BONUS: Real Self-Coaching with Jennifer Dent Brown

Welcome to the Make Money as a Life Coach® podcast, where sales expert and master coach Stacey Boehman teaches you how to make your first 2K, 20K, and 200K using her proven formula.

Stacey: Hey, coaches. Welcome to another special bonus episode that we have on the podcast this week, featuring my brilliant Black coaches from the 2K community that are here to teach me so much, here to teach you so much, and are seriously leading our entire community right now in 2K. I’m so grateful to have you, Miss Jennifer – do you go by Jennifer Dent Brown or just Jennifer Brown?

Jennifer: Jennifer Dent Brown.

Stacey: Alright, welcome to the podcast. Introduce yourself.

Jennifer: Thank you, favorite coach. I’m so excited to be here. This is kind of like a huge moment for me to be featured on your podcast. You know, I admire you and I love you so much and you’ve taught me so incredibly much.

Stacey: We’ve been coaching together for a while.

Jennifer: Yes, and at the time, I couldn’t see it. But now, I see everything so clearly, like all of the personal transformation and growth is all kind of, like, coming to full circle now.

Stacey: That’s awesome. So, tell everyone what you do. Let’s start there and then we’ll talk about what you want to talk about today.

Jennifer: Okay, so, I’m a life and weight loss coach and I help women learn to stop dieting forever, very simply. Women who have been on the diet rollercoaster for years and years and years and years and seriously been yoyo dieting, it’s like, no, it’s time to stop and I’m going to teach you how to un-diet your brain so you can begin to lose weight again…

Stacey: How to un-diet your brain. That’s so good. I love that. I think people – what was it, intelligent – Sade just gave me another term earlier today that I was like, “What, wait, that’s so good.” Now, I can’t think of what it was. But you guys have some really good terminology for the coaching that you do, like really amazing concepts that I’m like, “Wait, what?” That’s a good one, un-diet your brain, so good.

Okay, so I asked you to come on the podcast because you really showed up very early on in 2K and led the narrative for our group and showed up as a leader and said, “Here’s my work. This is what’s happening with me. This is how I’m working through this.” So, I wanted to have you on the podcast and I have told everybody, like, this is your platform. You lead this, you talk about what you want to talk about. The conversation has been all over the place. So, we already talked about what we’re going to talk about, but tell everybody else what you’re going to talk about today.

Jennifer: I want to talk about the importance of learning how to process your emotions by self-coaching, very simply…

Stacey: And how to not surface – what did you call it? Surface self-coaching?

Jennifer: Surface self-coaching, yeah, because that doesn’t necessarily…

Stacey: That’s a good one.

Jennifer: It just came up. Yeah, that’s exactly what my experience was with self-coaching for, like, a year.

Stacey: Do you want to talk about that? Do you want to start there? I think that knowing your experience ahead of time of what your self-coaching experience was like, and then bringing the present current events into the conversation and then how your self-coaching developed into a deeper practice, I think that could be really useful. I have to stop saying fun because I say that, and this is not fun. That’s not the right word for it.

Jennifer: I understand…

Stacey: More cognizant of like, “This will be useful.” Okay, so, let’s start there. what was your self-coaching practice like? Like, when we were working together in the mastermind, talk about that a little bit.

Jennifer: I was struggling with the self-coaching thing. So, I was introduced to the model because I worked with Brenda Lomeli and that was like, okay, it works really well for weight loss and I actually realized later, like, “Oh, that’s cute…” to be able to use the model to stop overeating, stop eating so much. Very useful in that way.

And then, when I was put into a situation in a mastermind where I just felt like a complete fish out of water and I struggled with compare and despair. I didn’t think I was good enough to be there. And so, I had all of these self-defeating thoughts in my head. And then, on top of it, I didn’t know how to do self-coaching. I tried and it wasn’t working and it just didn’t work for me.

Stacey: Can I just stop you and ask you, what does it look like to try to self-coach? Can you try to explain that?

Jennifer: Totally, yeah. It was part of my morning routine. So, I had 15 to 20 minutes to sit down, notebook in my hand, to try to self-coach. But what would happen is I’d pick up my phone and start, you know, with the distractions. And then, before you know it, because I was still working fulltime, I said, “Oh, I’ve got to get ready for work,” and so there goes the self-coaching.

But just, like forcing myself to write down my thoughts, being like, “Okay, this is how I’m feeling,” and then not wanting to really address how I was feeling. So, finding another distraction to, like, not even have to go there.

Stacey: So, would you, like, get all the way through a model and then start distracting, or get to the feeling line and, like, check out?

