Create The Best Me

Awaken Your Potential: Resilience Strategies for Women

July 25, 2024 • Jennifer K Hill • Episode 74

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In today's episode, Jennifer K Hill walks us through her incredible journey of transformation, from the challenges of selling her company to starting new ventures, including co-founding OptiMatch. We delve deep into personal development strategies that have helped Jennifer and can help you, too, whether it's creating rituals for stability, understanding human design, or tuning into your intuition. We also touch on the importance of pausing and reflecting before interactions to foster meaningful connections and build resilience.

5 Key Lessons:

1. Understanding and Calming the Amygdala: Learn how the amygdala affects our responses and how calming it can facilitate higher brain functions, providing better coping mechanisms in stressful situations.  

2. Adapting to Change with Structure: Jennifer’s extensive travel taught her to create rituals and provide structure for herself, demonstrating that stability can be maintained amidst change.

3. The Power of Personal Development: Incorporating practices such as gratitude, journaling, meditation, and heart-focused breathing can significantly enhance your connection to a higher purpose and improve self-awareness.

4. Using Assessments for Self-Understanding: Jennifer discusses the usefulness of personality assessments like Human Design and Kolbe, offering insights into understanding and evolving as a human being.

5. Building Meaningful Connections: Pausing and reflecting before engagements can enrich your interactions, allowing you to see positive aspects and ensuring more heartfelt connections.

Call to Action:

To dive deeper into Jennifer K Hill’s work and explore her resilience strategies, visit additional information below in resources. Discover more about OptiMatch, her speaking engagements, and some invaluable resources to help you awaken your potential.

Next Week’s Episode: 

Stay tuned for next week's episode, where we’ll delve deeper into our core philosophy of striving to "Create the Best Me" by exploring new ways to be the best version of ourselves.

Thank you for joining us today. Remember, you have the power to become the best version of yourself!

