A former skydiver, digital nomad, world traveller, Tony Robbins Results Coach and Chartered Accountant and marketer, today, Jana Hendrickson lives in the US with her husband and two daughters as she helps others like her “have it all”.
Jana and I met at the second year of her Alive! conference thanks to a mention from one of my early ‘mentors’ and this encounter led to all sorts of wonderful things in the coming years. Now, we both share the experience of motherhood as we juggle our coaching with wanting to be present with our two children, and a belief in the power of work-life integration.
Tune in to hear more about Jana’s personal and professional journey since that conference, her philosophy of attachment parenting and ‘unschooling’, and why she is now moving from relying on referrals to building an effective personal brand.
You can connect with Jana on her website, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook.
*Resources mentioned during the episode*
1:1 Coaching & Mentoring – If you’re looking for one-to-one support to help you achieve your specific life and business goals, Anna has a limited number of spots for individual coaching and mentoring. onestepoutside.com/coaching
Watch Jana’s original interview from back in 2015 here >>
Unschooling
Anna Lundberg
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another interview and it’s a special one for me today because Jana and I met a long time ago now I should have checked what year it was. But really, it was around the time that I was first experiencing my own escape from the 9 to 5. One of the books that changed the game for me while I was traveling back there was almost sabbatical when I was 2013. I was off in South America, I read Chris Guillebeau’s The Art of the Non-conformist Life, I want to say on my Kindle, and he was amazing, because even though he had a huge following, and this big conference in America, I tweeted at him at the time, I was active on Twitter, and I asked, Hey, I’d love to come to the conference in Oregon. But you know, so far away, and at the time, I guess I hadn’t quite started traveling. I don’t know why I didn’t just go. And he said, Oh, you need to talk to Jana. Over in Germany, she’s organizing this a live conference, which I then came along to, and in fact, apologies for the long introduction. But this is something we talked about in our original conversations. So I think we won’t go too much into that today. But anyone who’s interested, I’ll pull out the old interview from many years ago. And at that conference, I met first of all, a lot of the people who have been on this podcast and who are in my first book, leaving a corporate nine to five. And secondly, I met Dave Cornthwaite and Emily Penn, one of the I think the last slide on one of their presentations was, Oh, we’re paddleboarding down the Mississippi later this year, I was like, yep, sign me up for that one. So I went there. And I met people there who have since been working with me and my programs, etc, etc. So I guess this is all to say, Jana, a huge thank you, to you, because you’ve been sort of there on the sidelines in a way, but thanks to that thing that you will, you know, you never know, the unexpected things that will happen. And even though the the conference and that community in the exact form didn’t continue, my goodness, the reverberations, certainly for me, personally had been tremendous. So thanks to you. And also, you know, for everybody listening to hear the serendipitous little meetings, that can happen.
Jana Hendrickson
I don’t think I knew that, actually. Thanks for the very kind words. Yeah, I don’t think I don’t think
I knew the whole story that Chris actually pointed you to the live conference. But yeah, he obviously came as a speaker. And actually, you know, funny side note, you know, similar to what you were sharing. When I had the idea for the live in Berlin conference, it was largely because I had been going to the US for these all the time from Europe, I was living in the UK at the time. And I felt like, man, we need more of this. And in Europe, and I picked Berlin because it felt like Central easy and cheap to get to. And in my mind, I thought, I’m going to ask Chris, and I’m going to ask Pam Slim. And if they both say yes, I’m gonna have to do it. So I asked them, and they both said yes. And then I was like, Oh, dear, now I gotta, you know, rally and make it happen. So I, it took me nine months from that summer of August 2018 2013. Sorry, till May 2014, which was the first year of the life conference. And so yeah, I’ve had lovely messages, and still sometimes do get messages from people who had made connections, and then one thing led to another led to another. So that’s really wonderful to hear. And it just goes to show, you know, if you have an idea, then you know, do it no matter what, because it could make a big impact on people’s lives. So yeah, but
Anna Lundberg
