Permission to Heal Episode #16 - A Conversation with Jonni Redick about Building Resiliency and Building More Emotional Connections.

Jonni Redick, CEO of JLConsulting Solutions is a brilliant leadership coach who brings a rich and robust blend of work experience, education, training, and lived experiences to her services which include coaching, speaking engagements, resilient leadership strategies, and training, and promotional readiness. Jonni's style of coaching centers around the capacity of leadership while building relational engagements to create new paradigms in their own leadership. Jonni develops corporate cultures that empower teams, enhance leadership resiliency, and create “circles of safety.”  She has provided consultation, coaching, and training for thousands of personnel in the corporate, education, government, public safety, and nonprofit sectors. Building relational engagements and creating new paradigms in leadership is the mastery of JLCS. 

Get in touch with Jonni Redick
Website -  www.jlconsultingsolutions.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jlconsultingsolutions
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonniredick
FB: https://www.facebook.com/jlconsultingsolutions.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonni-redick

Read about her  - Authority Magazine
Jonni Redick of JLConsulting Solutions: Five Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Leader During Turbulent Times

Connect with Marci

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·       Permission to Land  (memoir) - Hardcover, Paperback, eBook, audiobook 

-      Permission to Land: Personal Transformation Through Writing

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Transcript

Welcome to permission to heal. I am Marci Brockman, and I am so glad you're here in this podcast. We engage in meaningful, deeply human conversations using our voices to inspire connection, compassion, understanding, empathy, and whole hearted wellness. I want you to find the courage to transform yourself no matter what others tell you.

Only you can give yourself permission to trust yourself, permission, to take care of yourself, permission to follow your heart and desires and build a life of love, home and belonging. Through sharing our stories. We will help each other to heal and create the healthy, meaningful lives we richly deserve.

We only need our own permission to begin.

Everyone and welcomed permission to heal. I am Marci Brockman, and I am so. Thrilled that you are here today. I have the magnificent Johnny Reddick here from Stockton, California, and you're going to love this conversation.  Johnny provides leadership training and enhances personal and professional performance to build resilient leadership for the 21st century.

She is the founder and CEO of J L consulting solutions, J LLCs, where she develops corporate cultures that empower teams that enhance leadership resiliency and create circles of safety. She has a 29 year career history of law enforcement, where she became a police executive within the top 1% of our organization of over 11,000 employees and industry wide in the top tier of women leadership and policing her progression from the frontline police work to executive leadership in a large state agency serving the entire state of California, generated her passion for building resilience.

See in organizational cultures, she has provided consultation, coaching and training for thousands of personnel in the corporate education, government, public safety and nonprofit sectors, building relational engagements and creating new paradigms in leadership is the mastery of JFCS. If that's not enough, she's also a instructor in the masters of public safety leadership program at the university of San Diego, where she is highly respected by her students.

And I looked it up. It's true. She's also an adjunct instructor at San Joaquin Delta college in the bachelors of criminal justice and professional leadership and ethics department. And if that's not enough, She is in the midst of writing a memoir of leadership and personal reflection called in, uh, called black, white, and blue surviving the sifting.

She's amazing. I don't know when she sleeps. Welcome Jonny. I'm so glad that you're here. Thank you. I thank you. And I do find few moments here and there for sleep. Yeah. Oh, the restorative and necessary. I don't know how to function without it. I never get enough, but. Yeah, some is necessary. So I really want to dive into all of this.

There's so much here that I would love to talk about that I know the listeners will be thrilled to, to listen to, but I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the memoir that you're writing black, white, and blue surviving the sifting. Yeah, absolutely.  First of all, thank you for having me on Marcy.

I appreciate it. And , and I'm glad to be a part of, you know, something really important, , if anything, having to do with healing, right. Uh, I just think that's so, , vital to our wholehearted living that we all want to try to have. And so, , the memoir is. Is related to very much, uh, it's a leadership kind of philosophy, but it has healing that takes place within it.

It is, uh, designed around the trajectory of my career promotional pathway. , like I said, I am. , humbled at the position in which I was able to attain in my organization and all the privileged opportunities I've had because of it. And I took that into my leadership, coaching and consulting. And so the book is kind of this place to be vulnerable, to share some of the brokenness that took place for me personally, , through.

Childhood reflections, but also reflective moments that are actually occurring maybe a little bit behind,  maybe a promotion that I'm getting ready to seek. And, you know, oftentimes we will feel like we're moving forward, but then we'll get stuck because we keep looking back instead of looking forward.

So there's some of that that takes place, , the blurry, right? The bull stuff, you know, so many of us do that. It's sort of natural, I think as long as, you know, Get stuck in ruminating too much about the past reflecting backward to sort of see how far you've gone as a healthy thing. I think right when we do it in a healthy way, and that becomes all about our mindset.

Right. But a lot of times we bring these childhood traumas. On whether we're worthy, deserving, , and all of those things, and we carry that and we think that we've maybe recovered from it or, , we've moved past it and yet we'll find it resurfacing, , throughout life, unexpected ways. Yeah. Yeah. And so the title, black, white, and blue, the first part of that is because I'm biracial, I'm black and white and the blue is because I was in policing and it's very much, , an intersection of things in my life.

That affect my, you know, attitude, my relationships, my leadership, all of those things. And then the surviving, the sifting is because when I look over this pathway from, you know, a little bit of childhood, I put in there and these reflections and children and marriage and divorce and death of family members,  death of my own, officer's cumulative trauma from critical incidents from my policing profession.

All of this is me being sifted. And, you know, that is a biblical,  reference to a sifting, like when you do a wheat and the shaft or the wheat and the sifting process and the floor and all these things to get to this part of us,  that helps us. So for me, a woman of faith, to be able to be seen how God would see me to be, but it takes the sifting for us to get to this place of feeling enough, feeling like we're deserving, feeling like we're worthy.

And so I take this journey through my memoir,  that, you know, I'm excited to be heading to an editor and publisher. So hopefully the process will not be too extensive and hopefully be out by late spring this year. Excellent. Yeah. So sending your manuscript that you've birthed, especially a memoir, that's so personal to an editor to read is.

A stressful, a stressful act, an act of trust and utter vulnerability to be able to just hit return on that send button and send it off there in an email too. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was, but I had to release it because. Also part of the process for me was, understanding that like all of us, our experiences are very unique to us, but we also have a message to be able to deliver out that might touch or save someone else by them reading or.

Experiencing what you keep holding onto because we're not vulnerable. Netflix afraid to let other people read this or see inside of us. Right. Or it's not going to be good enough. I mean, that's the big thing that echoes for most people is the fear of not being good enough or it's not good enough. And so,  the release.

Was, uh, the process was cathartic, but the release was even more so. And so I absolutely agree with that. I wrote this time 12 months ago, I had sent my first draft over to Craig Lancaster, my editor, and then I, he was the first human being to ever read it. And I was , okay. You know, sitting on eggshells for  a month while he was reading and sifting through.

Well, there's the word again, sifting through and, and asking me like surgeon, like precision questions to get really at the heart of what I was. Attempting to say,  where to add more detail, asking me questions, to get me to like really delve further and dig deeper into things to make it make sense. And, and to help me with the through line, you know, we rearranged paragraph rearranged chapters and deleted things and, and that's why we, that's why we reach out to people who have expertise because our story is our story.

But the professional, the people with expertise helped to really, like you said, get granular, get granular in some spaces where we may be feeling like we are, but they're a little too vulnerable for us. So we just don't go deep enough sometimes. Right. If we're willing to, and we go deep enough. That's really going to resonate with the reader and that's really going to Pierce the heart or whatever it needs to be.

