Before my interview with Jessica Steward, I spent some time reading her blog and getting to know her through Facebook (we “friended” each other when we set the interview time). When I learned that we shared a common background in marketing, even in the same industry, I felt an immediate kinship with her. Jessica and I compared our corporate battle scars and raised our swords in salute to how things can be when companies are run with both the heart and the financial statements.
After working for large corporations in product management and marketing roles for more than nine years, Jessica became a life coach and started her own business. Her business background uniquely positions her to do what she loves: help other coaches find their voice and figure out how to share their messages in a shackles-off way. Jessica’s fierce belief that we are all capable of living our bigger purpose is what fuels her passion to help people reach their potential and life the life of their dreams.
With your corporate background and experience, how did the transition to coaching happen for you?
Well, it was actually Martha herself, well not literally Martha Beck, but I was working at a large corporate company, and I had reached a point where I just couldn’t live that way any longer. The work just wasn’t resonating with my heart. Once I made that mental shift and got over the fear of leaving, all sorts of amazing magic started happening, just synchronicities and unusual things.
One day a coworker said, “Hey, you should check out Expecting Adam, by Martha Beck, and just listen to the message she shares with you about magic and finding it in unexpected places.” So I read that book and loved the way she wrote, loved the way she communicated her messages, loved her humor and her honesty, and I found out she also did life coaching books and was a life coach. That’s when I realized I’d been reading her for years in O, the Oprah Magazine and had no idea it was the same person! Basically hers was the only column I read regularly – no offense to Dr. Phil…
So I picked up her book, Finding Your Own North Star, and it just didn’t resonate with me. Then I found Steering by Starlight, and I read it voraciously. Now I have to tell you, I am not really a lover of self-help books; I find them just hard sometimes to read. So to find one that I couldn’t put down was remarkable. I attribute that to her language and the way she speaks; it just feels really authentic. It feels very approachable. So I’m reading and reading and I put the book down, turned to my husband and said, “Honey, I know what I want to be.” And because I’d been searching and searching for years and years, and he’d been listening to me talk about this for years and years, he just casually said, “Sure honey, whatever.” And then I kind of let that dream go.
I changed jobs, and eventually I got restless – again, and I decided to seek out Martha’s stuff – again. I found that she’d started writing a blog, and it was just when she was introducing the concepts for her newest book. There was a blog post that said, “There’s no ‘I’ in team, but there is a ‘me’.” And it talks about what it takes to be on the “team”, and it was as if she had reached out and asked me about my life and then said, “Yes! You’re on the team. All of these qualities are things that are you.” I sent it to my husband, and once he picked his jaw up off the floor, I asked him if I could sign up for her training now, and he said yes. So I did!
I had finally realized for the first time in my life that this was my life, this was my choice, and that the only way for me to live a great life was for me to begin taking responsibility for it – for my own happiness – and do what I call “happening” to my life. I began happening to my life for the first time really ever, by making my own choices. That was almost two years ago, and it’s hard to believe that time has passed so quickly!
That’s a really powerful story, Jessica!
Oh, I feel so lucky, and I love sharing it because so many people go through life believing they have no choice, that this is it, this is the lot you’ve been given, and that’s just not true. You know, when I was at the company I mentioned, I was desolate. I was hopeless. I literally felt hopeless, and cried every day. I cried one day for four hours straight, and I called my husband and I said “I can’t do this anymore.” But the fear and the hopelessness, and the paralysis were so intense, and that was really a pinnacle moment. From there it was just picking up Martha’s books, and once I started reading them, I realized that it’s not hopeless, it’s hopeful. I became filled with hope when I really started reading her stuff. I had been at this company for almost nine years, and a lot of transitions happened – one company was acquired by another and then by another, and on and on. And I believed that the only choice I had, to be in marketing, to be in business, was to work for a large corporation. And that just wasn’t the case.
So, I imagine when you started out with this corporate company you mentioned, you were excited and energized.