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Do 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? Yeah. It's, it's like having a compass for life, for lack of a better word. You know, you just start to live in the flow and in tune. I think so many of us, Carmen, we feel like we're fighting against our husbands, our kids, our colleagues, our employees, whatever it is. And there's a way to have it all work. And 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. It'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. Now, was I that way with my ex-husband? No, 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. I am your host Carmen Hecox, and today I'm thrilled to be joined by Jennifer K. Hill, an evolutionary leader, entrepreneur, author, and shining example of resilience for women everywhere. Jennifer has hosted luminaries like Dr. Deepak Chopra, Bruce Lipton on her podcast Regarding Consciousness, and has recently ventured into the tech world with her innovative company, OptiMatch. Today, we'll be discussing tools for resilience for women in midlife. And make sure you stick around because Jennifer has a special gift for our listeners and viewers. It's a valuable opportunity you won't want to miss. Jennifer Hill, welcome to Create The Best Me. This is an honor. Oh, Carmen, thank you so much. It's my pleasure to be with you and your audience today. Jennifer, before we get started, could you please share a little bit about who you are and what you do? You're going to make me blush, Carmen, to start the show. It's so funny whenever we talk about ourselves. I was just asked a question the other day as part of a a reflection and inquiry breakout group. And they said, what's one thing that you haven't thought of in the last year that you are proud of? And 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. So I started off my career in the legal recruiting world, built and sold a company in that space in 2018. And 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. So, 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. And 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. So that's my life. Holy moly, talk about, a high powered, overachieving woman. I think you were born that way. My 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. Nowadays, I live in a flow state as you and I were remarking on before we got on the show. I'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. I was that annoying know it all, Carmen. I was literally that person who had her hand up like this the whole time, because I just didn't, I didn't understand myself. I didn't understand human beings. I had a chip on my shoulder and something to prove. And now I just surrender and let it be. And if, if I can make a difference for you, great. If something I say lands for you, awesome. If 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. I 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. So 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. So on a personal note, are you the middle child? No, actually, I'm the eldest. I have one younger sister. Love you, Erica. So I have one younger sister, and I'm two years older than her. Cause the way you described yourself as a young child, that's kind of who I was like. And I was a middle child and so was my husband. So that's kind of like how some people will say, Oh, that's middle child syndrome. So that's why I asked that question. Yeah, I think who I show up as today shows up completely differently than who I was as a child. Um I think I did fit into kind of the stereotypical first child um, you know, needed lots of attention and. You know, we're all doing the best we could. Now, 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. So 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. And for me, it was very eye opening because my father, um, you know, they say autism is a genetic. And all of a sudden, one day, I was like, autism is genetic. And 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. So It was just kind of sweet and funny when we figured that out. It 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. Cause I have adult ADHD. And well, I didn't get diagnosed until my son got diagnosed. And then I wondered, where did it come from? And I look at my parents and I'm like, oh, I get it now. Yeah, exactly. And it just gives you such deep compassion. That'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. Like my dad and I were identical, but I never saw it as that way. Like 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. Followed 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. I can have a little giggle about it because I definitely see those traits in myself. Hum, that's similar to adult ADHD. Cause I have this ritual. I have to do things in this order. If anything falls out of order. I'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? What do I do? Because the chain's been broken. I I get it. And 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. And I want to, you know, bring the whole audience in here that it's not whether you're neurodiverse, neurotypical, neuro whatever, neuro human. It doesn't matter whether you classify yourself. We all have these things that can trigger us. And 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. Some people might not know this, but we have like a three brain system. The lowest part of the brain is the amygdala, which is that fight, flight, or flee. Fight, fight, or flee. And if we're in that phase of that, we literally cannot access our higher brain functioning. What most people don't know is that our higher brain can't function until our lower brain feels safe. And the middle part of the brain is the mammalian brain. Am I safe? Are you like me? And so we're constantly going through this process. And 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. I'm not going to survive this. Into, 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? Yet we don't have that same access when we're coming from that amygdala reptilian part of our brain. Yeah. And 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. I