We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jennifer Redden a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jennifer, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

My path to success has always been non-linear, and until recently, I realized the breadcrumbs have always been there, leading me to this moment.

So, while I have been in business for five years this year, sharing my story with you is a full-circle moment for me Because I can see the markings on the map of a once uncharted journey, and it all seems so clear. How I ended up here from an idea of a better way, to living it.

You see, I always wanted to have my own business, even as a little girl, it was something I talked about. I was always contemplating different ideas for businesses I could own.

But it wasn’t until 2012 that that idea really started to take hold. Still, after one of the most traumatic years of infertility, miscarriage, and a car accident, I was left pretty broken. I found my self-worth and confidence at an all-time low, and that led me to stay in my career as a respiratory therapist because I didn’t have the self-belief to take that leap just yet.

It also led me to search tirelessly for external validation and success. I had an insatiable hunger for “more,” and this drove me to push, force, and use every bit of my willpower to continuously do and achieve. We all love a hustle-to-success story; we celebrate it. And I wanted to be celebrated. I pushed myself to work towards more formal leadership roles in my career, and I did.

But I was unprepared for what was to come.

No matter how hard I worked, how many hours I put in, how many shifts I covered due to staff shortages, or how many meetings I attended or projects I took on, I always felt alone, unrecognized, and unseen.

And then it all hit a boiling point.

We commonly refer to this as burnout and many of us have been there (and are still there), but this was more sinister than that. It was beyond burnout; it was depleting apathy.

And I soon realized it wasn’t just me.

After a local weather event, we had to spend the night at the hospital to ensure patient and staff safety. I was sitting at a table with other managers and directors, listening to all of them talk. I had a pure moment of observation, almost out-of-body, and I heard myself say, “There has to be a better way.”

A short time after, I went on a 10-day yoga retreat, and that time away gave me the space I needed to see what was really happening.

I also could hear the voice of my Soul for the first time in years. Those ten days were like pulling back the curtains for a sneak peak into something honest and authentic.

I felt softness and ease take over my body in a way I had never felt before, or at least not in my adult life.

Six weeks after I returned home, I turned in my resignation. I had no idea what I was going to do, which scared me, definitely frightened my husband, and confused everyone I worked with.

All I knew was I could not live like this anymore, and I believed beyond doubt that there had to be a better way to live and lead, ultimately discovering a new way of BEing.

As I left my 17-year career as a respiratory therapist in January 2020, I was armed only with this belief.

As I said, this is a full-circle moment because I am living and leading this new way of BEing today.

And I while I have shared parts of my story, especially why I left my 17 year career, I have have never publicly shared what I have done to get here. It has all been so non-linear, following nudges, learning to trust those nudges and my vision for my life and the future of humanity.

I didn’t arrive here overnight. How could I?

After years of living disconnected, disjointed, and fragmented, coming into Wholeness required dedication and a new sort of devotion. It meant applying effort in new places, turning over rocks, and looking into the nooks and crannies of dark corners that once were forbidden.

After leaving my career, burnout and apathy remained, still living inside me, consuming me, so of course, I thought the answer was, once again, to hustle my way to success and work hard; at the time, I thought the first step was to sell and market my business.

I hired consultants to help with social media and marketing, but all of it felt ‘off’ misaligned and still disconnected because, mind you, at the time, I was still unsure what my business was. I had a profound understanding of the problem, but I still didn’t have a sustainable solution.

I was still learning how to truly tend to myself, all my pieces and parts, both seen and unseen.

So, as much as I wanted to keep proving myself through the external, the painful truth was I had no idea who I was at my Highest Essence; the most finite and infinite part of me was still a mystery, and until I knew HER, I would continue to buy into the certainy of others, let their ideas of success define mine and seek my self-worth and value from external circumstances, hustle, grid, and the need to prove myself in the overdoing and producing.

What most people won’t tell you is that this is a skill, one that doesn’t get you overnight results but actually leads to compounded results through magnetic presence. It is firmly anchored in who you are and what you stand for, not how much you do or produce.

This is the core of my work with my clients.

This is what cultivates a regenerative and expanding capacity to build a leadership legacy that will rebuild the systems and structures of our future, new structures that will be the harmonizing point of duality for the sustainability of resources, including humans.

This will lead to smaller teams and organizations that offer a broader scope of individuality and energetic sovereignty, higher quality of care, and more significant impact, all by doing less.

Jennifer, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I shared so much about how I got into this work and why I am passionate about it in the previous question.

So yeah, let’s get into the work I do with clients and how unique it is.

