, complete. Change in my life because as a highly sensitive person that I was telling you, I feel the highs and the lows stronger than people that are not highly sensitive person, stronger than 80 percent of the population in average. What that means is that the reaction that I had to sugar is higher and lower than normal. So I struggled with depression since I was 14 years old. Depression and suicidal thoughts and a little bit of a story. When I was 14, I was gone. I was talking to the psychiatrist and the psychiatrist prescribed some medicine and my parents that, of course, as many of us in our generation, our parents have a different way of parenting. They choose to not give me the medicine that now as an adult, I understand why, but they didn't take the time to explain me why. So as a 14 year old teenager, for me, it was like, Oh, they don't want to give me the medicine. They're ashamed of the medicine. That means that it's up to me to figure it out by myself. And since the age of 14 until I was almost 30, I fight with my depression alone, by myself. And when I start understanding the highly sensitive person and the highly sensitivity to sugar, I realized that my depression was triggered and magnified by sugar. And I literally start being able to switch those episodes of depression and suicidal thoughts with some of those refined sugars. And then I start studying and say, okay. All sugar is not the same. We have natural sugars in fruit, root veggies, and we have refined sugars that are 150 200 times more sweet. And when I link that to a highly sensitive person feels the high is higher and the low is low, I'm like, well, if this is 150 and I'm a highly sensitive person, I'm going to feel it as 300. And that make a huge change into stabilizing my mood, the way that I take emotions and balancing my highly sensitive personality because now that I didn't have that additional input that was taking things out of the whack exponentially, then I was able to be more aware of the high highs and the low lows without that double extreme. And that was like, I will tell you the first couple of years in my marriage, in my relationship with my husband, I used to hate him because we will go into a restaurant and he will be like, he will literally will escape, uh, dessert to have extra broccoli or to have more potatoes. I will don't finish my dinner, so I will have a space for dessert and just instead of the society part of you should, you should not having that connection on how highly sensitive people tend to have a high sensitivity to sugar make me feel very empowered in my decisions, in my health, in my wellness, and see how that impact my emotions and my wellbeing as well mentally and emotionally. Um, yeah, that's interesting. Definitely. It is so interesting how, how we can be so sensitive to, to different things and different nuances. Everyone, like, even though we are highly sensitive persons, we, we're so different as well. So yeah, thank you for sharing that. And how do you feel that your high sensation seeking is playing into to your life? It's been a journey to, like I was saying before, to Learn to accept and love myself completely and don't try to fix and then being aware that It's not that there is something wrong with me is something that I'm just special and then it's different so in my case, for example, I am very very sensitive to noise and to Lights, so things like going to the grocery store Is really overstimulating for me to the point that two or three years ago, we switch when I was, I was pregnant in COVID. So it was, I had a baby COVID, a COVID baby. And because of that, we choose that I was not going to the grocery stores to reduce the risk. And it was amazing to me to see the difference in my. In my week, when I was not exposed to all the lights and all the noise in the grocery store, I talk with my husband and that is, for example, one of the things that I don't do anymore. My husband is in charge of the groceries because it's very stimulating. I remember the first time that I went to Disney, in 2008, and remembering that I had to, every couple of hours, just go to a corner and close my eyes and my ears because the over stimulation was big. And why that is important has been impacting my life because if we as highly sensitive people don't learn those triggers, like you were saying, each of us had different sensitivities to noise, to light, to textures. Um, to sugar, if we don't know that we get overstimulated, overstimulated, overstimulated. And that is where we explode in an emotional way because we just can't handle anymore. That if we are proactive and we start saying, Oh, I am very sensitive to this. I am very sensitive to this. Then we start showing ourselves grace and love and start not exposing ourselves to things that hurt. It's almost like. Like, if I know that fire burn, I'm not going to put my finger in the fire. And the first time that I get burned, you're like, Oh, maybe next time it's not going to burn. No, every single time it's going to burn. And it's part of us to having that grace and that self love to say, this doesn't mean that I'm less than anybody else or less worth it than I'm at. It just means that my brain. work different with these inputs, and it's part of my self care to protect my brain to be exposed to these situations. I love that. My husband is also in charge of the grocery shopping, or I do it online. Definitely not something that I want to waste my energy on. So when I asked you what you wanted to talk about, and you said using highly sensitive power as our superpower and embrace our strengths, tell us more. Well, one of the things that I want everybody that is listening to us. To take away from this is that a statistic that the new research are showing that highly sensitive people are only 20 percent of the population in average. That means that we are the unique, we are always thinking about the unicorn, the people that is unique. If you talk about only 20 percent of us have that, that means that we are special. And part of that special is that, yes, we need to, everything that we said before, learn to handle it, but that highly sensitivity allows to be more empathic, have amazing problem solving skills, because we are able to see things not only from our way, but from