I would think, because it changes the flow or, or the ritual. Can you share what inspired you to change and how you navigated the uncertainties involved? It was quite a rollercoaster. You know, it was both miraculous and challenging at the same time. So in 2018, we got acquired by a subsidiary of a very large law firm. And we had had a team and our team was so close. We were like a family. So the team was a part of the acquisition. And fortunately for us, one of our key team members had been an early, early team member from almost day one. And another gentleman had been with us. 7, 8, 9 years. So both people have been with us quite a while. And 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. And I was like, pick me, pick me, that sounds awesome, world travel. And this was right before COVID. So I've always had the travel bug ever since I was very young. Actually, funny little story. When 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. He said, oh, Jennifer, you don't know what it's like to run a company. You like to travel. You will never be able to travel running your own company. And for me, there's always been the side of me, Carmen, that says, oh yeah? Watch me. So the minute it was like gauntlet thrown buddy. So 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. And so at that point, I made a decision and a choice that I would go on at least one trip every month. Some are tropical every year and somewhere I'd never been every year. And that was my late twenties. And I've averaged about 20 or more trips a year ever since I made that choice. So 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. Not really, but it felt that way. Or 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. I was like, I will take door number two, please. So 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. So 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. So all of a sudden my life did this 180. Next 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. Who a few years later became a dear friend. And 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. Well 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. Now we barely knew each other, I just met him like two months ago. I said, Deepak, it's Jen Hill. I'd seen him at his house one time in New York since then. And I said, I think we need to do a global meditation for peace, given what's about to happen with the world. Like it was before the world got shut down before COVID, but we've kind of felt it. And 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. And that just completely changed the trajectory of my life. So around that time, I was invited to do a radio show. It was actually out of that, I was invited to do a radio show with another thought leader. And she then, two months later, into COVID, invited me to a private online retreat with a lot of these famous thought leaders. And 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. And Moon and I met in a Zoom room just like this during COVID in June at sister Jenna's private retreat. And she was like, oh, I'm looking for an advisor. And 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. And one day Moon says she's looking for an advisor. And then she's like, well, what if, you know, you could actually be a co-founder for this? And I'm like, ooh, I don't know. We're building another company, I swore I'd never do that again. Cause for any of you out there who are entrepreneurs, it's both a love, hate relationship. It's, you know, you're building something, you're giving birth to something. It's probably like a mother giving birth to a child. It'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. When you're given birth, you're like, oh, I don't want to do this again. That's kind of the analogy I would say with building and selling a company. So 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. And it's a software for matching people based on our algorithm that aligns two people in high trust relationships based on motivators. So 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. So you're used to things not being in a ritual per se. It's yes and no. It's such a great question, Carmen. It's I have learned how to be ritualistic wherever I am. So people are like, how do you go back and forth? I 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. And as long as I, as long as I apply these tools, it's the structure, it doesn't matter where I am. I've learned that what I need is structure, and I need structure the way I need it and I provide it with myself. So my two hour, I might sometimes condense it down to one hour. If 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. Though I just find ways to make it work. I think our whole life, Carmen, is designed where we're either the designers of our lives or we're at the effect of it. And 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. So 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. Yeah. What misconceptions did you encounter when starting your new company and how did you overcome them? When I was, when we began building, it really has been a wee thing from the beginning. I couldn't be doing this without Julian and Moon, who are the co-founders who helped kind of bring this baby into the world. I know nothing about software. In fact, it was kind of ironic. So misconceptions, I thought, oh, this will be easy. The company I'd sold before was legal recruiting. So it was a services based company. I had never had to build a product. So one of the greatest tests of my endurance and patience has been software, because for me, I'm an idea person. I could just sit around. If 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. And 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. So 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. We're so lucky to have our CTO, Julian, who is a software engineer, in his career before ah joining us. And then our COO, David, who's a technical COO. So thank God I'm surrounded by people much smarter than I am otherwise all of my hair would be gray. So you would say it's