You know, the response that you want from them. Absolutely. Awesome. You said, you know,   the fundamental details of your story and my story and everyone else's story is unique, but the human emotion that. Transpires is exactly the same. And so stories like, like your stories, like mine stories, like all the other memoirs that I've read.

And I, I love memoirs,  because it gets to the heart of the human experience and ultimately stories, listening to stories, reading stories, hearing stories, telling stories, all of that. It's very cathartic and very healing. Uh, it absolutely touches the heart of everything that we each are. In our hearts, you know, and then, you know, and one of the things that was always.

Also troubling for me was,  you know, as a church go where you go to church and you have your family and everybody sees you a certain way all the time, but at the moment, we're no longer in church. We are, you know, If they could only see us when we got in the car and the parking lot and how we started arguing about where were we going to go have lunch, or, you know, how are you driving the car?

Or why are you parking lot? We're here. And so carrying around this armor that we have all the time for the outside world to always see. When you allow them in, it creates this common ground for us to say, we're all we all have this humanity that's connected. And so for me, in black, white, and blue, it was really important to try to transcend that for the blue component, because you know, the conversation and the narrative around policing,  from community is so harsh.

Sometimes yet we know that there are police officers who are doing things that they should not be doing, and those are catastrophic and they're not tolerated. And most of us in policing, we do not agree, but the majority of police that go out, they have chosen a noble profession where they have to Don a uniform and they have to go into somebody's worst day, every call they go to.

And it is just very hard to constantly take the arrows, piercing their armor. When you don't feel like the public appreciates or understands them. So I wanted to also put a human element to policing, but also to the leadership that has to have the very highest responsibility for all of those people, because they often get forgotten that they too are human, that they too are impacted and that they too have cumulative trauma.

Absolutely.  Something that you just said reminded me of one of the blog posts that you have on your website.  For you, you were talking about adrenaline addiction and that the destructive conditioned behavior changes us on how we live our personal lives, interact with others and how broken we become from the overexposure to incidents that our normal person may never see or experience.

That, that reminds me of what you were just saying. Yeah, absolutely. So there's something in, you know, in law enforcement that's called hyper-vigilance and it is this complete adrenaline rush because we rush into everything and it's high because we don't know if it's officer's safety, we don't know what's going to happen.

And so you're constantly on defense and alert and it's this,  Space where you never really get to let down from that because most law enforcement agencies, especially in major cities have calls for service that are endless. They're responding from call to call, to call, to call, to call with no downtime, which is very different for somebody in maybe a rural community, but might have a little more downtime.

Or we often like to compare it to the fire department where they're usually the big heroes that the public absolutely loves. But they get to go into, you know, do their work, but then they can go and have downtime back at, you know, the firehouse. They can decompress a little officers. Don't have that opportunity in a shift and then they go from a shift to go home.

And when you go home, you're often going to the kids to the Y to the family expectations, to the what. And it becomes this cyclical thing. If you don't acknowledge what's happening, where you become to isolate yourself, distance yourself,  your behavior starts to change. Uh, you know, maybe you start picking up things vices, like maybe you drink a little bit now, right?

You started drinking to try to calm yourself down from that adrenaline. Just try to bring that hypervigilance. Yeah. From the hypervigilance to bring yourself down from that. The state and it's all physiological.  And it becomes psychological as well. And so it's just a hard, and it's hard for public or anybody to understand this cumulative process that happens.

And that's just, that's just responding from call to call, to call. When you add in the component of maybe call to call to call had.  You know, people who have been killed , maybe they've had to, uh, you know,  escalate domestic dispute or something where there were some violence. Exactly. They had to escalate their force because somebody was being aggressive or somebody was attacking them or attacking somebody else.

And that becomes even more stressful. And so you add that cumulative, piece and it becomes just a very difficult and hard to navigate this. External comments that come from the public that disparage policing when that's not their intent when they put on a uniform every day. And so it's just a humanized leadership and humanized, a little bit of the person behind the badge, so to speak.

And I would love that to be amplified with even our rank and file officers. So that's more out there for the public to have this understanding that. Where people too, but do you mean the rank and file? I don't know what that phrase as an assistant chief, so rank and file would be officers. Oh, it's just, you know, the hierarchy of the organization.

So the largest body of people in a police agency is your officer. They're the ones that, they're the people that the public is meeting. And oftentimes you, you often just see them as a badge and somebody responding, but they're actually someone's dad or someone they're Johnny Reddick. I was an officer before I promoted them.

 I'm Johnny Reddick and I have two kids and I have a husband and I go home and we have to manage our lives and all of those things, but I put on it, where to buy eggs before you get home. So there's breakfast in the morning,  there's just, and I come to serve you on a daily basis and , but, and so the book is just really about that.

And a lot of the leadership work that I do, is culminated from my. 29 year career and all the teaching and instruction and leadership that I did for all classifications, whether they were professional staff, sworn staff, executive staff rank and file staff. And I try to bring that into this new, new season that I'm in after I retired and started doing consulting and coaching.

So that's, that's kind of where my passion lies these days. It seems like a very natural outgrowth from what you were doing with law enforcement. Yeah, it feels so it feels very organic. You know, I noticed there is a space for,  I know there's a lot of leadership coaching and consulting and training, but I try to really focus more.

On these areas of building resiliency. So I do strategic planning and communications and, you know, different things having to do with operational components of leadership in an organization. But I really liked the resilient. You need to see piece of the leader, which is really understanding, the wellness aspects for yourself, your own emotional intelligence.

So you can know, your own self-awareness. How you're going to interact and manage your own behaviors,  triggers and all those things. And so I love those pieces and, yeah, and so I'm really kind of growing in that capacity to kind of refine really that's where I want to stay versus I do a lot now and, but I really, really find a deep, deep passion for working more specifically there that's very inspiring.

What do you think. Most, I mean, I, on an looking at your, your clientele on average, what do you think the most prevalent questions or deficits or problems are with the leaders that seek your coaching? Like what, what are they looking for? What kinds of strategies are you teaching them to bring to their businesses, to their own personal lives?

You know, what would be interesting,  is if, if, if you had everybody lined up and ask them that question on what they needed, right? Because you would have. So many similarities, but with a slight variance, depending on what their organization or what their top three to five challenges were, right. Do this.

So you do this assessment. But what I really find when I really  dig a little deeper with people is they're not looking for me to give them an answer to something. What they're really looking for. For what I help them do is to really think about things that they hadn't thought of before, because I have a broad knowledge and experience in a lot of areas.

So sometimes people get very siloed in their thinking and they haven't brought somebody in who. Maybe isn't specifically in their industry, but because I'm not in your industry all the time, which is kind of cool. I ask questions about things that maybe you haven't heard of in a long time or even thought about, and it really makes them go, I never even thought that we don't have to necessarily reinvent the wheel for something maybe , operational, but maybe we can restructure it or , approach it from a different angle.

Yeah. Rearchitect it. And then most of the time. Like most of us, it's a mindset that is often the thing for people personally is challenging them on their own mindset because they know what they need to do most of the time. And sometimes if they don't think, Oh, well, you know, I was thinking about doing that, but I didn't think it was really that important thing to do.

But when we really talk about it, they find that, that one little thing, which isn't very big, it's usually something really small that if they do it. Changes outcomes for how they're perceived with their employees or staff and how, it changed job satisfaction for their teams and how productive and innovative if they just, think about relational things versus always operational things.

 We're always thinking about absolutely. That is huge. That is huge and it's simple, but if you don't come in and really have the conversation and start identifying where this is at and what you do, um, they just keep operating in the same way , and the big elephant in the room. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's, so it's always interesting. It's never anything, usually like some big earth shattering breakthrough, but I've also found that. Most people who need coaching versus consulting. So consulting, when I come in is generally for the organization I will consult for, I'll do assessments.