it absolutely does. And I think I mean, that’s a whole conversation we can have, but in terms of measuring success, you know, we look so much and, and it’s so hard, especially people starting out on their business, for example, oh my gosh, I’ve only got three people showing up to my webinar, and no one’s watching. Right. So when you forget that each of those people is someone who first of all is trusting you at that time, and possibly money and so on. Exactly. You know, they are talking to other people. And yeah, the ripple effect of things you just don’t think I think we’re so obsessed with these big numbers of oh, I need millions of followers on LinkedIn and so on and when I say we, I guess we as a society, general public… It’s easy to get pulled in that direction
Jana Hendrickson
And I think with with regards to the, you know, quote, unquote, definition of success, I think, a live conference, we had about 150 people and both both years, and it was really hard to sell all the seats and you know, get the volunteers on board and stuff. And I remember that in order to kind of grow the community a little bit I had a live and left Brian England and alive in this, you know, like just little meetups register on meetup.com. And so some people met, you know, in a live in Hamburg at their little meetup and stuff like that. So people organize themselves, but there were a number of them where I sat there by myself. So, this is, you know, this is part of the picture, you know, and, and, you know, as people may or may not know, or remember, I’m not sure if we talked about this in the first podcast, financially, this was not a success conference, but for me personally, and for so many people, it was absolutely life changing, you know, so, I guess it depends on what you what you want in the end and whether it was 100 people or you know, Chris, Chris Guillebeau went from like 1000 or a few 100 1000 to like, 3000. Then there was like, Now, actually, my reimagined success is actually going back to 1000. Because the feeling was different. So the last few were just 1000 people. So I Yeah, it was an exciting time, and certainly life changing for me, and I, you know, unintentionally, I guess, created that for myself, you know, to because I wanted to feel alive in all areas of life. And I still stand for that now, you know, all these many years later, because I actually went, you know, I kind of had this feeling of like, oh, man, I feel hypocritical, you know, I’m proposing that we feel alive, and, you know, it work in our relationships in our, you know, adventures and travels. And here, I was kind of dying in my former relationship. And so that really was a big catalyst to, you know, separate and move on, and all the things that happened after but, you know, basically, starting starting a second life
Anna Lundberg
isn’t always the case, right? We teach, we create what we need for ourselves. And I don’t think that’s inauthentic at all, if anything, that’s the vulnerability and courage. And so, and you mentioned, you know, what you want in the end, I mean, it’s hard to know what the end point is, if not death, and so on. But I certainly I think the long haul being in it for the long haul, the long term, you know, the, it’s just stepping stones along the way. So the conference, huge endeavor, and my goodness, what a success to get Chris and Pam coming along, and everything you’ve created around that. And yet, it was financial failure. And also, it was only one of many things that you’ve done since then I know at the time, you were skydiving, you dyed your hair and you know, probably enjoying maybe the single life and I think things evolved a little bit. So I guess before we dive even deeper, because it’s already so interesting. Why don’t you tell us then you’ve also moved to America, ironically, after this whole conversation of bringing things over to Europe. So where are you now? And I guess, a couple of sentences. What’s happened was hard to say since I last conversation, but maybe just give us give us a little flavor of what’s happened. Yeah, yeah, happy
Jana Hendrickson
to I think, you know, probably like you believe, as well, especially given this podcast, you know, I
feel like we constantly keep evolving the different parts of life in order to define what success means for us in the moment, right. And so, at the time, and 2014 and 15, when we held the conferences, you’re right, I was just kind of I had made this commitment to myself that I would only do the things that would make me feel alive. So hence the skydiving and then I, you know, I moved to Hawaii for a while and I actually did my skydiving license in Texas for a while. And I dyed my hair, I started actually very Cetainly with just some pink streaks, and then it just got crazy. So if you want to look back on some photos, you will see some rainbow hair. But it was it was really just, you know, any connection, any work opportunity. I also at that time left Tony Robbins because I was coaching for Tony Robbins, because I was not feeling alive, doing that work, you know, doing call after call after call and not being able to, like, dive deeply in with the clients because it was so you know, half hour 45 minute sessions and just like just high turnover of calls. So I had I was kind of, you know, at this crossroads, and I was like, Oh, the money but oh, you know, and, and I love that community too. You know, I had an amazing team that I connected with for the years at Tony Robbins company. But it was not fit, it was not filling my cup, right. And so one of the things that I did was pursue sort of the inner search around my relationships and why my previous marriage had failed. You