more of a adaptability. And 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. That's what it was. Yeah, that's, that's exactly what we've studied at OptiMatch. It's what I learned first, uh, over a decade ago from Julian introducing me to human design. We treat each other, Carmen, whether it's our spouse, our children, our colleague, our friend, we treat one another as if we're misbehaving. And yet, what if we're actually all designed differently? And 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. Can we allow for those? Our quirks, our shadows, our idiosyncrasies. And going back to the human design point, I was introduced to human design by Julian. It changed my life and changed our company. Every time we would hire somebody, we would do their human design. Now, here's a funny story to tie back in to the sale of the company and how I was able to make this transition. One of our team members, the one who had been with us from day one, almost didn't work out. We were literally close to not having her stay with the company because I was treating her like a worker bee. She and I had worked together at another company and I was like, produce, produce, produce. Well, I didn't know until Julian came in and did our human design. She was a projector like me. She was meant to be a leader and a great one at that. She's still running the company even better than I was. It's more profitable now than when I sold it. And they're doing greater, better job than I did, which is amazing. But 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. The moment we put her into a leadership role, she just soared. The team loved her. It was the best thing for her, the best thing for the team, the best thing for me. And 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. And so for me, how we're designed as human beings, whether it's human design, gene keys. I'm a huge fan of some of the other tests out there, like Myers Briggs and Enneagram. And we just designed our software. Ours is completely proprietary, it's LAMP. We call it our LAMP assessment. It's Lychee, uh, Lychee, Apple, Mango, Pear is what it stands for. And those are the four types of motivators that we assess. And it is so helpful, Carmen, to understand if somebody is motivated by like what we call Apple, which is facts. And I'm motivated by Lychee, which is what is like being driven, accomplishing, getting things done. If 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. Like 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. Um, I'm not sure, did you ever hear of Google's Aristotle project? Did we talk about that? No, no, no. I've Oh, great, great study. I highly recommend looking it up to you and your listeners. It was about 10, 12 years ago, Google did a project called the Aristotle Project. Where they studied, I think it was thirty eight thousand people and hundreds of teams across the company. And they wanted to find out what has teams be most successful. Now, a lot of people were, had hypotheses. They 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. It turn out, what had teams be most successful across the study with psychological safety. And 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. This was October of 2023. And 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. So would you say that women in midlife is, you know, who are the people that, listen and, and watch. our 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? So 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. A 100 percent Carmen. For 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. By the time we were done, she was like hugging me and in tears and like, oh my God, you've changed my life. Cause I love it. I pull out all these tools, whether we're talking about our tool OptiMatch, Human Design, Gene Keys. Human design, Gene Keys, totally free. Go 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. This is where awareness comes in. So many of us, we go unconscious, it's not a slight against us. We're all doing the very best we can. And yet I had to do all of this out of survival. So people say like, why did you create OptiMatch? Why did you create the algorithm that matches people? For me, it was not of like, oh, this will be fun. It 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. And when I was a young kid, mine was blank inside. And 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? So 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. One 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. I didn't understand. All I could do was mimic characters I saw on TV and I didn't have any good female role models. So I was pulling straight and devil wears Prada. I was awful back in the day. And yet I can laugh about it now. And I've apologized to the people who I cause pain to and, you know, have great compassion. I work with a lot of CEOs. I 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. And whether you're a man or a woman, you know, we have these limiting beliefs programmed in our minds. So I love it, it's like, what would it take, Carmen for us to number one, do a deep dive into ourselves. I call it the triangle of connection. First step is getting to know ourselves, getting that really deep inner knowing to get to know ourselves. Step two. That knowing of ourselves then allows us to connect more deeply to others. In 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. Allow some slow, deep breathing, calm that, calm that amygdala. And 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. So when you do that, step one, connecting to yourself. Step two, connecting to others in a meaningful way. Step 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. And 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. What matters to me? What matters to me? Ask yourself that question and let that question and that answer inform how you interact your day and live your day. That's really good advice. I 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? Great advice. It's, it's about that pause and giving that moment. When we pause, we're giving ourselves