The biggest obstacle for us as a collective to reaching this future point of harmonization of duality is understanding and integrating authentic self-care practices that awaken our Embodied Truth and Wisdom.

There is an art and practice to proper and profound self-care that involves ALL of you and has a Whole-BEing approach. Very few leaders have mastered this art and practice only because of the state of burnout many find themselves in.

And unfortunately, the nuance of this process has been abbreviated and completely oversimplified by terms like “fill your own cup first” leaving little acknowledgment that your cup was already full before you started.

While you may find yourself experiencing some relief from depletion and exhaustion through certain activities like massages, journaling, yoga, days off, etc., you very rarely get to the root cause of the issue, which is why all of those are temporary fixes.

What most people don’t tell you is that burnout is a living, breathing entity, and once you’ve experienced it, it continues living inside of you, inside of your cellular structures, even after you’ve “recovered from it.”

It lies in wait under the surface and will continue to secretly keep you living in a state of overarousal and overdoing in the subtlest of ways.

A perfect example of this is a client I worked with; She had just stepped into a management role, a high-stress situation on its own transitioning from bedside to middle management. But her world was thrown into further chaos when she was diagnosed with cancer.

All of this was 7 years prior to us working together.

Shortly after one of our sessions, an event triggered a profound realization. Her phone rang, the familiar melody a jarring reminder of a past trauma. For years, this ringtone had been a subtle trigger, unconsciously reliving the stress and anxiety of that difficult time.

She had never seen it before, this thread that kept this state of trauma alive in her every day until that moment, how she was unconsciously reliving that time in her life in the most subtle and sneaky ways.

One critical part of the work is bringing the unconscious conscious because once you can see the pattern, you can heal it.

For her, this realization was a turning point.

She changed her ringtone.

This seemingly insignificant act was a catalyst for a significant shift in her capacity for deeper self-awareness and a more grounded and regulated way of navigating her life and leadership.

This is why I say Burnout is a Capacity issue.

What I see most leaders struggle with is the deeper, more nuanced approach to cultivating their operational capacity.

That can only come from opening up the clogged-up spaces within your atomic structures.

This comes from activating your conscious awareness of the unconscious programming that is running in the background.

The more you open those portals to see what is under the surface, the more you truly learn to honor and tend to all your pieces and parts, both seen and unseen, with unconditional love and acceptance.

Which is what profoundly restores you at the cellular level.

Once the internal friction of burnout has been resolved at the cellular level, then your innate genius and wisdom surface,

along with your magnetic presence, which has been there all along.

You were just too bogged down for it to shine and lead the way.

So, the leadership gurus out there will have you believe that there is only one quality or characteristic that makes a “good” leader or that you need to just push past the fear as a means to achieve.

I firmly oppose these ideas.

And this is why in my work, we don’t start with strategy or focus on fast results.

You start with YOU, ALL of You, and get to the root cause of the depletion first.

This is the key to sustainable, long-lasting results. 

The way you tend to your pieces and parts, both seen and unseen, is foundational to building a leadership legacy with integrity, clarity, and coherence. 

To share a bit more detail, there are three phases to my work:

Phase I: Leadership Resonance: Master your energetics, get connected to your highest essence, and develop emotional and Self-mastery. Build a Harmonious Infrastrucutre™️ and cultivate cellular capacity. Know who you are at your purest, infinite, finite essence.

Phase II: Leadership Uniqueness™️: Here we uncover your Karmic wounds and gifts that will serve as your guide, along with your Soul Values (I intentionally put this in the second phase because most value work when done before the deeper work of mastering your energetics, is still attached and dripping in conditions and pretenses) Also, in this phase, we get into your desires and visions, now that you have the capacity to hold them, they become an anchor point.

Phase III: Leadership Ethos: Once the previous phases have been implemented and you are going through the embodiment process, we will discuss how you are uniquely designed to serve the consciousness of humanity. This is your Soul Mission and your Message, and these two are your expressions that fortify your Magnetic presence.

The final piece to embodied leadership is where you emanate what you stand for, thereby needing to do less to get results because YOU are the anchor point.

Welcome to Quantum Leadership Embodied.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

The three unexpected places, I learned the most about my own leadership uniqueness and why honing your skills in unconventional ways is the key to becoming an embodied leader.

If there is one thing I am more confident in than guiding magnetic leaders to cultivate a regenerative and expanding capacity, it’s helping them awaken their Leadership Uniqueness™️ so they feel confident that their way works. And help them build a magnetic presence that allows them to be effective at what they do without always needing to be on or hustling to get results.

Over the past year, I have realized that several unexpected and seemingly unrelated industries have directly influenced my own self-mastery and, subsequently, supported me in my own leadership philosophies.

