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John (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jennifer Watson. She’s a healer, high-performance coach and breakthrough speaker on a mission to help leaders heal and accelerate their deeper purpose of impact through their vital wellness, leadership genius and potent speaking. She does this through her company, Jennifer Watson, leadership. So Jennifer, welcome to the show.

Jennifer (00:34): Thank you so much for having me, John. It’s an honor to be here going into the holiday season and just honored to serve your community.

John (00:41): So you have, let’s see, not necessarily a typical background entrepreneurial background. So I always sometimes love to say, how’d you get here? What was your journey that led you to this being what you were meant to do today?

Jennifer (00:56): Absolutely. I started as a high level athlete. I was a two-time, All-American track and field athlete. Used to be pretty fast everyone, and go figure. I had my chair of injuries and I started getting interested in the wellness and physical therapy world because I had physical therapy. I went to doctors to help with injuries. And during that whole journey I was also struggling with depression and anxiety. And I started realizing as an athlete that wellness and fitness actually incorporated more than physical. It was mental, emotional, spiritual. And it started my journey toward not only healing myself and optimizing overall health, but understanding that health is mind, body, soul. And because of my thought process on how to engage health in a more powerful way, I started my own practice just a few years after I graduated from PT school because I felt that traditional way of health care, at least in the areas of true healing and optimizing even performance with Hilo athletes was missing some pieces.

(01:57): So my practice has always incorporated mind, body, soul optimization. And from there I just took it in the last four to five years into coaching and consulting and speaking because what I found is beyond my four brick walls of healing, people in leadership positions and executive and business leadership positions wanted this information. And I knew, listen, how can I accelerate this information more powerfully in the workforce? And that’s when I became a coach consultant. And now I get to also speak across the country on aspects of mental emotional wellness as well as really staying into performance and team productivity, no matter the environment that you can truly be successful and keep your health no matter what life gives you. And that’s just an honor for me to do throughout the years that I’ve had here.

John (02:47): So I’m envisioning you working on somebody’s knee and then chatting them up about leadership skills and it just blossomed from there. Is there a little truth to that?

Jennifer (02:59): It’s absolutely, it’s really interesting because a lot of people that came to me, John, were high performers, business leaders, executives that had physical issues but also had some anxiety and depression or had some performance and productivity issues with their team. So of course after working with them for a while, that’s when they started getting some of my expertise. I was leading teams and I was pretty good at it and giving them advice on that. So it was a natural bridge. Such a great question, John, because people ask me, how did you go into coaching, consulting, and speaking from your PT practice, brick and mortar, it was actually a very easy bridge to craft because what you just said, a lot of people were drawn to the type of work I did as high performing business leaders, and I got to just use my skills as a wellness provider and a leadership person because I was growing my own business. So the two got married together to really bring out the coaching, consulting and speaking, and no one’s ever asked me that. So thank you for asking.

John (03:53): I also, I’ve always said for years, I think a lot of people underestimate the physical aspect and maybe the sort of parallels to being an athlete to running a business. I mean, it is very physically demanding. There’s a lot of the, you need to have rest, you need to practice, you need to perform on game day. I just think there’s a lot of parallels. Do you feel like your background as an athlete really helped you kind of understand what was missing maybe in leaders and in entrepreneurial journeys?

Jennifer (04:22): It’s interesting. A lot of executives and leaders that are drawn to me are prior athletes. So it’s funny you should ask that question. And I will say this, I learned about leadership performing in different environments, in environments that were not maybe optimal for race performance in a powerful way. So I would agree with you, there’s a lot of things I learned in performance, mental edge mastery and leadership as an athlete. However, I want all of you to get this. What I also found is some things that were detrimental as an athlete that I had to learn to transition into different skill sets for myself and for the people that I work with to help leadership and performance in a different way. What I mean by that is this, John, and I think it needs to be very clear because a lot of high performers and athletes, former athletes see performing hard as pushing through, as getting through the hard stuff as at all costs of often health, just get it done and be successful.

(05:22): And what happened is a lot of business leaders were tanked, were exhaust and overwhelmed, and I questioned that. I’m like, there’s got to be an easy way in the business leadership world to do things that you can actually be healthy and vital and actually still be a great business leader. So some of the things I took from being an athlete that you had to push through didn’t work in business. So the things I did extrapolate that were good as an athlete were powerful in leadership and performance. But one thing I really feel downloaded just to share with your audience is actually how the transition for me was different, becoming a leader that I had to get a different relationship with resilience, I had to get a different relationship with performance because if I kept up the whole athletic press on, don’t tell anyone, suck it up buttercup.

(06:08): That’s when I started self imploding to be quite frank in my health, in my relationships, Albany in my bottom line when I started shifting what performance meant to me and the relationship with it and shifting how I could shift that for my team and be a better leader in a healthier state is actually where my bottom line took off, where the productivity and performance of my team took off. So I did take powerful things from being an athlete, but the biggest caveat I would give the leaders now is be careful about the push push scenario. I’m not saying that’s not necessary once in a while, but I’ll say on average you need to be in a calmer flow state for you and your team to actually provide value and get things done effective on a time while keeping your health

John (06:52): Well. But one of the points there though, I think athletes are especially at a very high level where there’s millions of dollars on the line of their performance. I mean rest is as equally as important as practice nutrition is equally as important as weightlifting. And I think that a lot of leaders are starting to wake up to that whole, I got to take care o