In this episode of the Leveraged Business Podcast, host Jay features Irma Jennings, “The Bone Lady,” who discusses her role as a patient navigator and coach for women with osteoporosis. Irma shares insights from her transition from Wall Street to health advocacy, emphasizing resilience, trusted networks, and tips for well-being. Her strategies for overcoming business and life stresses offer valuable lessons in courage and emotional balance.
INTRO
My guest today for our Rising Resilient series is Irma Jennings, a.k.a. The Bone Lady. Irma’s journey is in helping women who have been diagnosed with osteoporosis to navigate the emotional and medical journey they find themselves on, bringing her own story and experience to her coaching and navigating herself through the ups and downs and challenges of business and digital marketing to boot.
Irma’s now firmly positioned as the Bone Lady, Patient Navigator, and has key partnerships with medical professionals. Alma’s providing a much-needed support service to her clients, both inspiring and pioneering. She’s personally tackled numerous challenges herself, from her days working on Wall Street to her work today in building a thriving business.
Irma’s whole brand rests upon helping her clients to rise resilient. And it’s synonymous with love and care and changing people’s lives. Join us for a riveting conversation on the Leverage Business Podcast with our special guest, Irma Jennings, affectionately known as the Bone Lady. We’re going to dive deep into discussions about resilience, vulnerability and personal growth and discover how to navigate life’s challenges with courage and grace.
You’ll be inspired by Irma’s candid reflections on maintaining balance and focus, whether it’s confronting the stress stacking that often overwhelms business owners, or addressing how habits that range from sugar to self-doubt can sabotage our best intentions. Irma offers valuable insights into reclaiming control.
Tune in and learn how to rise resilient and courageous amongst life’s uncertainties guided by her unique blend of empathy and pragmatic wisdom.
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INTERVIEW
JAY:
Welcome. Welcome. Today I have Irma Jennings, otherwise known as The Bone Lady. Irma, welcome to the Leveraged Business Podcast. I’m so happy to have you on the show here. It’s just fantastic to get into this subject matter with you. Take things very much outside our normal coaching sessions. So thank you for joining me.
IRMA:
Oh, it’s beyond great to be here with you, Jay. Thank you. Thank you for the invite.
JAY:
You’re welcome. As you know, the working title is rising resilient, and the subtitle was around tackling challenges and changes in your life and business with confidence, compassion, and courage. And I was inspired really by the work that I do with you in terms of coaching, but also how you coach and how you support others on the resilience part of their journey and with what you do, so that’s really where I was coming from with it all.
It’s challenges, changes, confidence, compassion, and courage – all the Cs. So the questions are going to be a little bit about your resilience and how you deal with ups and downs and setbacks and major incidents and whatever else life throws at us and business throws at us, but also how you apply that to your coaching and how you support your clients. So, we’re going to kind of flip around the two a little bit. It might be an easy split or it might be back and forth. And I’m just kind of letting it happen as it happens. You know me, I’m a structure girl, but on this occasion, I’m just going to let it flow.
So I’ve told you a little bit about the theme of rising resilient and tackling challenges and changes in your life and business with confidence, compassion, and courage. What part of that theme sort of spoke to you and why?
IRMA:
I don’t think it’s a straight line. I think it’s a recipe. It’s a recipe for maintaining all those qualities that you were speaking about. So what I mean by that is that I will fall into a little bit of self-doubt and then how do I wiggle my way out of that and I will tell you that one of the tricks that I’ve used over the years, cultivated over the years, because it really took me a long time, I would get down in the dumps and then stay there.
And now I think, this is a moment. This is a moment in time. How attached am I to the emotions of this? And how can I surrender to it? Not by pushing it away, but by surrendering to that, like, Oh my God, I am a blank fill in the blank. I’m a, I’m a phony. I, you know, I really don’t know what I’m talking about to what’s really underneath this. So sit with that. And that’s not always a comfortable place to sit. But for me, it’s an important place to sit because it reveals so much more than what I thought it would.
