Breaking the Chains & Embracing Opportunities: Women’s Empowerment

Hi and welcome to the You World Order Showcase podcast. Today we have with us Jen Ingram. Jen is a dream catalyst and business mentor, saving female solopreneurs from the chains of corporate America and host of a whole lot of shift. Gotta be careful.

You say that one, don't you?

Welcome to the show, Jen. It's really nice to have you here.

Thanks, Jill. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, no worries. So you're.

You're a coach and a podcast host.

I love that. How did you get?

Started and what?

Why? What motivated you to, like, start your podcast? And did you start your podcast and then become a coach? Or were you a coach and then started?

Your podcast how did it all go together?

Great question. It it's really funny for if you would have asked me probably six years ago, seven years ago, I didn't entirely know what a coach was.

The story I love to tell about that is many moons ago, probably I don't know. 10-12 years ago there used to be a reality show and it was on like lifetime or women's network. I can't remember, but it was a show of a group of women and how these life coaches followed them around for a period of time.

And basically help them get their stuff.

Together in their life. So like I knew that this thing existed and so Fast forward. I was just in a really bad place in life. I had really.

Kind of let myself go in every aspect of my life, my physical health, my mental health, my finances, you name it. I was in a bad place and I knew something needed to change. I had done therapy, and I was like it it it's not therapy that I need. I need.

Meet one of those people that follows me around and says, hey, what are you doing? You know, you said you didn't want to do that. Why are you falling back into this trap? Why are you getting stuck again?

And so anyways I sought out I ended up with a work mentor, but I lucked out because this mentor did some youth ministry at his church and he already was kind of in a capacity of coaching even though he didn't formally know it as such. Fast forward, I was working on my Masters degree.

In change management.

And as I was working through that, some of the course work that was required for that degree was coaching and consulting.

And I had to get so many, so many hours of recordings of me working with clients and. And so I worked through that and I realized that was my most favorite class ever. And when I got to the end of my master's degree and I needed to wrap up my final project.

My final project was to write the business plan and to create a business around this thing that I didn't even realize. I was kind of already.

Queen and I not only was kind of already doing, but.

Because I was using all the tools I was learning in the those courses of change management and those coaching.

Courses my life had completely changed like.

You know, you hear things. People talk about a quantum leap making a quantum leap in your personal development. I'm here to tell you that is absolutely possible. I never thought there was such a thing. There is.

UM, and as I had done that I realized, OK, I.

Need other women to see what they can experience and do in their lives if they can see this magic like whatever this is, whatever this feeling is that I've just captured. And so yeah. And so I started as a as a coach and then.

It was later on that I that I launched a podcast so that just launched. It'll be one year old this year, and probably the thing I think I've ever done.

Absolutely love it.

It's so fun. You just get to talk to so many interesting people doing so many interesting things.

You do. I love it. Absolutely. Love it.

So what is your umm podcast geared towards?

So my podcast is really geared towards those multi passionate women that have kind of that entrepreneurial spirit, right, they've always kind of felt like they don't exactly fit in in corporate America.

But I don't really know what to do because society says you've got to kind of fit into this little box. You kind of go through life, you graduate high school, you go to college, you get a degree, you get the job, you get married, you buy a house, right? Like you follow this path that is set out before you. Only you realize at some point.

I don't know that I even want that path that or I tried that path and I'm still not happy. There's something that's not fitting. This isn't me. And that's what my podcast is geared towards is helping those women figure out what that is and helping them break free from all those boxes.

That is awesome. There are so many people trapped in jobs that they hate, that they've spent a lot of money.

And a lot of money to get proficient at. And they're making.

A lot of money.

Miserable. It's like, yeah.

What do I do now? I've known doctors who've paid, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars to become a doctor and then decided, yeah, I'm just going.

To be a health coach.

Yep, lawyers. I know. I have lawyers that I've met so many people, you know, it's. And it's always funny to me because, you know, as a kid, when people would say, well, what do you want to be when you grow up? And of course, things like Doctor, Lawyer is thrown out there. And if you are that kid who is driven by those type of successes.

I don't want to see that say that those are easy things to achieve, but you're definitely driven towards them, right? Kind of the glamour of, oh, well, I could be a doctor. I could be a lawyer. And before you know it, you get there and you're like.

I hate this.

I don't like this.

But by the time you get there, you're mired in debt and you have a lifestyle that demands that you continue doing this horrible thing.

That you know.

Maybe it's not horrible, but when you're not doing what you really were created to do, it waste.

Weighs on your heart? Yeah.

It's. Yeah, it's like.

I and I I understand how easy it is to get there and you don't even have to be particularly all that driven to to follow that path. You just have to have.

You have to know what the steps are and you just kind of plot along and then suddenly you find yourself a lawyer or a doctor or an accountant or any other myriad of professions that you're going to end up working for other people.