Jennifer: You know what I would always try to do? I would always put my goal as the result. So, I would start there. But I was so far removed from all of the thinking that was keeping me from my goal, it just made me feel even worse because I felt like I just didn’t know exactly what to do. And so, for me, self-coaching was actually making me feel worse about what I was trying to accomplish and what I was trying to do.

Stacey: Yeah, but not because of the self-coaching, just the way you were approaching it.

Jennifer: The way I was approaching it and my thought about it, yeah.

Stacey: Yeah, I think that this is such an amazing topic that I can’t believe you wanted to talk about. It’s such an amazing topic and so useful right now where I think it’s the hardest thing to explain to people what self-coaching is. The best way I’ve been able to explain it to my students is how you know you’re doing it right is if you get up different, with a different awareness.

You may solve the emotion, but it might be like you’re experiencing the emotion differently, you’re experiencing your mind differently, you’re experiencing the world – there’s just a level of awareness, something has shifted and, you know, I even struggle with my own self-coaching to do that. There are times where I sit down and I’m like, “I don’t actually want to self-coach here.”

So, that might be something to start with is, like, I think you have to really know, when you’re sitting down, do you really wat to coach yourself? Do you want to deal with the emotion? Do you want to feel the emotion? Do you want to get out of the emotion? Do you really want to do that work?

Because sometimes, I think I will do this – even now, I saw it this week, I’m sitting here, like writing everything down, and then I’m like, I do exactly what you said, the distraction, like Facebook, and that will be a better use of my time or something, like let me just move on because it’s not registering as useful. Okay, so you had that experience and then what happened?

 

Jennifer: Yeah, and the other thing I want to mention too about why self-coaching was so difficult is just because I just didn’t know how to address my feelings. Like, for me, you feel good or you feel bad, or you’re somewhere in the middle. But asking me to describe a certain feeling was very, very difficult. And when I started thinking about that, I was like – my brother and I talk about it all the time. We grew up in a household where our parents showed us love by making sure we had good education and making sure we had summer vacations and experiences and things like that.

But nobody was ever like, “How was your day today,” or, “How are you feeling?” So, just that language of expressing how I was feeling just was completely foreign to me. I think that was also part of the problem…

Stacey: Just not knowing how to express what emotion you’re experiencing? Not knowing how to even like name it in your body?

Jennifer: Oh, that was a whole different thing. I remember, you coached me on that. Naming it is one thing, right? So, that was a difficult thing, to name it beyond, like, “Oh, I feel good,” or, “I feel not so good…”

Stacey: Right, like actually name the specific emotion…

Jennifer: Right, so that was one thing, one challenge. And then, it’s like, where do you feel it in your body? And it’s like, “What do you mean, where do I feel it in my body?” That was a completely foreign thing to me and I felt like you were all talking, like, Greek. Like, you and Elizabeth are really good at describing emotions and I’m like, clueless, just completely disconnected.

Stacey: Okay, so, that was the struggle. Tell me about what it was like building your business and being in your life and working fulltime and having a coaching business while this struggle was happening.

Jennifer: So, I got a one on one coach because it was so much of a struggle of building my business and I was using my job…

Stacey: And being in a mastermind and thinking everyone is speaking Chinese… Wait, you used a different one…

Jennifer: Greek…

Stacey: Chinese is the one I use. And it’s funny, I just interviewed someone and they used a different one, but it was like speaking a different language. I just genuinely think that that’s the way it feels.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Stacey: So, being in there, you hired a one on one coach.

Jennifer: Yeah, I hired Lindsay; love, love, love. And that was actually the first time I ever hired a one on one coach before. And it never dawned on me – because I’ve been in coaching programs that you mention, like, if you’re not having your own breakthrough, it’s hard for you to help your clients get breakthroughs. And I was in such, like, a mental gutter. I was like, “Oh, maybe I should get a one on one coach. This sounds like a really good idea.”

And so even at that point, like, working with Lindsay, I had to teach myself how to be coached. For me, that meant thinking ahead of time, like, how am I really feeling? So, I could tell her. But for, I don’t know, maybe the first month or two, I was like, “Oh yeah, I’m feeling good. Things are going good.”

Or I would kind of give her a surface, like, “Oh this thing is bothering me.” But it wasn’t the really in-depth description of what I was really thinking until I was maybe three or four months on, working with her every week.

Stacey: So, you had to learn how to be aware in order to be coachable?

Jennifer: Yeah. One, I had to learn to be aware. And also, I had to be open and be vulnerable to sharing my true feelings and my true thoughts. And that was something that I realized, you know, through the coaching process and through this personal crisis that’s recently happened, was something I just didn’t do.