I can talk to them about different training strategies they can use and things of that nature. If they'd like me to do it,  I do that sometimes. It's nice. If they have a training team, then I'll work with them and they can do it. Which is bad, but coaching is generally for either the executive, the police chief, or those that are in command positions or things like that.

And that becomes very personal and it becomes very engaging because this is where you can get some real, growth and transformation in your leaders specifically. And I would love to see organizations and police organizations even invest in coaching programs. For their leadership,  as a service versus the investment training and training is great, but training is, it's not as tangible and the engagement is different.

And so I was explaining to somebody they're like, yeah, but we have mentors on the department. We don't need coaches. And I'm like, okay, there's a difference between mentoring and coaching. I'm like mentoring is great. I have no problems I'm entering within the organization and you're not, you're not getting an outside point of view.

And mentors are only invested to a certain degree. And so, but a coach, if you take it into the analogy of any as sports, I played basketball coming up through junior college. And so if you have a coach, a coach , sets up discipline and structure, outcomes and consequences, and it's a constant interaction and engagement with you to get you to the goals of whatever it is.

So I was a forward. Or a center most of the time playing basketball, which was a four or five position for those who are sports, listening to your podcasts and sports. I know what a center is, but I want to get enough rebounds. And I want to increase that. Then I have to practice rebounding if I want to make sure that I'm working on my inside shot, which is inside the key.

I have to practice my inside shot key, but it's not just shooting. I need to know my form. I got to know how to pivot. I need need to know how to go up strong. I need to know how to rebound it and get an old board or an offensive board. So, coaches can get technical, they get personal and they keep you engaged in your process and towards your goal, whatever that is a mentor.

Doesn't do that like that, because they're not invested in that way. They're there to kind of be a guide, be somebody you can go to offer you suggestions and solutions, but a coach is somebody that will help you try to get to the goal that you're really reaching for. And so that's why I try to like my job as a high school English teacher.

It's exactly what I'm doing. Yeah. You're a coach every day. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely not just a mentor, definitely in the, in the thick of it coaching. So a good analogy, I think for a lot of us,  I notice what, what you were saying about sometimes just fine tuning, what the leader is doing in an organization, really making.

A very big difference. Transitioning even from a more authoritative, like big picture, kind of keeping your eye on the process of the bottom line.  Versus taking a little bit of that time and focusing on the more personal relationship that you might have with your employees, that your employees have with each other, that their personal relationship or reactions or vulnerability with what's going on around them.

  I came to teaching kind of late in my, not late in my life, but. 10 years or so after most people did. And, I was in a large variety of corporate jobs and creative jobs and, and had my taste of very hard ass authoritative. Bosses who didn't really give a rat's tushy, what anybody was thinking or feeling you just had to do what you were told and what was expected of you.

And that was that. And morale sucked. Nobody wanted to work late. Nobody wanted, nobody really cared to make him happy or proud or, It was, it was a very punitive atmosphere and a very negative, and it was a toxic place to work. I actually didn't even make it a year there and I had to leave.

It was just soul crushing. And, and so just think about by something as simple as creating more of a relationship. Type of management or leadership style doesn't require a whole lot from you. It just requires intentionality. It inquires your time. Right. But then also now with social, all the social issues that we have , in the United States and not just.

The, you know, black lives matter, which are very important, but it has created awareness on all kinds of social justice issues. You know, women's equity, equity, diversity and culture, and all kinds of things. So people are also asking the question from your own organizations, what is our corporate responsibility to this call to social justice.

And so that becomes now for leadership to have relationships. In the communities with partners outside of maybe their industry or their corporate peers. And so it becomes this place where leaders have this great opportunities, especially we're starting off a brand new year in 20, 21 new decade. Even I just realized that this morning, a new decade to really rethink your leadership.

And what do you need to be able to, to really change the trajectory of where you want to go? And I just think investing in yourself, investing in your people is the best way to kind of,  kick that, kick that off it's kick-started for 2021. Absolutely. Uh, and, our, one of our administrators in the school where I teach, is usually very focused on goal setting and student outcomes and so on.

And, and since really the middle of December, She may have had some sort of psychic connection with your book. I don't know.  But suddenly she's decided that she wants to have these individual meetings through, through zoom or Google meet, just individually with each teacher. Just to sort of get the temperature of how the teacher's going.

Like, how do you Sue things? How do you see things what's going on? How do you feel, what do you need? How can I be of help to you? What kind of support do you need? Make sure that you're taking care of yourself and don't discount yourself care. And it was these little check-in conversations and she didn't really. Describe what her outcome was of these conversations. And so she just said, that she wanted to have them. And my first dream first instinct is to just roll my eyes.  What do people want? Now we're already overburdened, and then I had my conversation with her just before the December holidays.

And it was one of the most delightful conversations I've had. With another professional in a long time, it was just the two of us. No one else was listening. We had a lovely chat. I felt so much better about her, about my job, about how the whole thing was going. And it took her 20 minutes. Just to make me feel seen, to make me feel like she cared cause she does.

And, and , we really didn't talk about strategies to reach goals and student outcomes so much as to take care of my emotional health as I'm working to navigate this myself, and she's making her way around the entire department on it, it's just. Yeah, it's amazing how it's amazing how transformative is, right.

Because what's come with that is , increased morale, like you said, but more innovation. Right. More creativity from teams to be like, to face some of these challenges and things that are still occurring, right. Because of COVID and plus all this stuff that you had to have before COVID, or the pandemic happened, 

you still have stress, curriculum and standards and stuff to reach and learning milestones and so on. And now we're in the middle of a pandemic and how do we keep everybody safe and ourselves. And every day we have more kids who are in quarantine because. , kids are kids and they don't wear their masks.

And  this is, this is the beauty of what you're saying right now. So we can have deep, traumatic pain and healing process, right. From trauma, from whatever. But there is a level of trauma that's taking place for all of us because of this pandemic. And it just it's fitting into the corporate culture.

And we don't even realize it. And something as simple as her taking this time is healing for you in your, your spirit and your, your whole thing, to say, and it can allow you to kind of release a little bit and exhale, and then you feel like you can be productive again. You know, you'll have to have another check-in somewhere maybe with her, maybe you create that in small peer circles that you have keep each other positive, and connected.

And it could be moment to moment, but that's healing, that's that's healing, but allowing yourself, like you said, to not resist her coming to you, but to be open to it was like that was the reward. Right? Absolutely. Absolutely. And to know that administration level is seeing us. And seeing the reality for what it is and our efforts and what we're already doing and expressing their appreciation and their understanding.

Just knowing that I've been seen, really seen and focused on and, and the whole, the whole bubble of the whole thing is, really being seen. It was huge. Yeah. So, no, and that's the kind of stuff that, I enjoy bringing into leadership paradigms really. I mean, I can do all the tactile kind of training and stuff and all of that.

But my whole thing is we really are need to elevate ourselves to this, this place of relational engagement in leadership. It is, we talk about it, but we don't know how to really do it. And if we've never had to do it, some people say, why should we, but I would think afraid of vulnerability also, because being acknowledging somebody else's emotionality and someone else's personal needs is also acknowledging that you have them yourself.

You know, you can't be a stoic robot while talking about somebody else's. Soft skills and soft, you know, emotional around a check the box because they're going to know if you're authentic or not. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And, and I think that, that there's a, a misunderstanding with a lot of people in leadership positions, thinking that they have to be very authoritative.

Or they're not going to garner the respect that they think they deserve or that they do deserve. And it actually is a hundred percent opposite of that in my experience. Yeah, no, I agree. You do not have to wield this big stick and have this big voice in order for you to get people to be inspired.