Well, my story’s a little bit different. When I went to college, I didn’t even want to be in business. I wanted to be a psychologist, or some variation. But from the moment I went into college, I kind of got onto that business path. And that was really the first moment I started ignoring what Martha calls my “essential self.” And when I did that, it meant that I kept making decisions for my “social self.” You know, based on what my parents – well, my dad, because my mom had just passed away – so what my dad and my sister told me.
I remember when I was a marketing and sales specialist for a consulting firm… and within the first week or two I was already thinking, “Oh my God, what have I done?” So from there it was just this urgent, almost pathological, need to find my calling. And so I looked and I looked. I mean, I became the Queen of Internet Research – sociology, anthropology, archeology, social psychology… like I said, it was pathological. And I kept waiting for someone to give me permission to change. And so I left that company – they went under and I got laid off – and I thought well, the only thing I can do is find another job – and that’s when I went to the other company and was there for nine years.
I knew, even before I got my degree, even during management classes, that it wasn’t the right path for me. But I kept convincing myself otherwise. I kept telling myself that management is really about helping people, it’s about managing people and making their lives better {laughs}. And of course I realized quickly that it was really about making money and doing what your investors needed you to do in order to make more money. Not to build a better company, but to be able to make more money. And that’s fine for some people. For me, it felt like a death sentence. It felt like a soul-sucking experience. It did, I felt like my soul was dying every day. You forget who you are. You forget how amazing you are, how funny and engaging and charming and audacious and kind – because you’re not in a place that encourages that. It’s all about rising to the level of your incompetence; stepping on other people to get up a corporate ladder. And it doesn’t have to be that way.
There are so many conversations I’ve had about improving the managerial experience, or just the corporate experience, but I think the only way you can really do it is when you recognize that money comes when you just manage it well, and when you make smart investments instead of making sacrifices. You just can’t grow a great company that way. You end up growing a mediocre company.
There are many companies that do it right, though. Zappos is one that comes to mind for me.
You know what’s so interesting about Zappos? It’s that they are all about customer service. They came from a place of creating great customer experience. And I truly believe, for anybody, any corporate employee, any solopreneur, any small business owner, if you focus on building attitudinally loyal clients and customers, you will make all the money you need – and you will have raving, crazy fans for the rest of your career. Build for them. Build for quality, not quantity.
Many people who feel discontent or unsatisfied with their life either believe, or are told, that there’s something wrong with them and they need to be fixed. How do you feel about that?
You’re not broken. You’re not a problem that needs to be solved. There’s nothing wrong with you. In fact, I just wrote a blog post today about forgiving yourself. The only way you can ever truly thrive in this world is if you learn how to forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for, well I wrote “forgive yourself for sitting down and eating an entire pan of brownies”, which I may or may not have done recently. Okay, it was a half-pan, okay not really a half-pan, more like a quarter of a pan, but still… I ate beyond satiation and joy.
You know, forgive yourself for all those little transgressions. This is not an indictment. It doesn’t go on your permanent record. And yet we live our life that way. We hold onto proof that we are broken, and we’re not. This is the human experience! You are imperfect and that is what’s perfect. My mom actually told me that. She had three kids and she said, “Every one of my children is perfect.” When I told her that was ludicrous, that we couldn’t possibly be perfect, her response was, “Only you are uniquely qualified to be you; only you can be you 100% of the time. THAT is perfection.” That, to me, is hard-core life coaching. She taught me well!
I think what brings people true joy and true happiness – and Martha really talks a lot about this – is the contrast in the life that you live. Feeling your feelings all the way through 100%. Feeling the terror, feeling the depression, feeling the fear and the anger, and then contrasting that with the joy and feeling that, because that’s the authenticity of the experience. It’s not talking away the sadness, or eating it, or burying it, which is what we do. It’s what our society tells us to do. We find an escape route – food, drugs, sleep, work, work, work, work, abusive relationships.
How do you explain to people what you do as a life coach?