Stacey: Do you think that – I’m just curious. I don’t know what the answer is to this. But do you think that Black women, or Black men, do you think that vulnerability can be a really scary experience, or something that’s not taught or not – do you know what I’m saying?

Jennifer: Oh yeah…

Stacey: I don’t think anyone is taught vulnerability. But I think, if there were a vulnerable population of people in our country, we could all say that African Americans would be that population. And so, do you think it could be harder as a Black woman to open yourself up to letting…

Jennifer: 100%.

Stacey: Could you speak on that a little bit?

Jennifer: Yeah, and that’s one of the things that came up for me was, like, “Damn, I’ve been living my whole entire life hiding and not being open to how I’m feeling, trying to play small, not wanting to be seen, not wanting to be heard.” And I just wasn’t. And just feeling really terrible. Just feeling, like, something is not right with my life. But not having the language to even express it.

So, it’s like, no you keep going, you work. You get a job. You work really hard. You work for that 1.5% increase. Like, I had a Masters degree. You keep achieving things. And when you achieve things, it seems like, “Okay, well you’re doing okay from the outside.” But on the inside, it’s like, “I’m not happy. I’m just not happy.”

And you don’t even have a language to explain or describe why you’re not happy because we’ve got all these things. We’ve done better than the generations before us, so you should absolutely be happy. But just not knowing what to talk about and how to express yourself.

Stacey: Yeah, and I feel like some of my students this week have expressed, like, you know, there’s also this inherent fear in being seen and being heard and being out in display. And what is your experience about that? Or what would you say to that? If that’s their struggle if, like, “You’re telling me to be amazing at self-coaching, to have really effective self-coaching, I have to be vulnerable. But vulnerable, for me, feels like I’m going to put myself in danger’s way. I’m going to be seen. I’m going to be heard and there is danger there.”

Jennifer: Yeah, so I had to get coached on my thoughts about self-coaching, and one of the things that I walked away with from that one coaching session was, “Daily self-coaching is a gift I give myself.” And there is no right or wrong way to do it.

So, I have that written down on my desk, “Daily self-coaching is a gift I give myself.” And why would I not want to give myself a gift? So, I’m just going to do it and see what happens, just try it and keep doing it. And I may not do it right, whatever right is, but I’m going to keep doing it as a practice and as a gift I give myself and an awareness that will eventually come. And that’s what happened.

I just started – I stopped following what I thought self-coaching was, like doing the thought download and the unintentional and intentional. And I would just write my feelings out. I would ask myself questions. And then, that’s how I got to that really, like, powerful, amazing, personal breakthrough that I shared in 2K, and just going through that process.

Stacey: And I think that that’s the key is it was a personal breakthrough. So, I’m just thinking of my students who it’s like, I coached a couple of people yesterday who were like, the feeling of – for example, one of the emotions was embarrassment and the feeling was so scary for her and open and raw and vulnerable, but being able to feel that even for three or four seconds brought tears to her eyes and rocked her to her core that she wasn’t safe.

And so, what I love about the idea of self-coaching is that if you are in a place where you feel scared to let yourself be that vulnerable, to be seen, to be heard, is this idea of this is what you do for you. Like, no one even has to see this. No one even has to hear this. It’s like self-coaching is a gift you give yourself. I love that so much. Okay, so you started working on it, and then tell me what happened after that?

Jennifer: Well, the reason why I even went that far to do it is because, one, I was very intentional. I was like, okay, I became a fulltime coach in April, so I stopped working my corporate gig, April first. And then I was like, alright, I’m getting all of the coaching I can get and I need to work on being more intentional about this emotion thing, like, feeling my emotions.

And so, I was very intentional in working with Elizabeth and, like, I’ve got to figure this thing out for myself, and just going through the work. And, of course, as soon as you say, “God, I want to work on something,” he throws you something to work at.

So, even before George Floyd was killed, or murdered, at the beginning of March, I had a cousin who’s not much older than me, she’s mentally disabled. She’s unable to take care of herself. She lives in a nursing home. She contracted COVID-19. And so, I get this call. My mom has power of attorney and I’m now her local power of attorney.

I get the call early in the morning. They’re rushing her to the hospital. She’s under respiratory distress. I can’t go see her. She cannot advocate for herself. She’s obese. She’s a Black woman, and she’s mentally disabled. And I was freaking out because I just had visions of her just lying in the hospital, being completely discounted because of who she is in that moment. And I just remember – I called Brig that Saturday…

Stacey: We’re all calling Brig this week. Popular woman this week.

Jennifer: I love Brig. And I was like, sobbing. I couldn’t even talk. And she’s like, “It’s okay. She’s going to be fine.” And she coached me.