that millisecond we need to go from here to here. So tell me, I know you mentioned that this didn't happen overnight. This was something that you have spent years figuring out because you wanted to figure yourself out or figure out how you worked. What steps did you take to get there? Great question. I would say the first step that I did is I began my journey with personal development work in my 20s. So I started off just understanding what I didn't know. I was a personal, you know, personal transformation junkie in my 20s. So I spent probably seven, eight years, doing everything from M I T T, working with Alison Armstrong, doing work with Landmark Worldwide. And 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. And Kabbalah really changed my life. So 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. And so all of the, it's kind of like that old adage, when the student is ready, the teachers appear. And so all of these extraordinary teachers kept coming into my life through different spiritual disciplines and trainings. And then it's been a lifelong journey. So as I, as I learned from each of these teachers, I still pull tools from Landmark, I still pull tools from Alison Armstrong. I'm still a huge fan of Kabbalah. I listen to their podcast weekly"Energy Boost," every single week. It's the only podcast I personally listen to every week without fail. Because it gives you kind of a forecast of energetically, even if you're Atheist, whether you're Christian, Atheist, Muslim, Jewish, doesn't matter. And it's just beautiful tools for how to win at the game of life. So now, over the last eleven years, I've evolved this tool set where my morning starts. with I sit down, I write down ten things I'm grateful for. I then journal. I reflect on any dreams, anything I might ask questions of my higher consciousness or the universe, of anything I want to know. Then I sit in quiet meditation, normally for thirty plus minutes, depending on how much time I have. After that, I immediately go into heart focused breathing. HeartMath has been a game changer for me. I'm a certified HeartMath trainer and coach. And anytime I work with anybody, I teach it to, like, Uber drivers. It's so powerful. It's a great, really easy tool for self-regulation and resilience. So then I go into HeartMath, heart focused breathing, immediately following my meditation. Then 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. And just cultivating deep love and appreciation for myself and finding out that's another thing about being autistic. And for many of us, whether you're neurodiverse or neurotypical, we don't realize how we feel. We've been so anesthetized to suppress our feelings. So 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. And I'll say, sweetheart, my love, how are you feeling? And I am floored every single time Carmen, sometimes she'll say, I'm sad. And I'll be like, 43 year old Jennifer isn't sad. I was like, what are we sad about sweetheart? And she's like, well, I'm really sad that blah, blah, blah happened yesterday. And so at a conscious level, I've had no idea about this. And then all of a sudden I'm like, well, tell me, what do you need about that? And 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. So I address the inner needs that I have and then I don't get my stuff all over other people. So after I do the inner child work, then I talk out loud. I like to talk out loud to the universe and just ask questions and work on fine tuning my intuition. I get a lot of people who ask me like, how do you harness such powerful intuition? I've used it to navigate everything from business to traveling to choices I make in life. And so I'll ask myself a series of say 20 yes or no questions. Is it in my highest and best good to, you know, get a massage day? Is it in my highest and best gut and will I do a show with Carmen today? And I actually will write down all my answers and I'll check and see how aligned my intuition was. So sometimes I'll ask really deep questions and then I'll check what percentage right I am to see how accurate my intuition is. And 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. However, there's so much noise and static that's why we can't normally hear it. Which 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. You can call it whatever you want. Um, you know, people call it by a lot of names. And I just find that that's how I live my life. And then I do one more thing before I go to bed is I reflect every night. How could I have lived today better? What am I proud of myself for? And what are three things I'm grateful for? So I always kind of bookend my day with them. Wow. Do 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? Yeah. It's, it's like having a compass for life, for lack of a better word. You know, you just start to live in the flow and in tune. I think so many of us, Carmen, we feel like we're fighting against our husbands, our kids, our colleagues, our employees, whatever it is. And there's a way to have it all work. And 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. It'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. Now, was I that way with my ex-husband? No, I owe a lot of this to Alison Armstrong, who I studied with and to the self development work and other things. But ninety seven percent of the time, my husband and I only speak to one another in a kind and loving way. Then we get the best out of each other. Same thing with employees or friends or whomever it is. You know, it's about being each other's cheerleaders while still holding healthy boundaries. You know, I teach a lot of people how you can hold a healthy boundary without having to be a dick. Now, it took me fifteen years to learn that, but you know, it's a work in process. You know, and it's funny cause I met with somebody today. And 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. And I just kind of made a comment. I said, hey, you always wear funny shirts. And I said, but that message on your shirt does not resonate with me. And he says, oh no, once you get married, game is over. And I said, tell me why