A lot of other perspectives and views. And then also to be absolutely creative and being able to do things like, like coaching and teaching and mentoring and taking decisions in a board of directors in a more win win situation, because That highly sensitive situation allows to always be aware of not only ourselves, but the impact around. And when we start seeing that instead of a weakness, because I hate doing that, because then I always cry or I get upset. Then we start saying, wow, if I'm able to do that, how much more good I could bring to my community. To my work, to my business, to my family, being that, that nucleus that keep the balance and make what for us is so natural, easy for others, because that is the other gap that the things that are very easy for us, we give them for granted. Like literally being able to balance those emotions and being aware of how others are feeling and find a neutral place. You are like, duh, yeah, like, I do that since I'm seven years old, like. Yeah. Nothing good. But when you start thinking that 80 percent of the people don't have that, then you start seeing that different. When we are talking about 80 percent is that for every five people that you know, four of them are not going to be highly sensitive people. So you're in a room with five other people that mean that those other four people are going to struggle to do that, that we do with our, with our eyes closed. And that help us to get into a position of leadership. Servant leadership in a position of leadership where we are taking people with us, where we are co elevating doesn't matter if we are is our children in our family or our business or we are an employee in a corporation, then we start harvesting that that for some of us like me for years was. The weakness and the part that we are ashamed of, and then we start actually harvesting that to help us to get better on what we are and what we do, but even more important for highly sensitive people that is in communities to do better for the common good, for community, for the world. I love that. Yes, definitely. It's such a superpower when we allow it and when we embrace it and see that it actually is something that we can use and that we are, as you say, the unique, unique gifts that not many people have, but we take it for granted. So now I think everyone is wondering, how can we have it all without doing it all? Tell us a bit more about that. So, talking a little bit about success because having it all into success is I, the first thing that I will invite everybody to say is stop buying the advertising of what having it all is because media, society, the gurus, the teachers, they are all telling you this is what having it all means. This is what having it all is. That is what having it all is for them. And that doesn't have to be what is for you. That is what start becoming that, that chasing that we are like, Oh, I'm working for that. And what happened is sometimes you get it and you're like, what is wrong with me? I don't feel that satisfaction, that joy. Yeah, because that doesn't mean having it all for you. So the first thing is that each of us need to be very clear into what having it all means to us. Particularly, not what is for my partner, not what is for my friend, not what is for Instagram, for me, in those specific areas, what having it all means in my health, my body, what it means in my finances, what it means in my relationships. I will tell you, uh, an experiment that I did a few months ago that was mind blowing was, I asked in a survey, what having it all means. And goes into that root of us, uh, of space, especially females, some males do, but especially females don't feeling comfortable into asking for ourselves. So I did that survey and a lot of the answers were hell for my children, world peace, Ukraine war stopping, and all of these are beautiful things. But then my question was, so if you are a point that you are asking and wanting things for others. Will that mean that you are at the level of satisfaction that you are completely satisfied with your life? The answer always was no, but we are just braining to is not I'm not as important I need to ask for others if I am asking for myself, I'm selfish. We need to be selfless So how we do having it all is being unapologetically Into be clear into what having it all means to me What financial freedom means to me, what a good relationship means to me unapologetically. And then when I have that, understand that I don't have to do it all. That because that is the other thing of no pain, no game. Like it has to be really hard. And I need to work really hard. I need to work really much, a lot of time. Um, and I need to do it all. So, so I'm worthy of achieving it. And that's just a lie. That's a lie that we need to start understanding, like, no, as more you stop doing it all and start actually relying on others and delegating and making a priority, then you're going to have more room to receive more, because it's almost, I, the best example that I have with having it all without doing it all is. Inhale and exhale. So if I'm doing it all, I'm inhaling. What happens if the only thing that you do is inhale? You will die! You literally will die, like it's not possible. There is a point that your brain is going to overpower your desire and it's going to make you exhale. And what happens if you exhale all the time? And just give? So it's part of having it all is doing that dance of inhaling, doing, and exhaling. Receiving and then allowing that to be a path and to do that, you say, how we start doing it, that we start healing our perfectionism, we start healing that good girl syndrome, that good boy syndrome, that syndrome that majority of us get since we were little, where we need to do perfect, we need to get the praise, we need to get the reward because, because of that, then um, um, We are afraid to ask for help. We are afraid to to work in a team. We are afraid of collaborate because it's always been about me, about me showing up, about me being deserving of the good grace or the qualification of the recognition. And instead of that, especially for. Highly sensitive people is remembering that we are a community entity, and that is how we can have it all without doing it all getting into that energy of