Stacey: What did she actually coach you on though? Because I know she didn’t just say, “It’s okay…”

Jennifer: No, she didn’t. And it’s funny, I’m trying to remember what she said exactly because we were doing our Coaches of Color Collective that same morning and I was a moderator. And I was like, “I can’t. There’s too much, I can’t be the moderator. You go get the questions and ask them.”

And it’s so funny, I don’t remember what she said exactly. But no, he did not say it’s going to be fine. But she was like, “Yeah, I’ll step in for you, no problem.” Oh, I know, she said, “Just sit with it. It’s okay. Go ahead and feel the emotion and feel the pain.” But I love coaching so much…

Stacey: Your brain was like, “I don’t remember what she said to me…”

Jennifer: It was so long ago. It was the beginning of March.

Stacey: Brains are like – they just keep giving us the same thing. I love it. So, she told you to just feel your emotions, like sit there with it.

Jennifer: Yeah, and she’s like, “I got you. We’ll do the thing. You don’t have to show up. It’s all good.” So, I boo-hooed, box of tissues, just let it all out. But I love coaching so much and I love what the Coaches of Color Collective stands for and I was like, I’ve got to be there for the people who are showing up.

So, once I’m in the energy of coaching, I was fine. I was feeling good. And I was able to share a little bit of the story because, ironically, the topic was it’s okay to not feel okay. So, that’s what we were talking about.

Stacey: Can I just slow you down. For everyone listening – I’m trying to think of how to pose this question, but this is the way I’m going to pose it, is like, why is sometimes just feeling the emotion and doing nothing, why is that the answer?

Jennifer: I think because you can fully process it.

Stacey: And then what does that do for you? Because in 2K, if you saw that post about, like, “I see that you guys are struggling processing emotions, tell me about it,” like, I wanted to hear about it in their words. And this is something, as life coaches, that a lot of us don’t’ know how to do or, if we’re not really on top of it, we will try to skip over.

Jennifer: And I did, lots of times because I didn’t understand what that meant. Process an emotion, what is that? What it means for me is being comfortable with being uncomfortable and just sitting there, not buffering, especially not going to eat, not picking up your phone, not going to do something else, not working, but just sitting there and just fully 100% feeling the emotion and not judging it. That was the other thing, not judging yourself for just sitting there not doing anything. No, this is how you’re feeling right now. It’s okay. And just let it go.

Stacey: I think that’s what most people have a hard time with is they will not – they can’t sit in the emotion because of how much judgment they have that they should be doing something else. So, why is judgment not useful in that moment?

Jennifer: Because it’s just going to make yourself feel even worse. If you’re judging – if I had been judging myself for all the thoughts I had about my cousin and, it’s like, “Why are you doing this? You’ve got work to do? Tighten up.” But I would have just suppressed that pain, like emotional worry and pain and stress, it would have come up at some other time of the day and probably unrelated to what the real source is.

Stacey: Yeah, so that’s the reason that we process pain. That’s the reason that we sit in emotions, because the purpose of it, you can either deal with it now or deal with it later. And now, you know what it is so you know to deal with it, but later, it will show up in a completely different way and you won’t have any idea that it’s suppressed emotion that’s creating a result that you don’t want.

Jennifer: Yeah, and it’s funny because I witness that in my household a lot, just like – because my parents were unable to process those emotions, and so I would see it, I’m like, “What’s daddy mad at?” And it’s, like, something completely different. So, I did the same thing.

Stacey: Okay, so you got on the call…

Jennifer: Yeah, and it was great. I just love being in the energy of coaching, what we’re doing is just fantastic. And so, it makes me feel really good. But as soon as the call was over, I was like, the emotion came back because we didn’t know what was happening and trying to call the hospital, like, all of those things started happening.

So, that was like the beginning of three weeks of every day dealing with we don’t know what’s going to happen with her. She’s on a ventilator for 20 days. But the hospital proved to us that the had her best intentions, you know what I mean, that they were going to take care of her, and they weren’t going to completely just disregard her.

So, they did everything. She got the drugs that hadn’t been approved yet. She got the plasma. She got all of that stuff. And so, she’s better now. She’s been discharged.

Stacey: Wow.

Jennifer: Yeah, which is good. But that gave me three weeks of learning how to process emotions and still show up.

Stacey: Three weeks of being okay with not being okay, processing emotions, and still showing up. Now, I think a lot of people are going to go, “But how do you do all that? How does that happen?” I think most people, because they aren’t processing the emotion, so resistance is what drains and exhausts us. But can you speak on that a little bit. Of being in that place where you’re not okay, you’re processing the emotion? So, you’re not trying to feel better about your cousin being in the hospital. You’re just being okay with not being okay. You’re processing the emotion and you’re going about your life.