you feel that way. And so he told me. And I said, you know, I was married once when I was younger and I remarried at the age of 38. And I said, and I will tell you that the marriage that I have right now is solid. It is good. I 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. We're not interested in the superficial luxuries of life. We're more interested in the intimacy, the love, the support that we give each other. Yeah, it makes a huge difference. I'm going to do a shout out for Alison Armstrong. She taught me something I will always remember this moment. It 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. Well, I swear, this is, so embarrassing to admit, so please don't judge me ladies for this. I was such a capital B I T C H with my ex-husband. I took it so personally. I'm young, I'm in my 20s, no excuse. He would get home about an hour after me. I'd be like sitting in the kitchen, being a good wife, cooking dinner. He comes in and say, honey, how are you? How's your day? And I'd be like, uh, right. And he'd go like, sit down on the couch. I was like, hey, how are you? And I'm just trying to engage. Uh, and he's like going and playing video games or doing whatever he was doing. And now, fast forward, here I am seven years into my marriage and Allison mentions transition time. And 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. He was just transitioning, it wasn't personal because then often 30 minutes later, he'd want to engage. And then that changed my whole life. So when we, there's what we don't know, we don't know, right? If we don't know something, we can't be angry at ourselves that we didn't know that transition time is a thing. When we do know it though, then we have a choice, oh, okay. I 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. So 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. That is, that is really really true. And that is really good advice For women that are feeling overwhelmed right now, because life is crazy. Your body's changing, your mind's changing, everything is changing, and it's, out of your control. You can't control what's going on. What piece of advice would you give them to help them get quiet, centered, and make sense out of all this craziness? If 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. I 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. I've been going through that myself, it's not fun. Then you need these tools where we can re-regulate, create greater coherence physiologically, not just as like a, hey, nice to have metaphorical thing. It's actually a physiological state that, you know, our Apple watches or Rings and Whoops and all of that can measure. So do you want me to go ahead and take us through that? Please. Okay. So, I invite everybody to uncross your arms and legs. If you're driving, you can do this with your eyes open. You can do it with your eyes open regardless, or you can do it with your eyes closed. And I want you to focus your attention in the area of your heart or chest. Imagine 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. Find an easy rhythm that's comfortable. Imagine that your heart itself is doing the breathing. See if you can breathe in to the count of five and out to the count of five. Let's do that one more time. Breathing slowly and deeply right through the center of our heart or chest. Breathing out. How do you feel, Carmen? Do you feel a little quieter, a little more clear? I do. I feel calm. Yeah, it's believe it or not, found it kind of challenging to do five seconds. Work up to it, ladies. It's, it does take, I, it's still, I'd be lying if I'd say it's not a struggle. My friend, Roland, who's the head scientist at HeartMath, will tell you five seconds is like the, the pinnacle to go through. But that's why we start off by saying, find an easy rhythm that's comfortable for you. For you, it might be two or three seconds. Though to get the greatest amount of physiological coherence according to what they've studied, they've been studying this for forty years scientifically. They've used it with doctors, scientists, business people, firefighters, police officers. That's how I got introduced to it. As I was invited to host a series of shows with them in 2020 with first responders during COVID. And 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. So that's why I love it. You can do it with your eyes open. I 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. God forbid, like hormones are raging, whatever it is. That's a really quick, easy way to regulate your nervous system. Who is a woman that has inspired you with her resilience and what lessons did you learn from her story? I'm going to do a shout out for a friend of mine, Melissa Bernstein. I am so grateful. It was actually another podcast I was on two years ago called Back to Basics with Leticia Latino. And one day she says, oh, you need to meet this woman, Melissa Bernstein. I just interviewed her she's amazing. And Melissa, you probably heard of them because you have children, right Carmen? Yes, I do. So anybody who has kids, many of you ladies out there may have heard of this. So Melissa is the founder of Melissa and Doug Toys. Have you heard of them? They're like some of the most famous toys out there next to, you know, next to Barbie pretty much. And Melissa became a friend of mine and has been mentoring me now for about a year and a half. Her story blows my mind. Much like me, you know, we both went through existential crises. She felt like she didn't belong. And 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. And to me, it's, I want to be her when I grow up, her. And 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. So I just really deeply respect and admire her. As 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. You talked about your company OptiMatch, I'm sorry It's okay. worry about it. Is, this something that is for people just like myself, or is this something, is this a product that would be used for businesses? Great question. So we designed it. We have a lot of individuals who want to do it. So if you go to om.app/survey, go