I had an interesting moment not too long ago with a doctor that I do a lot of referring to. And I was having a moment. I was having a reactive moment. And he said to me, Irma, what’s going on? And I said, Oh, it’s nothing. And he said, No, why don’t you breathe for 30. This doctor said to me, why don’t you breathe for 30 seconds and see what comes up. And I did that. And I went through, Oh, I don’t want to burden him with this. I don’t want to blah, blah, blah. It was a blah, blah, blah kind of thing. But what I realized is that that’s exactly what I needed to do. That’s what I do for myself. I was struck by a gentleman doctor telling me to do this. And that allowed all sorts of things to come forward. So that’s just reconfirming what I had originally said about what happens.
JAY:
Yeah. And we had Jo Hafey [last episode’s guest – listen or read transcript] on the Mastermind presentation, say to put your hand on your heart and take a deep breath in. Not maybe 30 seconds, but yeah, it feels just that take a moment is what I’m taking from that. And yeah, a moment in time and detach the emotion from like what you’re feeling and put it somewhere else.
IRMA:
You know, it’s so interesting because in my work I want my emotional world to be present, but yet I don’t want it to take charge. So I want the compassion, the empathy, and I put that in the emotional package. And maybe that’s an incorrect packaging, but I want to be sensitive to my client’s emotions because they’re very concerned. They’re full of fear and self-doubt. They don’t know where to go and where to turn. So I don’t want to discount those, but I want to handle them properly. And as a result, then I could do that for my clients. So when I see that they’re second guessing themselves, and they’re on the ledge, they’re on the ledge of the ledge of self-doubt. I’ll say, Okay, let’s take a step back. Tell me what’s really going on here.
JAY:
Awesome. So for context Irma, tell us a little bit about the work that you do, who you help, and how you help them.
IRMA:
I work with women who have been diagnosed with osteoporosis, and I break a lot of myths around that. Many people think that osteoporosis is an elder issue, but it’s actually an adolescent issue that manifests in your senior years.
So when my clients show up with incredible self-doubt, like, I do everything, I eat right, I exercise, I do everything I’m supposed to do, and yet still there is that darn diagnosis. Well, it’s not this moment. It’s the revealing moment, but it’s a lifetime that came before that. So they can’t go back and relive their life, but they can go forward and strengthen their bones through a number of different modalities.
And if at the end of the day, they need to go on medication because their bones are, they’re losing bone too rapidly, I hold their hand and guide them through that. Many women in my community feel that they failed if they have to go on medication. I want to debunk that myth. It’s a moment in time how we stop the bone loss.
So my youngest client was 28, or is 28, and my oldest is in her 80s. So it’s bones, we all have them, and they need our love and attention. And we forget them because they’re silent. They just keep supporting us from step to step until they don’t.
JAY:
Wow. Yeah. I can understand that. My mum was diagnosed with diabetes, not with osteoporosis, but she had the same exact feeling of like, you know, I’ve done everything right. And feeling like she’d failed somehow. And that you know, she’d been a bad girl.
Well, that’s where women go. Yeah, right. That’s it. That’s a default. Oh, I failed. I’m a bad girl. I’m naughty. Yeah. Yeah.
That’s not that what I was supposed to do.
JAY:
Yeah. I mean, we’ll dive into your own experiences in a moment, and where do you kind of pick up your resilience from, and how have you created those habits, et cetera. But first, you know, with your clients that you support, I mean, given all that’s happening as well, and it’s like this on top. What’s, you know, what’s sort of showing up? How are these things showing up?
I know that many of them got a diagnosis. So it’s kind of showing up as as fear and like the big unknown. But in terms of ongoing the sort of anxiety and stress, this overwhelm of information and conflicting information, as I understand it, to how’s that showing up as a client? And how do you start to tackle that?
IRMA:
IF the question is how do I avoid overwhelm after a diagnosis, I go back to the recipe scenario because food is my entry to life and to bone health, but I feed them one tablespoon at a time or maybe even one teaspoon at a time.
And it’s about, okay, let’s get the language down. I have had doctors say to me, I start talking about some of the vocabulary in the world of osteoporosis, they don’t know what I’m talking about. So I break that down for them with little bite-sized pieces or a teaspoon at a time. And then I help them understand that they have to get certain tests.