Jennifer: We just took it one day at a time because we just didn’t know what was going to happen from day to day. And she had all of the odds against her. So, we just – I was like, “Okay, we’re talking to the doctor at two,” then I’m like, “I’ve got to coach a client at three.” And so, we were scheduling calls around my schedule and it was just like, I needed to just be okay so I can show up for my clients in this because I just love coaching. And again, being in the coaching energy, it takes me to another place. I just love it so much.

Stacey: Okay, so flash forward to now, the last couple of weeks that we’re currently in. Tell me about that.

Jennifer: So, there are a couple of things, layers of transformation that were happening. So, initially, one of the things I recognized when I first saw the video of Mr. George Floyd being murdered, you know, knee on the neck, I felt the emotion bubble up, but I suppressed it really quickly because I remember watching it on the TV in the kitchen and I was like, I just don’t have time to even process that.

And so, I don’t think intentionally did it, I just did not watch the news after that. I didn’t look at anything on my phone. I didn’t watch the news on television. I just completely disconnected. And I remember, like, a couple of days into the week, my husband was talking about the looting and the riots that were happening in Milwaukee. And I was like, “Really?” I had no idea.

So, that was me putting myself in a bubble and suppressing that emotion and not even wanting to deal with it. Because I was like, that’s just too big. I didn’t even have time, and so let me just throw myself into my business, into all the things and coach my clients and do all the marketing and all that stuff because I did not want to be distracted.

Stacey: Yeah, this is the key indicator of when you’re suppressing emotion, is telling yourself you don’t have time to feel. The moment that happens, the moment you tell yourself, “I don’t have time to feel,” that’s the big giant red flag, the flashing siren of you are suppressing emotions. And it’s just so important for everyone listening to really hear Jennifer, that if you don’t feel it in the moment, if you don’t allow yourself to feel it, you will have to feel it at some point.

It will come up and show up. And it shows up as results. It shows up as results in your business. It shows up as results in your life. Can you talk to them a little bit about that?

Jennifer: Yeah, I didn’t want to be distracted because I had a podcast to launch that week. So, I was very focused on getting all of that stuff ready and relaunching my podcast. And so, I was in that bubble. I didn’t have time to deal with it. I knew it was going to be a distraction. So, no.

And then, so when I became aware, not intentionally but because of the conversation and the TV was on in the house and I started to pay attention to the news and started to see all of the unrest that was happening across the country and all of the comments and just, like, “Oh damn.” Because I know how I feel about racism in America and I know how it’s impacted me.

So, I got to the point where I’d written one email to send out for my podcast relaunch and then I could not write any more emails, I was like, “This just, I can’t. This is frivolous to promote a weight loss podcast and all hell is breaking loose for Black Americans. In my city, my city was being torn apart. I live in Philadelphia. It was just a lot.

And so, I remember on Sunday, that’s when I kind of immersed myself in what was happening, we were watching the news. We were watching all the looting happening in my city, text message conversations with my friends, like the whole all of it. And I think, because I had distracted myself so long from what was happening, I was absorbing a lot.

We had national news on, the local news was on. It was just around me. And so, that’s when I decided, I was like, “I’m fasting tomorrow.” And I’m an intermittent faster, so I’m used to fasting for health reasons. But I’m like, I’m going back to my spiritual background and I was like, “I’m fasting and I’m praying.”

Because I can tell, I knew the heaviness. And I was like, “This is going to come up.” So, I remember, I posted on Facebook. I asked people, because I know a lot of people who are Christians, I was like, “I’m fasting and praying today. Send me some scriptures to look at.” And so, people were sending me scriptures. And on the other hand, I was getting a lot of messages from my White coach friends of, like, “I see you. I hear you. I love you.” And that, like those just took me into the tailspin. And that started my mental and emotional breakdown.

Stacey: Why did that send you into the tailspin?

Jennifer: Well, one because I think I had been suppressing all of the emotions about Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery for days, and so that was the emotion. And then, the people that I know and care about were telling me that they see me, and I realized that I’d spent all of my life not being seen and not being heard.

And so, that thought right there was just immensely painful for me. And that’s when I was just like, I’ve got to figure this out. I’ve got to figure this out.

Stacey: So, what did you do after that?

Jennifer: I did all – I was reading the scriptures. I had my bible on one side, I had my journal on the other side and I was reading the scriptures. I was processing what my thoughts were. I asked myself questions, why is my heart so heavy? And I wrote down all of the reasons and everything that we bubbling up, form experiences I had in second grade to how I didn’t even show up in the mastermind with you fully.