collective. And then having, because when I have clear what having it all means to you, to me, and you have what having it all means to you, and they are different is absolutely amazing. Support each other because I'm going to support you in things that are not my priority, but are for you. And I'm going to be there for you there. And you are going to be there for me to support me on some blind spots that I have. And that is where the matrix is start clicking and then the ball is start creating some momentum from the individual into the collective. Love that. Yes. So, so important what you're talking about as well. And. It's listening and they feel this and they want to start living a life that is more aligned or start the business. What would you recommend them to do? Get a support team, get a tribe. And as a highly sensitive person, please, please filter your tribe, filter your coaches, filter the podcast that you're hearing like Frida. And make sure that they are people that if they are not, ideally, they will be highly sensitive people too. But if they are not, at least they have experience and study highly sensitive people. Because if not, you are going to feel all the time that you are doing two steps forward, one step back. Because as a highly sensitive person, you are going to try to start your business or start working on this with a recipe that don't work for you as a highly sensitive person. So that is the first one, how to support team, a community, and in the possible try to hear podcasts like Frida that are from highly sensitive people, work with coaches that are highly sensitive people or are familiar with it. So you can. Stop fighting that your uniqueness and instead start learning how you are going to use that to maximize that learning curve. And then, um, the, the second one on what you can do is honor your feelings. I think that that is one of the most breaking ground things that every highly sensitive person can do and is stop labeling your feelings. The good feelings and the bad feelings, because They are not good feelings or bad feelings. If you're hearing this, I will invite you to spend two hours next weekend on watching Inside Out, the Disney movie Inside Out. To ground this concept that I'm telling you that is not good or bad. So because we are highly sensitive, we feel the emotions a lot longer, a lot stronger. So it's about, you know, labeling what are the good emotions or bad, but allowing yourself to feel them all. And this is something that is very scary for highly sensitive people. And knowing that create a lot of relief. Some latest research are showing that if you don't fight the feeling or the emotion, you will not stay in your body for more than 120 seconds. That is only two minutes. And that is a relief for all highly sensitive people because we are so overstimulated that we're like, Oh my God, I'm going to be crying for the entire night or I'm going to be upset for the entire night. But when we start, stop fighting the feelings and we are like, Oh. All the feelings are there as a message, to give me a message. So, first, I'm not labeling. These are good ones, so I want to feel more of these. These are bad ones, I don't want to feel these ones. But instead, I'm just like, no matter what it is, I'm going to allow it to feel. And I have the certainty that it's not going to last more than two minutes in my body. That I think that will be the two things that will create the biggest breakthrough in the journey of embracing our highly sensitivity. To use it as our superpower. Mm. Love that. Thank you so much for sharing that. You also have a free resource. Could you tell us a bit more about that? Yes, absolutely. I was telling you before about how the perfection is and the good syndrome is. So I have a ebook that had five things that we can do in this journey of healing on that perfectionism, that good girl syndrome, that good boy syndrome. And what to do instead, because one of the things that I found in the past was there is a lot of literature about what, what you should stop doing. So stop doing this and this and this to change your life. But how the brain works is, yeah, I can stop doing that and leave an empty space. But if I don't put something new in that empty space, then your brain is going to be, oh, there is empty space there and it's going to bring back the habit. So it's not only what you are going to stop doing, but also what you're going to put new instead to start healing that perfectionist that is going to allow us to go into that curve of being able to articulate what we want and then start using that magic that we have about our sensitivity for ourselves and the people around us to create the biggest impact in our lives and on the people that we love. Wonderful. And that sounds amazing. And we'll put the link in the show notes as well. So people can go and download that. Is there anything else that you would like to say to the sensitives that are listening? I will say take 2024 as the year that you stop hiding that you are sensitive. Stop hiding. Stop fighting your sensitivity. Start embracing it as the gift. That it is start feeling every morning freaking amazing look in the mirrors and like there is only 20 freaking percent of the humanity that had these that I have how freaking amazing that is so you don't spend a lot of energy trying to hide, trying to overcome, trying to fix that. There is nothing that you need to fix. You are perfect exactly like you are. Actually, you are a gift to the world. You are the 20 percent of the world that is a gift to help us to find that balance. Love that. Yes. Yes. Listen to that. Let's all do that. Thank you so, so much, Joe, for being here and sharing your wisdom with us and also for the work that you do in the world. It's so important. Thank you so much for having me and thank you for doing the work that you are doing to on changing the world. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Sensitive Success. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and share it with someone who could benefit from this message and come over and connect with me on Instagram at Frida Karpo. And remember, sensitivity is neither good or bad. It's what we make of it. Embrace your sensitivity and use it to create sensitive success your way.