And even though It’s out of my scope of practice to read the blood work. I give them the range that we’re looking for and why we’re looking for that range. And I help them track those numbers over time. So we have a journey that says, okay, my bones they’ve stopped declining or they’re continuing to decline. So I’m either at a standstill, which is fine or they will continue.
Because we lose bone every year. That’s the natural process of life. It’s like wrinkles. You know, they happen, as much as we don’t want them, although they show signs of wisdom with bones, the loss of bones. They don’t necessarily, because you don’t see them, you don’t feel them, you don’t hear them again until you fracture, and then it’s a whole different conversation.
So managing their overwhelm by supporting them, and I don’t want to say by being a cheerleader because that’s not it, but every small step that they take is an encouraging step. So I will acknowledge those steps. And sometimes they’re bigger leaps that they have to take. For example, I have a lot of women that are in an unhappy marriage. And I can’t imagine osteoporosis and getting out of their marriage.
That was the journey that I had to take. But yet, it’s doable, but they can’t see that. So, if that’s something I will ask that early on. How is your, are you in a loving relationship? And if they say no that’s underneath it all for me that we’ll discuss at some point when it’s appropriate. But first, let’s deal with the strengthening of the foundation, the internal foundation of the client, of her bones.
JAY:
Yeah, so important. What I’m hearing is the stress and worry stack that we all have. It’s never one thing. There can be one very important, you know, life threatening in the case of your client’s thing. And it’s like dealing with one thing at a time rather than trying to, like, I have some magic wand that’s going to make everything settle down. Acknowledging them as you said not a cheerleader. They actually also need practical help.
And if you widen that scenario to entrepreneurship and how do we stay resilient in business? It’s like it feels sometimes like life’s on top of us. The business isn’t going well, you’ve got a team member or a client that’s being a pain, you know there’s stacking that’s going on and it’s trying to dive into well, okay…What are the things that if we take that away, if we solve for that first, that the other things become more manageable and you have a different perspective on them.
So talk me through a little bit, how does that look like for your clients? Because you talked about a journey that they’re on, are they recognizing that they’re becoming more resilient because they’re going through these steps, these bite-sized steps that they’re taking, these spoonfuls at a time? Are they recognizing and acknowledging for themselves or through you, and therefore getting more resilient as a result?
IRMA:
I want to go back to something you said, the stacks, the stress stacks. Because when we’re in that, when I’m in that phase, everything has the same amount of importance. Everything has the same amount of stress.
So that’s interesting to observe. When I observe that and then I take one little piece out of it, because I have clients that are very demanding. If I take one little piece out of that and just deal with that, usually the simplest one, the easiest one, then it encourages me to go forward with, okay, I did that, now let me tackle the next one versus let me look at this whole scope. It’s like, Oh, I got to, I got to retire.
But with my clients, I do look at it from the point of view of what do you want to celebrate? What is your takeaway from our conversation? Which is very different than what are your wins? Because what is the takeaway from our conversation today when I’m coaching them is often something that I had no idea about. So that allows me to get to know them even further with that. And then I acknowledge that, that small piece. So oftentimes they’ll say, Irma, I feel deeply listened to. I don’t have that. And you listen to me without a judging ear. I don’t have that either.
And that builds up my real resilience because it’s like, okay, right, that’s exactly what I want to offer my clients. And they’re feeling that. So it’s letting them feedback what they’ve learned, what they took away from a session. And also the small steps that I acknowledge along the way.
Every time they tell me, I mean, I just had a client session yesterday. She’s like, I’m about to give up. I don’t know what to do. I, you know, I, I don’t think this guy is good enough, the doctor I’m dealing with, and I wanna be more aggressive.
I said, why? Tell me? So then she started talking. I was like, okay, okay, I hear that. Let’s see if that’s necessary. And you can always go to a different doctor, get a different opinion. At least in the US you can, it might cost you money outta pocket, but there is always that option.