All of that shit just started to come up and it just made me feel so bad, like all of the things that I think I missed out on. And so, part of my processing of all that, I literally cried all day. And at one point, I did try to suppress and I was like, “Oh, I have something I need to be on at one o’clock.” And I tried to clean myself up. And as soon as I saw everybody, like, laughing and joking, I was like, “Oh no,” and I started crying again. Like, “I’ll come back later.”

And thank god, Lindsay had reached out and she said, you know, “If you need coaching, I’m here for you today.” And I was like, “I need coaching.” And she coached me for like – it wasn’t like she even coached me. She just let me cry and let me express the pain. And this is another reason why I love coaching so much, because if she hadn’t been there and holding space for me, I don’t know what would have happened. And so, I’m just grateful to be in this space where people care enough to be like, “Hey…”

I’m sure she had other things she could have done, but she was like, “I have time right now. Let’s do it.” And that was just really, really meaningful and transformational to me because, after that, I’m just like, “I love coaching even more.” I love it even more.

So, I just spent that day just coaching myself. I listened to sermons. I listened to your podcast. I literally had to break down my brain and recognize all of the limiting thoughts that I’ve had throughout my life are no longer serving. They are no longer going to be a part of my brain anymore, no longer going to be part of my thinking.

And when I got to that place towards the end of the day, I was just, like, I’m no longer going to be a victim to my own thinking. And I thought about my clients and the people that I serve and how they are so out of touch with their emotions and how painful it is for them to be exactly where I was, you know, a couple of months ago, unable to name an emotion, unable to feel it in my body, unable to describe it and just knowing that I just don’t’ feel good but I don’t know what it is.

And so, now I was like, I feel even more convicted in what I’m doing. So, yes, I’m a weight loss coach, but it’s not just about the weight. It’s not just about the weight.

Stacey: I like to think about – I’ve always believed this. I’m curious what your thoughts are about weight – is I think when we carry weight, it’s because – when we have weight on our body that isn’t naturally there, that wouldn’t naturally be there, extra weight, it is because, I think it’s the physical manifestation of feelings that we’re holding onto.

Jennifer: 100% yeah and I’ve always said that. But now, I really see it. and I also really see it in the Black community. I was like, “Is this the reason why we’re obese and is this the reason why we’re sicker than the rest of America? Because we don’t know how to process our emotions and we don’t know how to address them?” I don’t know, but it made me even more empowered to do what I do.

Stacey: Yeah, I mean, to at least have that solution available. There could be a lot of different reasons, but for sure, I think that that is one of them. I think that pain and weight are the two signals that you’re holding on – like physical pain or weight gain are the two signs that you’re holding onto emotions and you’re holding onto thoughts and you just have an unprocessed emotion in your body.

Like, mine shows up as physical pain. It shows up as weight as well. Like, my most stressful coaching year, I gained almost 30 pounds. And I was really holding onto it. Now, I didn’t lose the weight until I started coaching about weight on my brain.

So, it was like I hired Brenda too, I worked with a weight coach, but it was fascinating to see how much shame I was holding onto and how much was really under the surface of that. And at every level of letting each thing go, it’s like the weight would just come off.

Jennifer: Isn’t that amazing, when that happens? Because I even gained weight during your mastermind because I was so, like, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Just so in my head about everything that wasn’t working. I’ve since released the weight, happily, which is good.

Stacey: You look fantastic.

Jennifer: Why, thank you, Thank you very much. But I feel so much better. I feel so much better. And if there’s anything I can do to help people learn how to acknowledge their emotions and acknowledge how they’re feeling and just figure out and work – I don’t know, just write it down. Just start writing something to figure out what that feeling is and be able to deal with it.

Stacey: Yeah, to be able to deal with it. Like, I think it’s interesting to think about, for everyone listening, like, how are you currently dealing with how you feel? I think that’s an interesting thing to take an audit of is how are you dealing now?

So, are you dealing by watching a lot of news, like Jennifer was? Are you dealing by scrolling on Facebook, like I was? Are you dealing with going into the pantry? Corinne talks about that all the time. How are you dealing with it now? Because you are dealing with it. We think we’re just not dealing with it, but to suppress it, we are dealing with it. We’re just choosing a different outlet and is that way going to create something better for your life?

Jennifer: Yeah, and that’s what I got to in order for me to be able to finish my podcast email launches, like to launch my podcast, was because, yes, it’s a weight loss podcast, but this is crucial to you if you aren’t able to process your emotions and you’re emotionally eating and you don’t know why. So, I was like, you need this podcast right now in your ear more than you need anything else if you’re finding yourself gaining weight and not understanding why you’re feeling the way you’re feeling.