And I think that's the difference. People want people to just be follow and do what I tell you to do, but really leadership is about how you motivate, how do you. Buyer, you know, how do you get people to reach their own potential? Right. And so you're inspiring intrinsic motivation rather than just punitively giving them extrinsic motivation.

Yeah. Yes, yes. Yeah. And that's, and it's easy to do if you practice it, if you do it intentionally, and then you as the leader of your organization, because leaders are throughout your organization, but as the leader of your organization, You have to create that in all of those that are within your hierarchy, it's you can not carry that weight.

Like they'd say a leader sets the tone. Absolutely. But your people deliver the tone every day. And that, that changes. It's like the old game of speaking in the cup. And by the time it gets to the phone telephone, it's changed completely. So you have to have systems in place and processes and you know, all of those things.

So that's, that's the beauty of what I love to help people assess in their own, organizational culture. So do you think that thick cult, corporate cultures or workplace cultures have problems with consistency in delivering that? I think you answered your own question by the course. Absolutely. Because the time I got to the end of the sentence, I had already answered this.

You're absolutely right. And that's the biggest change challenge, right. Is because there become some other priority that comes in swooping over anything that you wanted to be proactive about. And then once you change the priority, that becomes the focus, right. But what you have to do is there are things that are going to be a priority, but that should always be your essence.

It should always be your core. That is something that is never changing. Right. But unfortunately, people get distracted and they reprioritize based on, operational goals and budget setting and everything else. And then that's where your energy and your time goes. I always say where your budget is aligned is where a lot of your focus goes.

So if you don't put enough investment and energy and effort into investing into your people, into how your leadership and how this relational engagement goes, then that's where your priority is for that. And the corporation also on how you deal with your stakeholders externally engaged in your community and develop partnerships.

If that's not in your strategic plan and your visioning and in your budget. Then you're not doing that at a level in which it needs to be done. But, people have to make those decisions. Now what's important and what's going to be expected of them, not only externally from consumers, from community, but from their employees.

 And  their executive teams that work alongside of them. It's changing. The world is changing and you can look at many corporations and industries that we thought would be around forever. And they're just not, they're either dissolved, completely, always use the Kodak one, but they're dissolved completely.

Or they've been absorbed by somebody else who has re-imagined them and done something better with him, for them. As I was listening to you speak, I was thinking about that. All of the things that you were describing.

Describe on a, on a microscopic level about even my one person, entrepreneurial little job here, the little company I'm trying to build with the podcast and the books and so on, like even the art aspect of my business, my, my employees are me. Right. And when I get derailed from my plan, like I'm going to work on marketing today or I'm going to work on Pitching media today, but then I get pitched myself for the podcast.

I'm like constantly putting on different hats and taking off different hats and doing different things. And, and then there's something with my husband or there's something with the kids, or I actually have to do teaching things that actually, that's. The job that brings in the money and that's where my primary responsibility is.

And so it's, it's,  am I disappointing my stakeholders or am I disappointing myself? And then am I going to be too hard on myself because I want outcomes and I'm not being, sensitive enough to my employee myself. You know, like it's totally applicable. Even if it's a company one or it's a company of a million.

Absolutely. You are. You sure you have to create your own boundaries for yourself as well. Right? Because if you become overwhelmed and you have all these things coming in at you that you've either created, or people are helping you to create, right. Because they're excited and want to be a part of your process and all of that, but you have to create the boundaries for yourself so that you can.

I dunno, I always say, and I always say this wholehearted thing, but so you can have your own wellness,  physically, emotionally and spiritually as you're, doing the work. Because if you get off balance with any of that, and  that's part of what's in my book as well is I've heard it on some of your other podcasts that I wasn't a people pleaser, but I was a go-to person.

I became the person that you went to to get something done, because you were always there. I was always saying, yes. And, but I would take on so much water into, my little canoe or whatever, where I felt like I was just barely staying afloat. And sometimes I was under water water, but I never let any of them know, but it internalizes us into our,  the stress and the worry and the anger, trying to get it done, that we make ourselves sick.

And I got sick the last three years of my,  career and I'm, retired three years still recovering. Physically emotionally, I'm still triggered by some things.  But I have lost 80 pounds. Wow. Since 2016 and it is big and that's all, and that's not my choice. That's because I've been ill, but the weight, but the thing is the weight that I gained was all stress and work and  that cortisol and all of that.

Stuff. But what I say is if we don't create boundaries, whether we're a company of one, or we're a company of thousands, even for ourself and our leadership, then we are diffusing and destroying not just the business, but we're doing that to ourselves. And we only get this one life. Right. And so we only have this one vessel to carry our license in.

And so we have to be very careful with that. And so that's getting ourself that grace boundaries, but still being about the work, right. We can create, a calendar and a schedule that will get the things done. It just may not be like we want it, but it'll be healthier and it'll work better. So, so how did you re-imagine.

Your structure, your own personal boundaries who are professional versus your personal life. When you were taking your consulting firm into the world, as you were trying to structure this for yourself and build this, how did you protect your, how did you protect Johnny from burnout in this new life too?

Yeah. So no, Greg, great question. Thank you.  I think because I'd had this really pivotal moment in my illness at the end of my career, because the end of my career, wasn't supposed to be the, into my career. I was on a promotional list to promote again, I was on a trajectory to be, continue to be in executive leadership in the organization, which I was very grateful for.

And. Deserved. I worked hard, so it's not like I'm humble to the point of like, Oh, thank you for the handout. No, I worked hard. Yeah. I worked hard and I appreciated too to have the opportunity to be a part of it, but I really had to evaluate, , I, I wasn't in alignment with  my spirit, with the kind of conversations, the kind of work.

It wasn't, it wasn't, I was no longer passionate about it. So when I decided to go into my consulting, I really made this. Kind of covenant with myself, just like you would have a marriage, covenant, you have your vows, it's a contract, right with yourself. It's a covenant that I would create boundaries that I would learn to say no more.

And the note doesn't have to be like the end. The whole sentence, but it would definitely be a consideration for me to be like, well,  I'm not comfortable or able to do all of these things, but I might be able to do an aspect of it, or maybe I can bring in somebody that can help me. I don't have to do it all alone.

So I created a network of partners and people that were, I built relationships with over years. Right. And I kept them and everybody has utility in something. And also I decided that my, my, my goals wouldn't be so big. I didn't want to be , a millionaire or all these things. I really wanted to continue to have purpose and contribute.

And I knew that I had a unique, ability to do certain things. And so it's just really been refining it and a very specific niche, which is really interesting to me and stay in my lane, stay in my lane,  and not try to be in other people's lanes. Like I could , we've heard the term FOMO, right.

I can do that all day, but. When I really started thinking about if I want to that person that I'm looking at all they have, and I want to be like them, and I want to do that. It requires more energy. It requires more time. It requires me to do like a whole lot of things that I just don't really want to do.

And so I think it's taken, me to be in the second season of life. And, you get to know yourself and really what you want to do in your heart of hearts. Yeah. And I really like the space and I think if everybody does that kind of, self-assessment self smut for yourself and you just have a covenant with yourself, this is what you're going to do and stay to it.

And  don't blur the lines anywhere because once you blur the lines, you'll probably go over the lines and then you'll be outside your boundaries and then you'll be doing something you don't want to do. But,  if you do that, then it's just, I don't know. I just find myself more at peace. I feel that makes me better for people.

When I engage them, I can be really authentically myself. And oftentimes when people come to you, For whatever it is that you have to deliver, it's hard for you, for them to trust and want to engage you. If you can, yourself, aren't taking your own advice. Right? Exactly. So I try to do that. And that's what, in this season that I really feel like I'm doing.