What I find when people do that, they’ll come back to me and say, oh, this doctor said I should do this completely differently. And this doctor says, you know, that’s like, oh, well, is there a middle ground that we can agree to that makes sense for you? I’m not telling them what to do in this case, because I’m just holding the space and saying, what works for you? What do you think of those two pieces would make sense for you? Does that make sense?
JAY:
Yeah, it does. And I mean, that’s the beautiful coaching conversation that you have, and I know that you call yourself a Patient Navigator and you’re not steering their ship for them. And you’re not cheerleading on the side, you’re helping them navigate certain options or identify options they haven’t thought of, and make the best decision for them. But you’re not telling them what that decision necessarily should be, although you could advise strongly in some cases, I’m sure.
IRMA:
I just want to say one thing there, and this is something you do, Jay, it’s holding the space, holding the space from a higher perspective. And it’s not just simply, oh, I want to hover above and look, just really holding that space: no judgment, listening, deep listening to the pauses that they have, to the quickening of their pace when they’re talking about something because it’s stressful, but holding that space and they feel that. They feel held. And it feeds back as you listen to me deeply, but it’s holding the space.
JAY:
Yeah, and sometimes we do it intuitively, but we don’t always do it very well for ourselves. So let’s change tack to like, how do you do it? I know you’ve got me, but apart from that, now you’ve had a long life doing it for yourself as well.
Like what, what are your go-to ways to not build resilience, but to stay resilient. You pick yourself up very quickly after a setback. What are your go-to ways that help you do that?
IRMA:
Well, I admit that I need a lot of care, a lot of support, and I will go to my support people. I have a lot of groups that I could be open with, either from a business point of view or from the personal point of view. I live in an alternative lifestyle because I have a boommate. This is a woman who we have both traveled through life, married, divorced. We have the same values and we have been spending a life together, last 11 years. She is a sounding board for me and I will say to her, am I being crazy? Am I being overreactive? And she’ll say to me: Yep. So when I have someone who can speak the truth.
My son also- he’s an adult, he’s 35- he has a wisdom about him and I can bounce something off of him and he’ll feed back. In a way that it’s like, Oh, now I have the power, mom. And it’s somewhat, what were you thinking kind of thing, but I can hear it. I can hear it and say, okay, all right. That’s right. You know, that tone of voice is wrong or that I hear the judgment in that moment that I’m sharing with you and asking you for feedback around that. Now I hear it. So I know that I need support so I can support others. And I’m not afraid of asking for help. I think that that’s a big, big thing for me.
I used to think, Oh, I have to do it all, all by myself. Superwoman, I think I had a wall street career. I could do it. I could scratch my way to the top. I could, I could do it. I could do it. I could do it. It’s just too much to do it on my own. And when I asked for help, then I’m vulnerable. And then those that are offering help say. Wow, I put you up on a pedestal. I didn’t know there’s some of that that happens and then I’ll let them process that on their own and say, okay, can we go forward now? Now, can I ask you this question?
Because we do that. Women do that. People do that. The pedestal thing is really really interesting to observe. It’s like, no, no, no, I’m just like you.
JAY:
Yeah. And it’s funny because the theme of vulnerability and being, you know, okay to ask for help, those are things I think that aren’t necessarily the quickest tips, tools, tricks that we go to.
Is it really that simple? And Brene Brown talks about this a lot in terms of vulnerability. She was saying, a lot of people think that vulnerability is about showing weakness, and that’s the pedestal thing that you’ve just talked about. People sort of say, oh, you’re not as strong as I thought you were. But actually it’s about courage. Courage to share and ask for help, et cetera. So I, I think that’s a really, a really amazing point.
IRMA:
If I see that in others, that they’ve done that to me. I notice that I do that to others. So when I see that and say, Oh, I did it again, I’m doing it again. I’m putting somebody up there and the only way they can go is down. They can only fall off that pedestal that I created. So it’s a real interesting dance for me just to be true to myself and say, what am I doing here? It’s really happening. And is that happening with my clients? So that whole mirror thing, I find absolutely fascinating.