Stacey: Yeah, I had this – this is so crazy because I struggled with emotional eating and I don’t know, I can probably break it down, but this is the one thing, that I have not let myself emotionally eat. And I don’t know if part of it too was it made me so sick that I couldn’t eat.

Food was uninteresting. Like, I mean, in the last two weeks, I have consumed so little food. I just haven’t had an appetite, like, the level of emotion has taken all appetite away. But the times that I did want to, like, I caught myself a couple of times wanting to go for the wine or wanting to go for the ice cream.

And I remember, the time that I wanted to go get ice cream, I told myself – and I sent this actually to Brenda afterwards, it really hit me that I could go get this ice cream and I won’t enjoy any second of eating it. This upset is coming with me. And then I’m going to add fat to my ass on top of it…

Jennifer: It’s not even worth it anymore.

Stacey: Right, like, I’m not going to enjoy this at all. If I really think about it, I’m going to take this horrible feeling that I’m feeling with me to the ice cream show. I’m going to feel it the entire time I’m eating ice cream. And then I’m going to feel terrible that I ate ice cream after the fact. I’m like, I only want to experience ice cream enjoying it.

Jennifer: And still have the emotion, right? The emotion hasn’t gone anywhere.

Stacey: Yeah, it wasn’t going anywhere. And so, I was like, “Okay, so if it’s not going anywhere, there’s no amount of wine that I can drink that’s going to make it go away. Like, let’s just feel it.”

Jennifer: Yeah, and that is definitely a result of the work that you’ve been doing. Because most of us emotional eaters, we just, “Oh, I’m hungry, I’m going to go eat.” Like, with no thought about the cause.

Stacey: Yeah, with COVID, I was able to do a little bit of buffering or a lot of buffering and get away with it. But I watched that video and it made me sick. So, there’s not a lot of positive stuff I can say, but I do think that talking to my community, talking to experts like you, that is one thing that we’re being forced to do, is like, this is, like most buffering has been removed anyways because we’re in quarantine. So, we can’t go to work and pretend like everything’s fine. We can’t just, like, keep our busy social life going and all of that, going on vacations and all of that.

It’s like, all of that is gone and then we could use food, and some of us are using food, Facebook, news, whatever it is. But I do think this is a time where we’re really being called to sit with our emotions.

Jennifer: Yeah, it’s the perfect opportunity, everyone who’s having trouble with your emotions, to really feel them. How are you feeling? How are you feeling about your role with what you’re doing as a coach? How are you feeling specifically about the video of Mr. Floyd dying? How are you feeling about your role as an American in a racist America? Like, how are you feeling? And just ask yourself those questions and get to the root of how you’re really feeling so then you can come from a productive place and decide what you want to do next.

Stacey: 100%. And for everyone listening, when you do this feeling work – and I’m sure you’ll echo the same thing. But so many coaches are shaming themselves about what they’re feeling or discrediting what they’re feeling because they don’t feel like they’re allowed to feel. I mean, I’ve even had mixed coaches tell me that they didn’t feel like they were allowed to feel because they’re only half Black. And to them, that told them, “I’m not allowed to feel this as deep as some of my friends and some of my colleagues.”

And I’m curious what you would have to say about that. But for me, I just want to put that message out there that, no matter what you’re feeling, don’t discredit it. You’re a human being who has feelings and everyone’s going to feel and it’s just not useful. it doesn’t do anything to shame yourself or to discredit what you’re feeling. There’s no useful result that comes from that.

Jennifer: Yeah, one of the things that I was telling someone else, it’s like, quit looking for other people to tell you how you’re supposed to feel. Quit looking at your community or your Facebook friends or your family to influence how you think you’re supposed to feel.

Everyone is absorbing this crisis in a completely different way. And so, you need to understand exactly how you’re feeling, very specifically, about your life and the bigger picture. I think that’s the bigger question for people who are like, “I’m afraid to feel,” or, “I don’t know what to feel.” It doesn’t matter what other people think about what they’re doing.

Stacey: Yeah, don’t even look to this podcast to tell you how to feel. Just whatever comes up.

Jennifer: Ask yourself the question. Like, I asked myself the question, “My heart is so heavy, why?” That was the question that kind of set me into a tailspin, but it gave me so much awareness because it just opened up the door for me. And this was my personal response of, like, me growing up as a black girl in a predominantly White society. This is my own personal experience. Whereas your experience or someone else’s experience is going to be completely different. But it’s okay, whatever that experience is, it’s okay.

Stacey: Yeah, I really hope that having, you know, all of my different – I want to say guest instructors. That’s what we call them on 2K – guest podcast hosts, cohost, I’m hoping that that message is going to come across because everyone I’ve interviewed has had such a different experience and different words of wisdom. And I think it’s just super-helpful to hear, I don’t want to say how to handle or how to go through this because there isn’t some rulebook on how to go through this, but to hear different ways and different options and different viewpoints on going through this.