Mostly, and they're going to be people that.

Are in pain generally.

That are hiring you

And it's not the same as being a coach or pursuing the things that are really exciting to.

You, you know, maybe.

Maybe you were really meant to be a writer.

Or a YouTuber, you know, ride your motorcycle around Africa and record it.

Right.

I know there's people that do that.

Right.

They're making a good living at it.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, if you think about that like we're even taught our whole lives like there's only a set number of things that you can be like, what if somebody just told us, hey, actually.

You can create whatever you want. There isn't only this set of

Things that you can do with your life, there's so much more. Yeah. Yeah. Who would have thought, a YouTuber who would have thought that when I was a kid, I, well, obviously it didn't exist at the time, but.

Going forward, you know, as the world evolves, we get to evolve and we get to define what that's going to look like for us.

So yeah.

And we're getting more and more opportunity to do that now as the Internet.

When I was young, we didn't have the Internet and for a lot of my childhood we didn't even have a TV wasn't a bad thing, but it was.

You learned to think in terms of opportunities and when I was growing up, it was.

Women were just starting to realize that they had the potential.

To do whatever they wanted to do in terms of before, when I before me, the generations before me, those women grew up thinking they could be a nurse.

Maybe you could be a doctor, but safer to be a nurse.

And men were never nurses. Only women were nurses.

You could.

Be a teacher. That was the other one. Nurses and teachers were primarily what women got degrees in, and women primarily went to college to find a husband because you really could not survive unless you had a man in your life because you couldn't get loans and you couldn't have your own.

Reddit, you couldn't.

Right.

Women, women today, younger women don't realize how much.

Opportunity exists for them today.

Because of the Civil Rights Act that was passed in 64.

It it gave us the ability to go to college and did you know that now women outnumber men in terms of college graduates and getting higher degrees like masters degrees and doctorates?

It's it's amazing. Like and you're right, it wasn't that long ago, I mean.

Even my own mom. You know, when she had me was right around the time women were able to have, like, their own bank account. But I mean, yeah, women couldn't own their own home. They couldn't. You had to have a man, basically.

You couldn't even rent someplace. I mean, literally you went from your father's.

To your husband's house. And that's why we had, you know, all those laws about, you know, you could only get divorced for infidelity. And it was usually you could only get divorced for infidelity. For the woman if the woman was sleeping around. That was a big problem. But if the guy was sleeping around, she wasn't going to make a big deal about it because she's going to be out on the street.

Right.

There was no.

Protection for her and in the 80s, late 70s and 80s, women started being divorced, men were divorcing their wives like crazy. You know my parents generation my parents are odd because they stayed married that so many people would.

Just get married and get divorced or the long term marriages. Men were dumping their wives after, you know, 40 or 50 years.

And these women were like.

They they didn't have a way to support themselves. They didn't know who they were. They were wives and moms.

Right.

Right. Yeah. I always love, you know, my grandfather passed when I was 11.

And we had to teach my grandmother how to pump her own gas.

She had never taken care of the car. She had never. She never did any of not her finances, nothing.

And it was like she it it, it was like she was the teenager, you know, I was the kid. And I was like grandma, you know how to pump gas like and I'm eleven. Right. But. And so we don't even realize the difference that the different ways we live now that those before us just didn't even have an opportunity to do it all.

One of my grandmothers didn't know.

How to drive until she was in her 60s?

Oh, I bet 60s.

Same reason Husband died and she.

She actually got married again because she felt like she needed some. A man around and she turned out to be a really bad experience. It was kind of funny because he didn't. She didn't tell my mom that she'd gotten remarried, and we went to visit. I think we visited my grandmother maybe three times.

In my whole childhood, we lived overseas mostly so.

We we go back.

To visit, she kicks him out. She's.

Like, Oh no.

Her brother, who's a lot older than her, spills the beans. So you know moms married is Lord.

Ohh my gosh.

That was that was.

That was it. It wasn't interesting. Funny.

That is so funny. But yeah, I mean, because they just viewed it so different because it was so different for them. The challenges that they had was they.

Just completely different challenges than what we experienced today.

We have so many opportunities.

We do, we do and I think we also.

I feel like in some aspects like we, we do have some quote UN quote catching up to do in the sense that, you know, like I'll hear some of my friends.

Say I want to learn more about investing and I'm just using this one as an example. You know, as a woman, I don't know anything about investing, and when I really think about that and I I dig into the root of that, it goes back to this thing of women for so long, we're not in control of their finances. We didn't have those opportunities. So that.

Education and or encouragement of women to learn all the things that they can do with their money just hasn't been there.

UM, so yeah, it it's interesting. It's really interesting, but yeah. And that's kind of what I love too, though, about working with the women that I work with because I say so many of them are at that point of what I like to call the awakening. Like when suddenly like your eyes open for a second time and you're like,

Hold on here. The world is actually very different than what I have always been taught or told, and it's it. It's a beautiful thing.