And you're the product, somebody hires DMLC JML J LLCs JLC S where I got that from, I don't know, JLC S I apologize when someone hires GLCs, they're hiring you, you're the product. So if you're not taking care of yourself and you're not in a good calm space with yourself, and you're not at peace with your inner inner self, then what are you giving them?

Right. I mean, I'm coming to them standard product. I'm giving them a substandard product, but I'm being an imposter. And so I don't want to do that. So I want to make sure that I'm taking care of me. And that, that's why you're, , talking about permission to heal. I have to be healed from so many aspects of things, but I get to the beauty of that is I can, I can embrace it and I can embrace it and bring it into my leadership consulting and coaching to help other people.

Be able to identify, be able to create solutions and pathways for their own wellness and their own healing, whether it like says cumulative trauma from experiences, or maybe it's just, them trying to discover themselves from the worthiness aspect or just whatever that is. Cause we all have self-doubt we all have these things.

And it doesn't make us abnormal. It doesn't make us like normal, normal, right out loud. Say it out loud. And it's it's absolutely absolutely. That's the same motivation I had when I, when I wrote my memoir permission to land, it's the same motivation that has me doing this podcast right now.  We're elevating our stories, amplifying our stories too.

To help other people recognize themselves in what we're saying and give them the permission and the knowledge that it is up to them to heal themselves.  For a very long time, I was looking outside myself for all of this looking for somebody else to tell me it was okay if I did whatever it was.

Um, and then at some point in my mid forties, it hasn't even been a decade since I figured this out. But I realized that all the answers to all of the questions about my wellness and my happiness and the meaning in my life and healing from past familial trauma and so on was 1000% up to me to do. Not only did I have to give myself permission to do it, but that nobody else, but me could do it right.

That's powerful, right? Yeah. I mean, and it's almost like a it's freeing it empowering. Absolutely. Feel like the weight was lifted off of you completely. And then it transcends itself into so many other areas of your life. Once you give your present yourself permission there. Right. You get bolder and bolder to give yourself permission in a lot of places that you had not been giving yourself the permission to say yes or no, whatever that is that you want to do or don't do.

Right. And it doesn't have to be with an attitude. It just has to be done with confidence and to be able to be like, thank you. But no, thank you. But yes, you give yourself cushion for a lot of things. Exactly. I've been offered jobs, doing other things. And I thought about them and yes, it was flattering.

Thank you very much for thinking of me in another life, maybe I would say yes, but I would really rather spend my time doing this. This is better for my soul. So I'm going to do this. I'm not going to do that. Thank you. But no. Yeah, and that was fine. And nobody got insulted and no one thought less of me.

In fact, I don't even know what they thought of me because that's not in my business. I don't care. Um, but they were like, okay, great. And they went and asked someone else, and that was the end of that. And you just said right there. So, you know, my whole life was in my career was. They need me.  I'm promoting and then they need me there.

I'm really important. I'm so in pivotal to this, I can't, if I'm sick, I gotta go to work though. I can't be sick. I I've got to show up. I've got to be there. And that last promotion was that.  I call it this temptation of feeling overly important or needed in the organization that I needed to stay. I needed to promote people, needed me to be around, but literally when I came to peace with my decision to retire and I shared it with my executive manager, the commissioner.

He completely understood and got it. He wanted me to stay, but he wanted a double-check, but he knew cause where I was coming from, I'm a woman of faith. And I was like, this is it. I'm very happy on. This is, this is what I need to do. And literally after that was confirmed and I sent in my documentation, they advertise my position.

So it's like, and I think they selected the person that would take my job before I even retired. So we have to get out of this mindset too, that we're letting other people down. For some reason, versus things will continue to operate, especially if you transition out well, right. Don't just not show up.

Like I'm retiring and see it. Right. You have the transition plan and you help the other person to assimilate into their new role, into the environment, to their job. And then you peacefully go to do whatever else you want to do, but don't feel like you have to stay somewhere and do something for other people.

Absolutely because in one of my blogs, or maybe it's not a blog, maybe I just wrote something. But,  when I retired, I can see everybody that showed up at my retirement luncheon because pre COVID right. It, I read it. Okay. Pre COVID it's packed. I mean, people couldn't get in. It was so full, but I can count the number of people that stayed connected after I retired.

And so, you just have to put that in perspective. So you remember to take care of yourself and your own wellness and your own healing and your own journey and your own resiliency. Absolutely. I'm going to read the paragraph because I did actually, I did actually circle it and put an asterisks next to it because it really resonated with me.

I'm going to redo to you. I love doing this to people. The immense social network we create in decades of service translate to a small fraction of those who actually stay connected to you. Once you retire. As I verbalized this to him who,  Okay. I remember all the faces at my retirement luncheon and think of how many of them I've seen or heard from since that day, the support and love of my family, friends and relationship with God or my sacred space, place of peace.

It became beyond priceless in my quiet moments of transition. And I think that that's golden to, to remember that. Yeah, absolutely. It's what helps you to navigate, like I said, those moments where we think we're strong, but then stuff will crop back up. And it's a reminder to yourself that, I mean,  when you think about the number of people that really matter in your life, It's not all of that.

 It's not that you don't care about people and won't be helpful to people and,  people aren't good or bad, it's just to you in your life and the things that matter to you, you, those people probably shouldn't be more than a handful or two of people and that's right. That's normal. Social media has made us all feel like we should have, 5,000 awesome friends.

Right? Absolutely. I,  and I think there are. I don't know if categories is the white word or a hierarchy of relationships. I'm not really sure how I, how I imagined that. But.  You've got all the people that you work with on one level, you've got the people who in your town or who, through civic organizations or religious organizations, and then you've got your intimate friends and then your immediate family and the intimate friends in the immediate family are the people who are integral to your life and everyone else.

Yeah. Yeah. It's really nice to know you and I'm glad we're in each other's lives, but if I don't see you for a month or two or a year or two or never again, not going to matter all that much. And if you don't see me, it's not going to matter all that much.  You're not that significant. Not that we're insignificant, but it's exactly what you were trying to say.

It's creating the boundaries again. Going back to the boundaries in order to have that, , a place for self care that is,  become this real catchphrase lately, but it's really this place. Self-compassion, self-care, self-compassion a place where you can stay healed. It's almost like somebody who,  maybe has an addiction.

To alcohol or drugs and you do the whole steps in the program. And then you change your lifestyle, right? And your behaviors so that you're not tempted or in a place where you can't be strong if you're new out of the program or however long. And it's the same thing for us. If we've had this trauma and we have this behavior model where we'll,  kind of go back and forth and being strong or being weak or being whatever that is, But if we create these circles of safety is what Simon Sinek calls them circles of safety, for communication, trust building, and all of that.

And he talks about it in a corporate culture, but if we create these circles of safety, for ourselves and our leadership and our personal lives, we're creating integrity. And we don't want to breach that. Right. So it just makes things easier for us. And we learned to operate within. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. I was thinking, like if, if you're husband, your, your day is jammed and then your husband or your kid, or your best friend, or your sister or your parents, somebody's really, really close to you, comes in and says they have an emergency. Or they need you for something you don't say, no, you drop, you cancel and you go and you deal with that.

Yes. But the farther you get out of that center of your circle. But I think the less likely you are, or the less likely, maybe not, I hate the word should, but the less likely that you should be in canceling your day in order to accommodate someone else's emergency, not that we shouldn't be there for people in our larger community, because I'd strongly believe that we should, and we need more of that in the world.

But I think if an acquaintance asks you because there's an emergency and you cancel your day, There's probably something going on there that you should look at. Yeah. I mean, and you got to remember, you have to be careful what you start to create as a pattern of your relationship or a pattern with somebody, because now they expectation it's for them has been set.