And when I’m trying to work on either processing a feeling or believing a new thought or anything, trying to release my brain from a thought, whatever it is, approaching it from every different angle is so powerful and so helpful. So, I really appreciate you sharing this with everyone. I mean, I have been enthralled beginning to end.

Jennifer: Good. I’m glad that you were able to invite me on to have this discussion.

Stacey: Well, think about that. That was the direct reflection of you processing your emotions. Because you processed your emotions and then you had wisdom and perspective on the other side of that. And then you came in and shared that in 2K. And when I was thinking about not wanting to put my own podcast and my own words out there – because I just don’t feel ready yet. I don’t feel like I’m educated enough yet and I’ve done my own work enough yet

And when I thought about that, I immediately – I don’t bring out, usually, I don’t do outside experts really. I think that my students are the experts. They’re the experts of our future and so I started looking at the 2K page and you were one of the first people to be like, “I’m going to lead this narrative. I’m going to start leading in this community.” And…

Jennifer: I felt like I needed to. I felt like there might have been some rumbling in the 2k community and I was like, “This is my personal experience and I think it could be very helpful.” And I came out on the other side. I was literally just doubled over in pain just crying because it hurt so much. But I came out on the other side and my clients are going to be so much better for it. My business is going to be so much better for it. and hopefully, other coaches are going to be so much better for it.

And I received so much love from that post. Like, hundreds of comments. Thank you do much, this has been really helpful, from Black and White people. Like, it just – it was a beautiful thing and I’m so glad that I did it.

Stacey: Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that, for showing up, for leading, for coming here and giving your expertise here. And I love this idea of – okay, so there’s surface level self-coaching. What do you want to call the opposite of that?

Jennifer: Oh, that’s a good one. I think that’s the real self-coaching.

Stacey: I love it. The real self-coaching, that’s so good.

Jennifer: Be open to it because you come out on the other side so much stronger and I’m just so grateful that I stuck with it and tried to figure it out and went through all the turmoil that I went through before and I’m just so much – I’m just so grateful for the opportunity. And now I’m here full circle sharing it with you.

Stacey: That’s awesome.

Jennifer: It’s good. Today is a good day.

Stacey: How can more people send you even more love? Where can they find you?

Jennifer: So, they can find me at jenniferdent.com, which is my website. You can find me on Instagram, @jenniferdentbrown. You can find my free weight loss guide at jenniferdent.com/stopdietingforever.

Stacey: And you have a podcast.

Jennifer: And I have a podcast, finally. Yeah, it’s so good. I’m just so proud of just the energy behind it. It’s just a completely different message form before. So, you can find me on iTunes and Podbean at Stop Dieting Forever with Jennifer Dent Brown.

Stacey: Oh my god, I love it. So, we’re going to put all of that in the show notes, but that’s just for people who don’t go there. I’ve been saying that on every one because I know, like, I know not everybody goes to the show notes to hunt something down.

So, definitely, for everyone listening, send all of your love to Jenifer. All of it. And if you’re holding weight because you have not processed your emotions because you haven’t learned to not diet, how to have an undieted brain and you are struggling with carrying extra weight, like, that shows up everywhere. That showed up in a big way in my business. Even Neil commented on it. He’s like, “Honey, I love you, but I can tell your confidence is down. Like, you’re not the same woman when you’re carrying all this weight.”

I have a photo of me from the mastermind, I think, that you were in. You were in two of them, two or three. The one where we were in Louisville, you remember that one? I have a photo of me. I mean, my face is like, I have a double chin. My face is huge. It’s shocking.

It’s on my Instagram. There’s a post I did where I talked about the 10 best and worst things of last year and I show a before and after picture. I was shocked. I looked at the photo and I wasn’t even mad. I literally looked up at it and I go, “Neil, why didn’t anybody tell me?”

Jennifer: Well, I was in my own shit, so I didn’t even notice you at that time.

Stacey: It was crazy. So, if you’re holding weight, if you don’t know how to lose the weight, definitely reach out to Jennifer because she is an expert at helping you do that. She’s done that for herself, done it for clients. She can do that for you too.

Jennifer: Amen.

Stacey: Yes, alright. Thank you so much for coming on.

Jennifer: Thank you, Stacey.

Stacey: Have a good day.

Jennifer: You too Bye-bye.

Hey, if you’re ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2k for 2k program where you’re going to make your first $2,000 the hardest part using my simple 5 step formula for getting consults and closing new clients. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.