So before you start looking for another leadership book, attend another conference, or enroll in a higher education leadership program, it might be time to look outside your industry and away from all the mainstream leadership fluff and gurus to discover unexpected paths to mastery that highlight your uniqueness and align with how you want to show up in your unique ways.

I think we have all seen the parallels between a high-performance athlete and leadership: commitment, consistency, practice, and that drive to continually show up.

You’ve heard it all before.

But I want to share another industry besides high-performing athletes that can teach and highlight some of the fundamentals of success that go beyond grit and labor and tap into mastery of craft and core elements of embodied leadership.

And that is comedy and comedians.

So, like high-performing athletes, comedians are committed, consistent, and practiced. 

Oddly enough, I think most comedians would laugh at these common factors. Nevertheless, they are paramount to a successful career as a comedian.

But of course, The practice looks a bit different.

Before they go on tour, they practice in mirrors, go into local clubs to test out material, record their set, and listen to audience reactions.

And with each practice, they make adjustments by moving material around,

and micro improvements by shifting their tone, pitch, and cadence, responding to what works for them and for the audience.

They spend time studying, contemplating, and observing the audience and the world around them.

I do believe most comedians have a natural tendency for observing.

All of these develop their craft.

While you may first think that a comedian’s goal is to become funnier because being funnier means more success, but that isn’t the case.

A big part of their craft is the art of storytelling, sharing relevant personal narratives and observations.

Now, relevance doesn’t mean pulling material from headlines, although some comedians do. 

Relevance is actually about topics, personal stories, public observations, and life experiences that the audience can relate to.

I witnessed this as I watched all of Mike Berbigula’s comedy specials on Netflix in reverse order. I loved The Old Man and the Pool so much that I then binge-watched all of his specials on Netflix.

And WOW, his delivery and storytelling drastically changed over the years. 

His storytelling got better with each one, as did his pauses that naturally drew you in for more. 

And what’s even more brilliant is that what I would say started as a stand-up comedy career turned into a career of truly developing one-man shows that invite you fully into his story.

I witnessed his development over the four or five specials I watched, and as I finished the third one, I realized I had just gotten a front-row seat to his mastery of his craft.

And leadership is that; it is mastery of craft.

But leadership itself is NOT a craft!

Just like humor and laughter are not the craft for comedians, they are, in fact, the byproduct.

It’s not about mastering a specific set of skills, but about embodying a way of being.

Leadership happens when you master or are actively engaged with your craft, and this is where we get leadership wrong.

We focus on leadership as the “thing” that will get us results, that will give us that title of GREAT LEADER, or that feeling of achievement.

When you solely focus on developing your leadership, you find that you are always looking to others to see how they do it, following their strategy and processes, and buying into the certainty of their success.

In this process, at some point, you abandon a part of you, if not all of you, and then wonder why you have to work so hard to make an impact and influence changes, leaving you feeling unrecognized.

When you focus on developing your craft by way of mastering your energetics, discovering your way of engaging with the world, honing your methods and systems, along with your message of what you stand for and your unique design for servicing humanity’s consciousness, 

not as a way to be a great leader but as a way to innately become masterful at what you do; you find yourself building a reputation and becoming an unwavering beacon without trying or focusing on the singular point of leadership development or some arbitrary point of success that was set by someone else.

No comedians are alike; their material and behind-the-scenes processes are all different and unique. 

That is the future of leadership, Quantum Leadership, a rich and vibrant tapestry that elevates the uniqueness of each person in the room.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Oh, I have had to unlearn way more than I’ve learned.

I believe that shedding all the conditioning and pretenses of what we think is the “right” way to achieve success is an enormous part of the process.

I have shared about the tipping point in my life that inspired me to start this journey of creating and leading a new way of BEing.

But I haven’t shared what that internal dialog and struggle looked like in the beginning.

It was only four years ago that I was still heavily attached to external circumstances as a way to validate me and my success.

And this was the way for my entire adult life, living under the program that my value was in what I produced and how much I did and achieved, this was all that mattered.

And I heavily subscribed to success requires sacrifice.

And I was the sacrifice.

I played by the rules, putting rest at the end of a long, daunting list of things to do.

Rest was only acceptable when earned, and the thing was, I never felt like I did enough to earn it.

If I took days off, if I allowed myself to fully restore and rest, guilt and shame consumed me.

And let’s not even discuss the days in hospital management of missing work due to being sick or ill.

I would call myself lazy and feel completely incompetent, sending me in a downward spiral 🌀 of anxiety and overwhelming stress to work harder.