If you do at one time and you were just like, Ugh, and then it becomes a thing and then it becomes awkward for you to figure out how do I back out of this? And now it creates your own stress, your own situation on you. When, if you just would've simply had some boundaries, I keeps going back to this where you're comfortable with letting people know that I'm not able to do that, but, and I'm really sorry that that's happening.

 Have you considered maybe give them a recommendation or a solution, but if you can't physically do something or don't want to do it, you, you need to be able to have a polite way to be able to just tell people I'm not able to do that for you. And I'm really sorry. And if they handle it and they accept that, and they're still friendly with you, then all is fine with the world.

And if they're not, and they disappear because they are upset, then good that's too bad. And so outwardly we can do that. But when we come inside into an organizational for leadership, We don't have the luxury to let people just walk away and that's okay. So you have to find better ways to be able to communicate.

Like I said, if I was the go-to person, but now I no longer really want to be that I have to create the boundaries that are going to be,  good for me mentally. Again, emotionally and physically to say, I just don't have the capacity to take on that project along with the three others that I'm already working on top of the it's sometimes it's the why.

It's the explaining I've noticed as I was retiring, the generations that are in an organization, we have generational differences and I'm from an old school generation where we'd suck it up, buttercup, go do the job. Don't ask questions. But generations after me, they want to know why they have to do everything, which is great.

So then you just have to take time to share the why. And I learned from them that sometimes I need to share the why with why I can't do more of what you're asking me to do. And that's okay. But I have to be able to share that with you now. So instead of just saying no, because you're not used to that.

This is why I've got these three things you already have me working on and I've got this thing,  plus I've got to get home to my kids. I've made a commitment to them to be home, more timely and to my husband and, whatever that's going to be. And it's okay. It's okay. It has to be okay.

It is okay. Yeah. It's okay. And  it's kind of a freeing to be able to find that space for yourself that you don't have to work yourself to death. And I decided I did not want to die sitting in an office or out at a scene or something because. I was pushing myself to do something that other people wanted me to do that I just could have created boundaries around and just not done.

I didn't want to do that. I think the American culture has somehow glorifies. Overworking and being working to death,  and always, always having this very strong work ethic and, and putting a thousand percent of our effort into everything. And that if we're doing anything else that we're lacking or we're slacking off, and I don't know whether it's the Puritan work ethic from the colonial era or what, but  I sort of have these workaholic tendencies, and that's just my little catchphrase in my own head because sometimes I find myself saying, okay, I just have to get this done.

And no matter how long it takes me in no matter how stressed I am and how exhausted I am, I'm going to get this done. And if I push myself past a certain point, I find that the product, I create sure. I finished the thing, but it sucks , because, so that's why Google and all these places have come up with this, how they have their work environments, right.

Because they've created it. So people will be creative, be innovative,  be able to be leading edge on everything and, paradigms have to break.  And  business culture, and yes, if you look at data and research, the U S does have the most work hours in a week and,  commute hours, vacation hours, and people that commute the longest and all of these things.

And, you don't even get to enjoy that life in which you're spending all those hours. Right. You're working to live instead of living to work. No you're living to work instead of working to live. Yeah, I did it backwards and my brother-in-law works for Google in Manhattan and yeah. Just, I've never been to the office to the headquarters, but, , he occasionally brings his wife and his young sons there to play.

I mean, whoever heard of that before, but they've got an incredible office structure there, the physical structure there, the way they do their scheduling, how they have, where their employees sit or stand or walk around or. Bicycle around or whatever it is that they do. There's there's freedom and play involved within the structure of their jobs.

 My brother-in-law all of them. I don't know what, what they call it. I forget the phrase, but they're all allowed to take or expected to take a certain percentage of their billable hours of their working time. And. Donate that to a pet project of theirs, whether they're working on innovating something creative that is off the beaten path, or it's completely off, off the regular, schedule,  or they go when they teach something or they,  whatever it is , they don't even care if money comes in for it.

In fact, that's not even part of it. They just want brain stimulus and new ways of thinking and new out of the box. And they find that they're. Their bottom line, their status as a company increases with allowing their employees this percentage of latitude. Right? So my brother-in-law went to a middle school in a suburb in one of the five boroughs.

I forget where maybe Queens or Brooklyn or something. And he went into a middle school and he taught. An after-school kind of class to the gifted and talented program kids about marketing statistics or something. I don't, I literally do not know what that was about, but he got to teach these kids once or twice a week, once a week for.

A semester and loved it, and I'm sure it inspired him in a thousand ways. Yeah, no, I mean, and so what you're just sharing too, also leads into the whole space of how they've created, not only to create more innovation and productivity and brain stimulus for new ideas, but it's also wellness, right?

So it has this. So that's one of the things that, I like to also, have conversations around in law enforcement, but just in corporate culture is bringing in mindfulness. Practices and activities for your employees, health and wellness. So we know most have an employee assistance program, but mindfulness,  is a lot of things like,  taking moments to, , focus on your breathing or whatever it may be to just sit and,  maybe meditate or to just take time downtime.

But also, we're finding that, some of our law enforcement agencies are bringing in yoga.  For officers to do yoga, they give them time to work out, in the physical fitness or they get them memberships to work out.  They also get,  health monitoring for heart and different things like that.

And so this is this time and error where this isn't every industry, because it's so crushing. This change to our lifestyle.  Things are uncertain still, we're in the midst of transitioning, , the commander in chief, in our, our United States of America. And so there's just all these different things along with the pandemic and the vaccine and the economy and things it around flux and everything.

So this is a space where you can do things at home that we talk about a lot. But corporate needs to have some responsibility and organizations to help their employees navigate this to through some of these things of mindfulness and,  wellness for employees also. I hope, more organizations embrace those types of things.

I think that they're, we're heading in that direction. Yeah. Yeah, no. And, and so this is the time to get out there and be an advocate for change and for those kinds of stuff. And so that's why I think everything, timing is always right. Good in some ways for certain things. , so I feel like, 20, 21 is going to be a nice place to be able to, have influence and maybe leave a footprint of some kind on a leadership and, change and wellness.

And. , all of those things we just talked about, I just really do. I think we need to focus on positive pieces of what, like I said, our trauma or our brokenness bring towards what we can offer back to the world, from our experiences. Absolutely. Can I, I want to bring this back to your, to you personally for a minute.

Okay. Um, how do you structure your day? As, , an entrepreneur,  to balance all of these different aspects for yourself, like, do you have a set schedule where you intentionally map out different parts of your day for different things? How do you manage that for yourself? That's great. I love that.

 Yeah, so I do, I try to keep myself pretty routine and I didn't for a long time, and I didn't realize how that affects your,  calibration, so to speak of everything. So I'm pretty routine on, I like it. To make sure I get seven to eight hours of sleep. And so I have a pattern of I generally go to bed around the same timeframe, wake up early five or five 30 in the morning.

Early bird gets the worm, but what I find is that being up that early out really allows me to get my devotion time and it allows me to be able to journal.  Any kind of, so there's some gratitude that takes place, but it follows in the line with my devotion, but I like to journal,  ideas. Cause sometimes I'll wake up very inspired.

So I'll take those few minutes. I keep a notepad by my side of my bed and I'll get up and I'll write those. Thoughts and ideas, and it's amazing the stuff I come up. I mean, I'm literally writing a full-on, presentation or a full-on concept and it, so I make sure I have that available, to me.

And then I like to get a little movement in not over movement.  I'm not a seven days a week person, but on,  three, four. Maybe five times a week, I try to get 20 minutes or more of some kind of,  either, cardio on the, on the bicycle or a walk or, getting at least outdoors.