JAY:
No, well it is. And I think some people show vulnerability as just part of their personality. They share stuff. You could call it self-deprecating is another kind of way of thinking about it. But some people just are okay to do that. And others, it’s a rare occasion where someone will say, Well, you know what, you know, I, I’ve had that too. And oh, I didn’t know that about you. So I hear what you’re saying.
What I was going to comment on back again to what you said was also that the people that are your go-to people are people that know you deeply, right?
So your roommate, your son, obviously they, they know you and they remember stuff from hey, do you remember like X years ago, this came up and here’s what you did, they’ll play stuff back to you. Yeah, I haven’t thought about that for years.
And my son’s very similar in that he knows all my kind of demons, as well as my strengths and my triumphs, and he’ll play whatever card back at me. He’s actually very perceptive and he’s even younger than yours. So and I was worried that my son was going to be like, I can’t be friends with my son, but it’s actually about people who know you deeply know the real inside of you and all your doubts and fears as well as your hopes and strengths.
Is that what I’m hearing from you or is it something else?
IRMA:
Oh, well, that’s interesting. I’m just to dive deeper into the mother-child, mother son relationship. I look at my son a little differently. He’s not a girlfriend. He’s not a daughter. He knows things about me, but he has his own mosaic of creation of what his mother is in his mind.
So I come to him for not the trajectory of our life together and perhaps it’s in his comments. Perhaps it is I never really thought about that before Jay. Because I thought, he doesn’t call, he doesn’t write…complaints that that I identify as love in a relationship between a mother and a child and he is not that but he is what I just described. He is someone to bounce things off of, and say from his own personal experience and mingling in some of mine. But I had to let go of what I wanted it to be, my relationship with my son to what it is. And we’ve done a lot of work around that together. So it’s fascinating that your son is so perceptive and you can have that dialogue with him. That’s a lovely gift.
JAY:
It is. I’m very proud of him. I’m very grateful for him. But when you raised that, that’s what made me sort of think, it’s the people who, you know, really care about you so much that they’ll tell you stuff that is hard to tell. Right. Whereas your friends will maybe work around it or they can’t quite engage with it because they’ve got you on this pedestal, etc. So, yeah, I think I hear a lot of what you’re saying there.
Tell me a little bit more about what makes you resilient and how you’re applying those things. Come from your experience if you are okay to share because how we help others is, is built on how we help ourselves. So you talked about like turning to others and getting the support of others. What else would be your go-to things.
IRMA:
This might not sound very relative, but I was driving back from Canada. It was a long drive, and I stopped to get a cup of coffee and went into a mall, which I don’t usually do. And I asked this young lady who was serving where the ladies’ room was, and she looked at me and she started to speak and she said, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it.
She, her stuttering was so severe. But she didn’t stop. She just kept pushing through. And I was in that spot of like, look at you, look what you did, look what you did. And at the end of it, when she gave me the direction, she gave me this broad smile that almost said, I did it! And I thought to myself, I just had a life lesson right here. This amazing woman. Thank the store for giving her an opportunity to be employed. And she’s breaking through her own barriers.
So sometimes I see the resilience in others and it helps me. Because I had a long drive after that. I was like, I can do that. And I referred back to that sweet little lady who was determined to show me where the ladies room was.
So getting it from others. I also get it tremendously from nature, being outside. And when I was driving back from Canada, I was like, Oh, opportunities to listen to all these podcasts. I said, no, turn off the sound, look at the sky, look at the winter that’s before you – just observe. And that gave me a tremendous amount of peace and resilience. It builds up my resilience. And I don’t know that I’m building a bank account, but I am. So there’s these subtle things.
Also, I I’m a real foodie and when I feel stressed or don’t have a lot of resilience, I have to fight the urge to go to sugar. What I do with that is if I have some protein in the refrigerator, I’m an animal protein eater. So if I have a piece of chicken or some fish that I could just nibble on. That helps me get over that sugar because then I go in a downward spiral and it leads to a self-sabotaging, a little bit of minor depression for me. And so I have to watch what I consume in all ways, right? And what people are saying, music I’m listening to when I’m consuming.
JAY:
This is a really important area to not actually come up before in terms of what we eat or our go to things. I mean, if it’s not sugar, then it’s, you know, could be smoking for some people. It could be alcohol for some people. Tubs of ice cream springs to mind, you know, from the movies. Different kind of stress maybe, but yeah.