This even showed up in my so-called self-care at the time, which was just smoke and mirrors of small moments of relief, coping, and, Yes, avoidance of what was really under the surface.

This did not go away because I decided to start my own business.

In fact, I would say it got worse because now, it was all on me; there was no external safety net.

As a result, I spent a lot of time chasing things to do, filling my list with tasks, but never actually getting much done.

Days ended and yet I felt incomplete as if something was missing.

Because under the surface, there was a disconnection and deregulation, a shadow that was screaming in fear of my unworthiness and incompetence.

I’ve told my husband that if I could do it all over again, the first year after leaving my career, I would have done nothing and not started a business right away.

I would have taken my time, doing things I have never done before, and found a hobby that had nothing to do with producing.

Because the lesson I had to unlearn, that very first step, was to disentangle my worth and value from productivity.

I started to see this as I found myself tired all the time in those first few years (yes, years).

I struggled to complete tasks and wanted to spend an enormous amount of time sleeping and in bed but because I was still so stuck in the idea that I couldn’t afford to relax, I fought the much-needed time of sleep like a three year old.

While that struggle was real, so was my ability to fully admit and accept my needs.

Tending to myself in this way was a luxury I didn’t understand the value of, and I didn’t have the skills or the embodied safety to truly honor myself at this depth of complexity.

So then I started to tell myself that “rest was productive.”

And I used to believe it because I desperately needed to.

I desperately needed permission to rest, to relax, to sleep without an agenda.

At that stage, my exhaustion was at an all-time high, and I needed to know it was okay to rest. It supported me by opening up the conversation and the space to rest.

But then, one day, as I was sitting on the couch, I had just recently reminded myself that “rest is productive.” I heard this stirring question in the back of my mind: “Why did I need rest to be productive?”

That’s when it became abundantly clear that my issue was not with rest. It was with the idea that I was only worthy when I was doing and producing.

And by telling myself that rest is productive, I was perpetuating the problem, keeping this very old, generational trauma pattern alive as a way to determine my worthiness and value in the world.

That has been my greatest lesson of unlearning.

Cultivating a strong sense of self-worth and self-belonging so that I am liberated from external circumstances.

Let my value shine through what I see and the vision I hold, and not let the world determine my worth, and there is nothing I have to do to be worthy.

My worth is innate & divine.

All this comes down to feeling safe to be me.

This is what I was asking for in all those years of working so hard to be seen and recognized—this deep yearning to feel safe and accepted as me, ALL of me, NOT a compartmentalized version of me that fits into everyone else’s expectations.

Slowly, as the unconscious patterns started to release from my cells and my capacity for myself started to emerge and blossom, I noticed guilt no longer guided my decisions;

I discovered restorative activities such as lying on the floor and listening to music.

I could let my mind wander and contemplate questions and concepts, letting myself uncover what I stand for.

I started going on adventures to explore without needing to earn the time away or work first.

Alone time became sacred and ceremonial.

Space opened up for meaningful conversation that didn’t need to have a purpose or a point.

I found empty days on my calendar to have the greatest potential to fill me up and restore me.

And now, When I find myself struggling to complete tasks or things just aren’t quite landing, I stop and ask myself:
1. Am I rested & restored?
2. Am I owning my worth?

With both of these as pre-requisites to producing, I now have a short and streamed-line to-do list,

it’s not overloaded with things to keep me busy but filled with intentional tasks that set me up for success and ensure I don’t miss specific tasks that support me and my leadership.

It’s common for high-achieving industry leaders to struggle with taking time to rest while also juggling the challenges of producing results.

And much like you don’t lose weight to get healthy, a healthy and safe body will naturally lose weight…

A safe, rested, and deeply sensed worthy being can produce in organic and natural ways without force because you don’t need productivity to determine your worth.

And there is no hack for that!!!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jennredden.substack.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsjennredden/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsjennredden/

Image Credits

Unseen Studio on https://unsplash.com/@uns__nstudio

Sincerely Media https://unsplash.com/photos/yellow-flower-field-during-daytime-Wsu7ieGJ_O4

Rachel Coyne https://unsplash.com/photos/orange-haired-woman-wearing-black-top-flipping-head-backwards-l1LT-rVqbDw

Autumn Mott Rodeheaver. https://unsplash.com/photos/yellow-sunflowers-in-mason-jar-JyXJouX8lGc

Ellie Ellien. https://unsplash.com/photos/woman-sits-on-bed-while-reading-book-MPjjaiuq2xU

Christin Hume https://unsplash.com/photos/person-using-laptop-computer-Hcfwew744z4