It is a beautiful thing and in those little those little moments, like when you're talking about investing, I know this woman who?

She went out to learn about investing and she was so disgusted by the investment companies out there.

That, yeah, they they don't really know that much. And she was like, I know how to do this.

You know, maybe I'm not an accountant, but you know I can research this. I'm an intelligent human being and she went and researched it. And now she has a thriving business where she helps people save hundreds of thousands of dollars on taxes because of their .

Oh, that's incredible.

The way they set up their investments and.

She does it. She's.

Just like.

Sweetest woman. But she's.

It's not the normal you go to whatever the investment company is that you choose and you listen to them tell.

And then a percentage of whatever they make you.

We were talking earlier about, you know, just doing it yourself.

Right.

The just doing it yourself option is.

It's opening doors for more niche markets like after I'd gotten somebody to help me.

Not actually fix my website.

I was in this group and one woman said she was looking for intuitives.

To help redesign her website, I'm like, oh, that's genius. Somebody that could read my mind right? Are people out there that are like that? They're really good at, just like.

That is true.

And I need.

But that's a niche market.

Right, right.

But that would be and and what an incredible. You know what? I actually I love. I love that because.

There's probably some folks out there with those technical skills who are intuitive but are like, how do you market my intuitiveness with my technical skills and that you know, it makes me think of of those scenarios too, because I'm like, ohh man, this is that there is a gap in the market here.

There is definitely, but you're right, man.

And and intuitive to help design. Yeah, like your website or or any of that custom work. Some of those things that when you're just starting out as a business, yet you're doing yourself and that's OK. Especially at first, I think it's good to learn it.

And then you can decide what parts to outsource or what have you, but.

U M1 of the things. Yeah. You and I were saying like, it's just not the same when someone else does it. Sometimes because they just don't know us.

And so asking them to create.

Based on on our preferences and likes becomes very difficult. So I love that thought of someone with an intuitive mindset.

Boy, there's a niche for that.

I I know and it's a really narrow niche. Yeah. That. Yeah, that could be somebody who can charge a lot of money for it, because if they're really good and if they really are into it, they they can read your mind. I mean, there are people that are are really good at.

That and they.

Genius idea. I love it. I hope somebody's listening to this and going. That's me. Yeah.

It's you be sure and get in touch with me.

Yes, please get in touch with Jill. No joke.

And you know, honestly, we've got a whole market for you because I'm so many people and at least it that I'm just off the top of my head and the coaching space alone would love someone with those skills.

Yeah, coaches tend to.

We tend to be more ethereal in we have we struggle with saying I want this specifically, and we might even say, you know, these are the colors I want you to use and and they just don't get it. They blend them all together and it looks like mud.

Great. Great.

Why? Why are you doing that? That's just, that's not me.

And right, you know what about all?

Of the other places I've got stuff.

I don't know.

Yeah, I want that.

If you're intuitive and you have, you know, mad.

Website building skills let me know.

Yeah. I mean, that's just another example of, you know, like I was saying earlier, society kind of puts us in all these boxes of well, here are your career paths. You know, that's not a career path that's really talked about. But I can tell you now there's a market.

So yeah.

And it is a big market.

Especially if you really are an intuitive person that you can just like.

Meet somebody and have a short conversation with them and really understand who they are and what they want, even if they don't have it on paper anywhere. There's there's so many place things like that out there that.

He's just like.

As many people as there are, there's something that you are like, so special at.

There's something you're special at, and there is somebody has a problem they would love for you to solve.

Somewhere. Absolutely.

So how do people get in touch with you? And we need to talk about your.

Side hustle accelerator.

No, beat the odds video and workbook.

Yeah. So one of the things that I really.

Talk quite a bit about is kind of understanding what your your bigger vision is and really understanding what your goals are and and where you're going. I hear from so many people they when they really sit down and they think about it, they don't again because society has defined all of these boxes for us for so long.

You don't even realize that kind of bleeds into your it bleeds into your goals, it it, maybe even bleeds into some of your your vision board, maybe your vision board is capturing all the material things, but it's missing a whole lot of you.

Right. Like we just don't even realize all the areas where this bleeds in. So my beat, the odds gift is it comes with a video, there is a worksheet but but in the video I kind of walk you through and explain how to kind of identify and establish your goals that are more in alignment with you and I provide.

Sorts of examples and some questions to really ask yourself to help you set those up so that you can get clear. I always say one of the you know people will say.

Oh, I'm stuck. I don't. I don't know what I want to.

Do I think it's?

A little bit about what you don't know, what you want to do, but I think there's also a really big component of.