There was something I was listening to a while ago that was about like we use some of these as self-medicating: sugar gives you a high, alcohol numbs the pain and that kind of thing. So, I think that’s a really important thing. It’s also recognising that that habit is forming, that that’s becoming your go-to thing and actually saying, no, I’m going to choose differently.
IRMA:
That’s exactly right. And the other thing, as you were speaking, that I noticed, I’m not a winter person. Give me the sun … my grandparents are from the islands, the Caribbean. So I love the heat. I love the humidity. When winter comes around, I was like, no, it’s going to be depressing. No, no, no. I’m going to be, you know, the sad, the season adjusted, whatever the terminology is, where the winter comes where it’s dark and I get depressed. But this time I thought. I get to go to bed as early as I want because the sun is setting here at 4.30.
So 8.30, my body is saying, okay, it’s time to get ready for bed. So I’m feeling that I’m sleeping better, longer, and that’s a key thing for lifespan, for longevity, for long term health. And bones are impacted by lack of sleep because we get stress and cortisol rises and then it has a snowballing effect on the digestive system, the absorption.
So sleep, sleep is big. I’ve turned the winter blues into I’m going to take this time to sleep and also just to read because I have a lot to read. I also purchased an aura ring. So I’m tracking my sleep. I like to track things. I like to track my blood work and my bone markers and my bone density and my sleep. Because yeah I am a victim of my own opinion. So I’ll wake up and say, I didn’t sleep at all last night. And I’ll look at my aura ring, it’s like, congratulations, you had a full eight hours of sleep. It’s like, well, why aren’t I feeling that?
So, it just, it gives me pause to think that I think I have all the answers about myself. And I’m not saying the electronics do, but it’s another piece of observation.
JAY:
Victim of your own thoughts? What it brought up for me was, you know, change the story.
IRMA:
Yeah, change the story.
JAY:
And the seasonal bit. I actually, as you probably know I did this impromptu podcast episode. And it has interrupted my content plan that was all in place because I was feeling this real low. Suddenly it felt like we’d gone from summer into winter all in one go, that was, where did autumn go? It really it affected me and I noticed it more than I’d probably noticed it any other year. We probably say that every year.
And so yeah, I had to change the story because it was like, well, okay, so what changes I’m going to make to my habits, to my daily routine that’s going to allow me to feel better about this. And I’m the same as you, nature. I want to get out and walk. So as soon as it becomes kind of dark, gloomy, the, the days are shorter, it’s raining, I haven’t got my go to place anymore. So what else can I do?
And Jo Hafey talks about this a lot in Seasonal Living, and, our personality types in relation to the elements. So that was just fascinating for me, and became my kind of, I’m going to really get into this and explore it, because there’s definitely something in that, that we probably don’t pay enough attention to.
IRMA:
Well, what I noticed that Jo did is that she brought ancient wisdom forward. This is not a new, oh, go to, let’s sleep better, let’s do this, let’s do, no, it is ancient, really ancient, how we have of our own, whether or not it’s Ayurvedic or traditional Chinese medicine, you know, whatever identification that we are living under. And when I say that I’m not talking about, oh, I’m a pitta or a vata from an aggravated point of view, but actually seasonally that in this span, in this moment in my life, in the season of my life, this is speaking to me on a very deep level. And it was so appropriate what she said and how she presented it very concisely. I really, truly enjoyed that presentation.
JAY:
Yeah, brilliant. So for yourself, you know, when you get that sort of sense of disquiet and easiness, you know, when you’re a little restless and feeling a little bit lost and like you need to kind of re tether somehow, what would be the things that help you do that?
You’ve talked about food and friends and support, but in other techniques that you might do, what would be the ways that help you kind of reconnect when you’re feeling a bit lost and like, I’m not really in the place I want to be.
IRMA:
I tried meditation and I was a long-time meditator and I was like, eh. I tried journaling and it was like, I have so many books, so many journals. I don’t know what to do with them. But now what seems to work for me, this might sound crazy, but I have piles in my office. I know where everything is in those piles, but I really don’t like clutter.