Well, I tell people that I use thoughtful, thought-provoking questions and a really deep process to help them let go of limiting beliefs and live a life that is their most fulfilling, challenging and rewarding life. For me specifically as a coach, what I tell others is that I use coaching to help solopreneurs and small business owners, especially those in the healing professions, to get out of their head and get into their gig. And when I tell people that, they get it immediately, because everybody knows what it’s like to live in your head. And everybody knows how amazing it feels to just do your work. Or your play, or whatever it is. But to stop living in the space of “maybe one day…” and “if only…” and instead living in the space of “Right now, let’s go, let’s move it. I’m doing it.” And to me that’s exactly what coaching is… It’s getting you out of your head and into your life and/or your gig.
I also use video to help those same people connect more authentically with their tribe. So I teach video classes as well, so I use technology to help solopreneurs and small business owners show their amazing personalities, because that’s really helps you find your tribe and connect with them. It’s about the relationships. They’re buying you.
I’ve been fascinated by Martha’s recent writing where she talks about the trials and tribulations we experience in life, and about not running from them, but instead embracing them as “Shaman initiations”.
Yes! She’s really been getting into the Shamanistic way, and it is about fully experiencing the situation you’re going through. For example, if you have a really pervasive illness, she refers to it as the “Shaman sickness” and it’s part of the ritual and initiation to becoming a healer of the world. That there’s something bigger in store, that you’re being prepared for something bigger. Your soul is being conditioned – it’s a conditioning process – so that when something bigger comes, you’re prepared for it. I’m actually in Master Coach training right now, and that’s exactly what it feels like! Seriously, I had like a total breakdown today, thinking, “I can’t do this!!!” And it’s not even really hard stuff, it’s that I’m doing things from a totally different place now; now that I’ve been coached up and down and sideways and backwards and forwards.
You start living your life from a place of power. And what I realized today is that your power doesn’t mean you are impenetrable or completely varnished. The true power is admitting that you’re powerless; admitting when you’re wrong; admitting when you’ve screwed something up. And in that comes the power of forgiveness, and that’s what stepping into your leadership and stepping into your power means. I thought it meant that I had to be resolute and strong and in charge; that it was an authoritative power. It’s more just the power of the imperfection; the forgiveness; stepping out of the shame. It’s unlearning vs. learning, if that makes sense. And that, to me, is true, deep power. That’s what Martha – that’s what all of us, as healers – teach.
What are some of the things you like most about Martha and her teaching/coaching style?
What I love about Martha, and what I think about her whole style and the people she attracts, is on one hand she can be completely rational and logical about the science of the mind, and neural pathways, and on the other hand she’s like, “Ah, screw it. It’s about magic. That’s all I can tell you; it’s just magic. I can’t explain it.” And I love that blend of science and magic, and that unique splash of spirituality. She’s researched and done the work and built up this vast volume of fact and proof, and she applies that to the healing arts, and it changes everything. And the fact that she’s so funny and so irreverent is what makes her so approachable.
I think what’s so great about her is that authenticity and the fact that she doesn’t take things too seriously. She’s not a “guru”, she’s not a “god”. She is just a human being who has used her gifts of intelligence and her gifts of just letting go of the crap, really, the social confines, and lets it go and lets it be magic and lets it be spiritual. I mean, she’s gone through fire… when she left the Mormon church, she definitely went through the fire there. But she left a structure, she didn’t leave her spirit there. In fact, it was embracing her spirit that allowed her to step away from that. And I think that’s a lesson every human being, whether you stay in a church or leave a church, that’s the lesson. The spirit comes from within, not from what somebody else tells you.
About Jessica Steward: You can connect with Jessica by email at Jessica @ StewardCoaching.com, on Twitter @JessicaSteward, and online at www.StewardCoaching.com (be sure to watch her entertaining welcome video!)
About the Author: You can connect with Dana Reeves, the Community & Affiliate Coordinator for DailySuccessDeals.com, on Twitter @SuccessDeals and @DanaReeves.
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Tags: Jessica Steward, Martha Beck