You don't know who you are or you haven't let me phrase that cause I don't want to say that you don't know, because that's not true either. You do know you haven't allowed yourself to be.

Who you are because you again, we just don't even realize where all these.

Boxes that we've been put into where they have really just gone throughout our entire lives.

So yeah, beat the odds. It's a great video and workbook combination to use to start setting, start establishing those goals for yourself.

When you're doing your coaching talk to people about their anagrams and Myers Briggs and maybe their.

Right. You know, I haven't gotten to, which is funny. I really like the ideograms.

Signs and stuff like that, like.

I haven't gotten too into depth into that in teaching.

Even though I do think.

There's an important aspect there. There is a small assessment that I have just barely started looking to integrate.

But it is not based on the Myers, Briggs or the.

And apologies, the name of it is escaping me. Yeah, but it it's not necessarily based on those, but it is something that helps me to identify. I don't.

Want to say skills?

Human design.

Yeah, it. And it's not human design either. But anyways, my point being that yes, because I think that becomes important. Learning trying to learn how you work, how you view things, how you see the world.

Gold helps you to identify you. Who are you? Who are you not? I always like that question too. Sometimes people go well. I don't know who I am and say. OK, well, who are you not?

Let's start there because.

And a lot of times.

They don't know that either, because we've just.

Right.

Been taught that you know.

Nice skills do XYZ and the reason I brought up the anagram and Myers Briggs and birth charts and numerology and all those things, what they do is they give you kind of a clearer picture.

Of the.

The framework of who you were created to be, and almost always they they kind of blend together.

And it gives you permission to be you.

Because it's it, it takes your preferences and they're they're foundational preferences. It's not like.

You know the.

The person who was born to be a leader and who stands up and is is willing to go forward and venture into places that most people are like.

Oh, don't take me there.

And has been told all their life. No, you need to be quiet. You need to be. You shouldn't. You shouldn't challenge anybody and just do what you're told.

It it's diametrically opposed to who they actually are, and once you get past those kinds of barriers for yourself because you keep those stories going and it it causes conflict within your soul in terms of.

Stepping into who you are and providing value in the world.

Because of who you are, it it? It's right, really freeing.

To me.

Yeah. No, and I.

That's why I was saying I I really have enjoyed the Indian grounds. One of the coaches that I work with and that's one of her specialties and.

And I agree, it kind of helps you see how you view the world or how you.

Want to say kind of how you operate, which then helps you start defining that.

Yeah, those are some great tools, great tools.

They they really are just.

To help you.

The baseline for you know why? Why do?

You feel this way.

Right, right.

Because that's who I am and it's OK.

And it's OK, yes.

Yeah, it it's the. It's OK part. I think women, in particular women who are high achievers.

Tend to miss and it it causes people pleasing and perfectionism and all these other things that really don't serve us very well because we're trying to trying to be the.

Right.

Thing that we're not fundamentally this person was.

Right.

Right.

In all the ways that we've, like, kind of made ourselves small right to kind of fit in and and and be accommodating, we don't want to, we don't want to talk too loud. You know, all of those things, we just don't realize how much that is just confining us.

So true.

Yeah, and it it's.

We've reached a point, I think, in in society where, you know just.

Just be you.

It's crazy and it's wild or it's conservative. I mean, you may be really, you may be a super introvert and not really want to be in front of people, but you still have something that you can do and contribute. It doesn't. It's not just like one group of people has all this opportunity. Everyone has all this opportunity.

Right.

That's what's so exciting to me.

Right.

Embrace the you you were born to be.

Exactly. And I think that's the other thing. You know, like you were saying.

We almost don't know how to say, and it's OK if that's you. That's OK you get to be you.

And you don't have to live up to anyone's standards but your own.

No, you owe no one an explanation.

For sure.

So Jen.

How can people get?

In touch with you.

Oh, wait and touch. You did ask me that. Sorry. Yeah, I honestly, probably the easiest way I would say is to follow me on on social media. I use Facebook more prominently, so you can find me on Facebook under Jen Ingram. Feel free to shoot me a message.

The messenger you can also.

Find the whole lot of shift Facebook group that's named after the podcast. A whole lot of shift and you can find the podcast on any of your favorite podcast platforms. Or again, find the Facebook Group A whole lot of shift and and join us there and be able to get in touch with me as we are kicking off next month.

We'll start our regular weekly networking meetups within the group, so that'll be kicking off and should be a lot of fun. So yeah, I'd encourage you to join.

Very cool.

And what's the one thing you hope the audience takes away from our conversation today?

I would say that.

I would say never give up.

I think that's so important. All those thoughts, ideas, dreams you have, they really were put there for a reason.

And don't don't give up on that. Don't just shove that aside. Don't shove those thoughts and ideas and dreams aside.

You can achieve them. The possibilities are there, so don't give up.

We'll leave it with that, perfectly said.