And I create clutter. So when I feel down in the dumps, I will take a small pile and work through it. And it’s like, Whoa, that really opened up space and energy. And maybe I’ll do a little more or maybe not. Maybe I’ll just do that one pile. But then when I walk into my office, it’s okay. There’s one less pile. And that, that just feeds me in a whole different way.
And, and every day I’ll make my bed. It sounds like such a small little thing, but I’ll make my bed and I’ll say to my bed, I look forward to seeing you tonight because it’s all made. It’s all fresh. I have some stuffed animals there and I enjoy getting into it and being cosy in it and we’re walking into my dream world.
So it’s self-care. I find that if I do it through working through piles, or my night time ritual. When I say my night time ritual, really getting ready for bed. I remember we used to tuck our children in and read them stories. Now, now it’s like I have my whole routine. It takes about an hour, and it’s my self-care and I really appreciate it.
I would almost say, and this might also sound a little like “what!” but I like to look at balancing my books. I like to look at where my business is. That might seem like when you’re down, you don’t want to look at it, but I do, I do. I want to look to see what’s working, what’s not working. I don’t always go there as a first ‘go-to’, but that’s also part of it.
JAY:
To some extent any lack of clarity or sight of what those books look like and how balanced they actually are. Yeah.
IRMA:
Well, because I have an opinion: oh, I’m way off track or I haven’t slept. Right. And then I look at the numbers and say, oh, wait a minute. You’re ahead of last year. Oh, you have slept. So when we talk about rewriting the story, first I have to see what the story is that I’m telling myself. When I was in Canada, I, I created a story about Danny’s mother.
I was like, Oh my gosh, this poor thing. She doesn’t get out at all. She’s surrounded by people and she’s so close to folk and she probably doesn’t drive. And I went out for a walk and I had this, this car was coming towards me. I was like, Oh, I wonder who’s driving this Tesla. And it’s Ruthie. And she’s waving to me.
I was like, Oh, I made up that whole story and I told that to Danny and [he said no,] not even close. So that was a story I made up and it’s, it’s just fascinating. I really have to look at that and say, Okay, that wasn’t accurate.
IRMA:
I didn’t know that about, not the bed making or, or the balancing the books, but I didn’t know that about you in terms of the decluttering. And I am exactly the same. I’m a very organised person. I like to have everything in order. So that is my go-to thing as well, whether it’s decluttering in the house or whether it’s decluttering in terms of my files and folders. I find it very therapeutic, which may seem a little strange to some people, but yeah. I do it as well.
IRMA:
But like lifting up that first piece of paper that says, okay, I’m going to throw this out or file this. It’s hard to lift up that first piece of paper when I’m in the doldrums, but then all of a sudden, it’s like, Oh yeah, this is good. This is helpful. I feel better.
JAY:
And in fact, I did that last night on some stuff that was just sitting in a pile. That’s so funny.
So, let’s finish up. In a nutshell, tell me what would you say is your positive superpower for rising resilient for yourself, for your clients, what is your one go-to thing out of everything we’ve talked about?
IRMA:
Self-care. Self-care has to be at the heart of my business and my life, because if it’s not, then I get off track.
JAY:
And you’ve got your own recipe for that self-care from what I was hearing. So that was amazing. Hey, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing with me and thinking around some of these things.
It’s always a pleasure to get your breadth of experience and your approach and your humour into these conversations. So thanks so much.
IRMA:
Jay, I will say the same for you. You are a natural curious digger and you see things about me and highlight them in ways that I didn’t even consider. So it’s the partnership here that I feel I’ve benefitted from tremendously. So thank you so much. Thank you.
JAY:
You’re welcome. You’re welcome. And it’s nice to hear that played back, not just for my own ego, but because I don’t always sometimes know that that’s what I’m doing. It’s like, again, we do things sometimes intuitively and it’s really nice when people notice and play it back to you because we can do more of it and lean into those things.
So thanks very much. And yeah, have a great rest of your week.
IRMA:
Thank you.
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