And so that's usually all in the morning part and then I like to have breakfast. I'm very, it's not like I'm regimented, but I've found that when I put structure in my day, it helps me to yeah. Handle all the chaos. That can happen in your life, but also in the world that if I have my routine, so I have breakfast and my lunch and my dinner, and then my husband works at home.

 Remotely. And so we have our points where we get together and how's your day going? Just like if he was at the office, how's your day going and  all of that. And then, I close out the day with gratitude and reflection and the sense of, I want to get better at this in journaling it, but I do pause to be reflective on.

Cause we ask each other. So was your day productive? Was it a good day? And it's a moment for us to share those good moments. And, and so I just recommend that for people, right?  You can set out your weekly goals, and which I usually do on my boards, but daily, if we skip and we go, why did it on Monday?

I don't need to do it again until next Monday. There's so much time that happens in there and our moods can fluctuate. Our focus can change. So I strongly recommend if you're true, truly an entrepreneur, you're truly about your leadership, growth and development and, and even more so, because it's the vein of what you do, your healing.

You have to be intentional daily and throughout the day, To say, these are the things you're going to do because literally I think there's like 86,000 seconds in a day, that you can take some seconds to do these things and it's hardly anything out of your day. And, I believe research also says there's like over 50,000 thoughts that we have in a day, regulating and having a structure to our thoughts helps us to stay more aligned with the positive.

Then they'll allow us to go to the negative. And I believe in that and I believe in that, and I believe people should set up something like that for themselves. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I, I fancy myself a very Bohemian fly by the seat of my pants type person, but I'm not I'm flexible. And I like.

To be spontaneous sometimes. And I'm good at handling spontaneous things when they happen. But I like my schedule. I like things to be predictable within that structure. And then, like you said, if I've got,  I'm up by five, five 30 every day, I have to be teaching by seven. So I. I used to get up at four and work out before school, but that was not maintainable at all.

Right. Just not for my brain.  And I do my work and I, I do as much of it as school as possible. And then, , I, I kind of separate my home time between schoolwork that has to get done for the next day. And then now I'm doing things with the podcast and I'm booking guests and I'm doing research and I'm having conversations with people for episodes and, you know, delegating some other home domestic things to other people, adults who live in the house and, And then within that, I have some latitude for playtime and meditation and journaling  and so on.

And, I can find that I squirrel it away. Sometimes I'm so desperate to journal and I've got no time that I've voiced. I turn on the voice record on my phone. And I just talk into it as I'm driving and then copy and paste it in. Okay. He says that that's not a form of you having this creative space to do that.

Right. That's really being I'm multitasking my time. Okay. And leveraging technology. Right basically, but your question was how do I start my days and entrepreneur? And so for those people, if you read anything on anybody who is successful, they get up early, they live with intention, they set their goals.

Yeah, absolutely. Yes. So if you want to be about something, you got to do something you can't sleep till 11 or 12 o'clock and then miss all those times. And you can't, unless you're doing that at the tail end, like you're more creative at night and maybe you do that same stuff, but the thing is good.

Having structure, whatever, whatever your structure is. Exactly. And just stay with it and keep doing it. And if it results in good things and it's a good structure, if it doesn't then unite, you might want to shift your structure. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So we got so into this so quickly that we didn't do the beginning ice breaking question.

So we're going to do them at the end instead. Okay. Okay. All right. So I always ask these guests, every guest, the same six questions.  What five words would you use to describe yourself? Five words to describe myself,  mindful giving free. I feel so free. Faithful and hopeful. It's a lovely combination.

I'm glad you feel free. You deserve to feel free. I do. I felt slightly imprisoned for 29 years. Oh, Johnny, that's awful, but it's not in the way that people should understand. I loved serving, right? This is, this was that memoir that I've written about my own. Broken newness and healing right. In a place that I didn't know how to navigate it very well.

Not that the profession felt that way, but myself. I understand the distinction. Okay, good. That you clarified. Yeah. Excellent. Thank you for asking. Sure. What's your favorite way to spend a day? You could do it doing anything. Money. Geography time  is, you know, time be damned. What would you do? So what I, what I'd loved doing prior to COVID is spending time with all of our adult children, and going to our sunny beach sides here in California in San Diego.

Absolutely loves perfect weather on the planet. Oh, perfect word, weather on the planet. , the temperature, the, just the essence. Yeah. So we miss that. We miss being able to do it all together and we're just really looking forward to that. What does the air smell like? It's so winter here, I can, I can hardly even remember right now what's air like beach and,  it does smell like, you know, the birds that are out there occasionally, but,  it just there's that nice, breeze and it feels so good.

And the sound of the ocean and the sand and your feet and the sun,  sometimes the sun is beaming strong. Sometimes it's hidden by a little bit of cloud cover, but you can still get the sun from it. It's amazing. Amazing amazing. I can't wait six months till summer. Yeah. What is your favorite childhood memory?

 My favorite childhood memory. So like I said, I grew up kind of athletic. And so it started when I was probably about in the fourth grade, I enjoy playing baseball in the streets.  I,  our house,  that we lived in at the time, everybody would congregate out front and you would use,  crushed cans as your basis.

Nice. And somebody would bring a ball and I had the bat, so I always got to play and we'd play baseball right out in the street, in front of the house. And  back then,  your family let you stay outside until the porch lights come on. , you had to come in, but you were right there in the neighborhood.

Yeah. We were like that too. Everybody played outside. All the neighbor, kids all got together and we was at whose ever house. It didn't matter. We were just all over the place. Exactly. I love it. I don't think the kids nowadays get enough of that. Absolutely not. And probably they don't even know what that means.

Yeah. And parents don't let their kids roam around neighborhoods anymore. No, they definitely don't. I mean, I think I was a generation of those two coming up where the kids just, and plus I was in policing, so I was always hypervigilant. Right? Sure. Talked about that. It was constantly, always, there's a threat, there's a threat.

There's a threat. The kids can't be out where that I can't see them in the backyard. I,  My daughter had a friend in elementary school who. Used to, they used to do sleepovers at each other's houses all the time. That's what girls do. Right? And then after my divorce, her parents wouldn't let her sleep over my house anymore because the father was a police officer and I was a single mom and he just felt like there was no man around the house to protect them.

If something should happen. I'm like we don't live in a city. We live in a city. Suburb, like this is a really safe town. If I didn't, I, I don't leave my door unlocked, but if I did nothing would happen, like as a stereotype, Oh my God. Like I have a brother burglar alarm. If it makes you happy a lock the door and I'll put the alarm on and Nope, not sleeping over, but not realizing how much that hurts the relationship with the girls, ?

Cause they just want to hang out. And I was offended, , like what do you mean? I can't take care of my own house, ? Yeah, no, no. I just, because I would have male genitalia means I'm better at taking care of my house, then. , like I was really offended on a feminist level. I was mad. Yeah.

Well, hopefully they're still friends though. The girls. No, they're not. Well, I don't think it has anything to do with that. A lot happens. Fourth grade in college. Trust me. I have a daughter. I know absolutely friend groups change all the time. Absolutely. Okay. Next question. What is your favorite meal?

Smothered cabbage really smothered with what? No, it's just how you cook it really that's just how you cook it. So most people will, , generally cook cabbage, like in a pot of water and you boil it or you steam it or something. This is just more with bacon. You do anything with bacon on there.

Yeah. Bacon and then you cut your cabbage up and you just kind of simmer it in a pot almost.  but you just allow it to get really , flavored and seasoned with the bacon and then you cover it and he had the corn bread or you have it, whatever, whatever else you're having it with. And then as a kid, we didn't have a lot of money sometimes.