ahead and answer the questions. I will give you a free report. If you came on through the show, it's fine. I'll give you a free report out of it. Um, we didn't design it originally for, you know, individuals. So we've had so many people, we have people who want to use it for dating. So it's originally designed, uh, it began being tested for therapists and coaches. So I personally had struggled with all, I had had an eating disorder for a decade, between 15 to 25. I could never find the right therapist. And we began vetting it originally by testing it with therapists and coaches. And 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. It was one of my proudest moments. So Dr. Mark Goldston was his name. God rest his soul. He passed away December 31st of 2023. And he was like a father to me. He basically saved me when I was going through depression, divorce, and everything. And I remember exactly where I was, Carmen, when he answered our matching questions. Because I'm sitting there going, oh, oh God, what if Mark and I don't match? He saved my life, like, what am I going to do? And real time, Carmen, it pulls up your results of who matches with who. And so Mark finished his answering. And there in real time, out of over a thousand people in our system, I pull up as his number three match. And Mark just starts crying. He, he was one of Marshall Goldsmith's top hundred coaches in the world. He starts messaging and introducing me to all of Marshall Goldsmith's top hundred coaches because he's so excited about it. So to answer your question, marketplaces use it when they're looking to match coaches or therapists. Communities are now beginning to use it. We'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. And then the third one is we have a lot of consultants and HR companies that are using it. Like I used it to hire my own assistant. So we found I was getting ready for a huge conference. I had zero time to hire. Went to an agency I said, I want your top three candidates to answer our matching questions. Boom, selected Albert. He's been with me seven months now. He's fabulous. So works great. It's a, we've been overwhelmed by all the ways that people can use it. And so, yeah, if anybody wants, you can go to om O M. app. And again, if you want to try the survey, it's om.app/survey. I'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. Yeah, it's fun. Here's the thing. It's totally fun. And, you know, we have these reports that help you understand. That's it's self learning, self understanding, be compassionate. Don't make yourself bad or wrong. If you're too this, too that, not enough this. I 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. And Justin, before we meet, he likes everybody to take Kolbe. So I was like, okay, it's good due diligence for me for OptiMatch anyway. So 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. And I'm like, uh oh, Justin's never gonna speak with me again because I broke, like, I was worried I broke the test. It turned out he was very happy and it meant I was a visionary or something like that. I say that because don't worry about your results. Whether it's Enneagram or our test or any of it, be compassionate. The more we evolve as human beings, the more I've noticed that we can be with any one of these. We can be with any one of the disc types, any one of the, you know, Myers Briggs types, any one of our types. As we evolve, we allow, we have bits and pieces of all of this. And 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. He's a software engineer. And 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. And so when you do this, you just have an opportunity to cultivate compassion. Jennifer, what current projects are you working on and when will we expect to see them? So the biggest one is OptiMatch. Right now, OptiMatch, our partner portal, which means um companies can pay $299 a month. Our first 50 clients get the preferred pricing on it. And then they can go online and have their own partner portal and do as much or as little matching as they want. So 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. So that's been the big, big project. And yeah, aside from that, the big thing that I'm working on otherwise is just speaking around the world. I'm being invited to speak a lot. I'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. Perfect. Where can people learn more about you and your company? And 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. You can find media appearances our interview will show up on there. We're just updating our media page, and you can find out where I'm doing speaking there. And 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. Hill as a lot of my social media channel handles. Great. Jennifer, thank you so much for coming on the show. I will make sure to include the link to your free analysis and anywhere and everywhere where people can find you. Thank you. so much, Carmen. It'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. That's my mantra. Great. Thank you, Jennifer, for sharing your incredible journey and insights with us today. To our listeners and viewers, I hope you found this discussion as enlightening and empowering as I did. Remember, Jennifer has generously offered a special gift to all our listeners and viewers. Don't miss out on getting your free report by visiting om.app/survey. For more details on today's episode, links, and information about Jennifer, head on over to createthebestme.com/ep074. If you enjoy today's episode, please don't forget to subscribe to our channel or podcast. Join us again next week, where I'll be discussing the core philosophy of our show. What is Create The Best me and why creating the best version of yourself is important. This 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. Thank you for tuning in. And remember, midlife is not just a period to endure, but a stage to thrive. Until then, keep dreaming big. Take care of yourself. And remember, you are beautiful, strong, and capable of creating the best version of yourself. Thank you for watching. Catch you next week. Bye for now.