So like cabbage was cheap, right. Thing to buy corn bread is easy to have. And those became like your staples and your staples. And so, yeah, as a kid, I loved that growing up. I love that.  When I got ill, I can no longer have bacon. I can no longer have certain foods. And so I have a very different diet and lifestyle, which I live, but you asked me what my favorite was.

That was me. Could you do it with Turkey bacon? Probably wouldn't be the same. It's not the same. So instead of killing what I remember, I it's best to just leave it be I leave it be and,  created a whole new. Grew up with things that I can have and enjoy good onward and upward. Yes. , okay. What one piece of advice would you like to give you your younger self?

, be kind to yourself,  and give yourself approval to not be perfect. You know, I think we all know that we're our own worst critic. Oh yeah. But I don't think we realize how damaging we can be to ourselves.  Because sometimes we'll find places to blame along with how we treat ourselves, but really,  we know that this place of self-talk.

Is it's destructive in so many ways. And I just really know how hard I was on myself. And, to the point I, I had a reflection, my daughter has anxiety really bad. She's 24 and we were having a conversation, but it made me have a reflection that I hadn't thought about in a long time. That when I was probably around 22 or 23, I was new to the department,  to policing, but I was the first time away from home and I was living on my own and I was working these long hours and I was seeing death and I was dealing with all of this that I contemplated suicide.

Wow. And I was living a, a life of, going out and partying when I was off and,  having relationships that weren't really relationships, but being with guys and not really wanting to commit to anything, and then I'd go to work. Cause I worked graveyard a lot. So your sleep, your circadian rhythm is backwards, just trashed.

And, and I was just so,  in this last space, but it was a lot of my mental. My mind was just constantly telling myself I wasn't good enough because if I'd make one bad choice or one mistake or one bad decision, it would compound. And I just couldn't find myself pulling myself out of it some days. So I would just go to sleep.

 And, and fatigue are huge, you know? , yeah, huge, huge effect on our mindset and our moods and our bed. So I'll just go to sleep. And then,  I felt like it was an intervention. My mom decided to move to, , another part of California. She lived a little further from me, but too far for me to see enough.

And I decided to transfer to the office closest to there. And I think it saved my life because I was just in this space where people didn't know. You know, and this is nice, but I'm a, I'm an attractive woman. I've got a powerful job.  I'm funny and humorous on all things. You got it all together.

But then when I go to my apartment, I was being by myself, all that stuff, which is flood me and weigh me down.  And so I just say that because my daughter's dealing with anxiety and it's a real thing. If you look at the numbers, our young people are dealing with this anxiety and fear and worry to the point where they feel like they're alone, they isolate themselves, and that they have no choices.

They feel hopeless to give yourself some grace. To be a mess up to be imperfect, to even be okay with that really bad stuff that you've done, that you would be embarrassed to tell your parents, but know that your parents are going to love you anyway. Cause we did say embarrassing shit too. Exactly. But when we are young, We don't have life experience to give us perspective.

Yeah. And so I would just strongly say that because they were just moments where I was like, and when I look back on it, I'm like, wow, insane. Was that thought process. Exactly. Look at my life, , it's I still survived. It was okay. And I still did all that stuff that I did that I wished I hadn't been done.

Right. But I'm okay. And if you were, if the job. Was what was weighing you down. Then you leave the job, you get something else. Yeah. But it wasn't the job. It was my, yeah, that was my thing. It was a part of your cumulative stuff, but it was really how I was creating my own life for myself. It was not healthy.

Right. You weren't spending your off time in a productive way. You were too far away from your support system. , there was is from the outside. You can look at it now and coming down. Four or five things that, or subtle, but not so subtle changes that would have changed the entire picture. Right. And, and back then, my organization had no resources for you if you were dealing with, you know, cause this was in the late eighties, early nineties for me, we didn't have what we have today, which is, employee assistance and you can see therapists and you can have.

Yeah, there was none of that. And there was a huge stigma on mental health and mental illness and people didn't and facing, there still is a stigma because you can lose your peace officer powers. You can lose your ability to do your job if you have any psychological issues. So we have a lot of people that still don't come forward.

Wow. It's very multifaceted. Yeah. Complicated. We're not going to solve that today. Not today.  Okay, well, we'll end on this. What is the one thing you would most like to change about the world? Not that this is a small question by any means, but, uh, no. Oh no. So the question was really interesting. So, you know, kind of create the ability for us to find our common ground,  in a, in a way where we can, and I think everybody would probably have this, but to find our collective humanity,  we're imperfect people.

Um, living in an imperfect world, but we have a responsibility and accountability to do the very best we can with what we have, because we are leaving a legacy and, we have to not be selfish. We need to be selfless. And if it's one or two small things that we can do to make an improvement around us for someone else.

Yeah. Just do it simply just do it. , make it a daily practice to do one or two things that make somebody else's life better or the future better. Every day, I want to do small things, whatever that is, everybody did one or two small things. The whole planet would be different. Yeah. If you don't recycle, recycle one thing, two things a day, if you're not kind to people normally be kind to somebody, when you go to the store today or tomorrow or person who makes your coffee at Starbucks ?

Yeah. I mean, it's just so simple and all of that stuff really has a ripple effect. Yeah. I agree. I agree. I think if there's one, one thing that this whole global pandemic has taught us is that we all need each other, that none of us can survive as an Island unto ourselves. And that we have to reach out and ask for help and provide help.

And. Be kinder and more community minded than we have been in the past several decades, at least. Absolutely. And what a better time than right now, we're like I said, we're starting a new decade, a new year and, Yeah, let's do this. Let's make the world the way we would want it to be. Yeah.

Contributions make a huge thing. I think about, when you save pennies, you start with a few pennies in a big hole , jar or a big water bottle. And as you keep making the contributions and you go to cash that in at some point it's hundreds of dollars. So it's contribution every day makes a huge difference.

A friend of mine had. When you said that it made me remember a friend of mine had a Lucite cube. That was a bank. And it was like 12 by 12 by 12, like a 12 inch cube with a little hole in it. And there was no way into the cube at all. In order to get the money out, you have to smash it with a hammer. She was a waitress.

And so every day she would come home from her. Waitressing job. And she'd put in only the quarters. She didn't put any of the other change in. She put all the quarters and that she got his tips and I have no idea how long it took her to fill the thing. But by the time she filled the 12 by 12 by 12 cube with quarters, it was over $500.

And she smashed the thing and took all of the money, took her a while to roll $500 in quarters.  But then she went like on a vacation with it, I mean, she couldn't go to Italy or anything, but who wouldn't want an extra $500. And if you don't keep all of those quarters together, they would've just been.

Lost in the ether. Right, right, right. They wouldn't have really been used with intentionality. And so yeah, if you're just intentional about something every day and it makes you feel good, absolutely. Feel really good when you do something good. Absolutely. That's a great note to end. Thank you so much for being here, Johnny.

I think one of our best episodes and probably our longest episodes, we did talk a lot, but chock full of phenomenally pivotal, relatable, inspirational ideas. I'm thrilled that you were here with us. Yes. , I mean, I'm really excited. I'm just so thankful that we came together and we were connected and, yeah.

I wish you the very best with your permission to land and your podcast and all the work you're doing. And I just recommend to your audience, if you last thing, if you want to do one, one nice thing, share Marcy's podcasts, share her message , and reach out to her. Yeah. With your feedback and your thoughts.

Cause I think that all will matter. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And as long as we're still talking about that, I invite everybody who's listening to. I would very much appreciate if you would write a review of the podcast on your favorite podcast platform and share it with somebody that you care about.

That would be great. Yeah, absolutely. That's awesome. Thank you so much for being here. Okay. Thank you.