know, we’ve been together for 12 years. He’s a wonderful person. So why didn’t it work out why he couldn’t be connect. And so one of those things led me down towards the, you know, the classes and material from David Deida, who’s based in California, who some of you may know, some may not. But he’s basically an expert in all things relationship, intimacy, Tantric Yoga, that sort of thing. And, you know, I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of David Deida, and a couple of other people teach us that took me then to Los Angeles. And so I traveled between at that time between Hawaii and LA and Texas for my skydiving and Berlin for the conference. It was quite a busy flight time. But in in LA, I met Chris who’s now my husband at a kind of a yogic weekend retreat. And we were not like I was my mind was not in for another long term relationship. You know, I was not really pursuing that. But you know, our connection was really really strong and we just kept seeing each other and eventually there came a point where we had to make a decision like are we gonna like be all in or what and so he ended up because I was at the time still and you know, already nomadic fully nomadic so I left England left all my stuff, just really had the suitcase and the backpack and the laptop and have traveled, you know, spent most of my time in the first couple of years in Southeast Asia and Europe and this back and forth that I was just describing, with the probably the most parts of that In Hawaii, and he joined me on that journey. So he sold all of his stuff and quit his job in Orange County tonight. And while he was living in Southern California, and then came on the road with me, and I had an opportunity for some work in London, and actually ended up being in London in 2016, for a little bit, in and out, working with a company that did forex trading. So while all the while I was coaching, doing some work with this company in London, also learn how to trade Forex at the time, which you know, was not very quickly turned out was not really making me feel alive. But you know, I was kind of roped in for that for like a year. And so we would kind of come through London a fair bit. And Berlin still was a big hub for us at the time, because, you know, we were then playing this visa game, or like, how many days could we stay in which place because he has an American passport, I have a German passport. And we can only stay in different places, especially the US and Europe for so many days. And so, yeah, we traveled for quite a while together from January 2016 till February 2018, and basically had two years of an intense, you know, honeymoon period of just being asked, you know, being a couple that we were doing a lot of growth work together as a couple spending time where other people go on vacation, and you know, and have their honeymoons and Thailand and Bali and places like that. And it was a very, was very cherished time, you know, when we look back, excuse me, just drinking a sip of morning coffee, because you know, it’s morning for me. In any case, we kind of came to in that in that sort of second phase of that we were starting to look at, well, what are we really looking to create? You know, I’ve always been very intentional about where do I want to live? What do I want to do for my work? Where do I want to take my life really, and it was clear that I was turning, while 2018 I would be turning like 2036 or so. Right? Then around that time. And I certainly always saw myself as having children. And so we were like, well, if we want to have a family, it’d be kind of like now, you know, like soon. And especially if we want more than one. And so we had to kind of think about what kind of places would be good for us to have our family to be based out of and it was very clear that in order to stay anywhere long term for more than three to six months, we would get married, because otherwise we couldn’t, you know, whether that’s been UK, whether that will be Europe, in Europe or anywhere else in the world. And so we ended up making a you know, it took us almost a year, like we made a big list of like locations, places in the world that we would consider to be based out of. And I would say that our top five were Thailand, Gozo and Malta, actually, we spent quite a bit of time there, we loved it there. Spain, like we really like Morocco, but you know, anywhere in Spain really considered. Then, in the US, we had a couple of places. And the fifth one was Panama. And because we knew that was pretty easy to you know, be a resident of Panama. And so we yeah, we looked at like, what do we need? What kind of community community would do we want? What amenities do we want, Western medicine was kind of important to us, which was one of the reasons why Thailand fell off the list. You know, especially having a baby and especially being more, quote, unquote, mature mom to be, we ended up choosing Washington state in America for a couple of reasons. One was that I just felt really drawn to part of his family there that was, you know, that still living there? That were just wonderful. I felt like, you know, we would have a lot of support, and just lots lots of love and great values of family around us there. And then the other was that, since I was going to be working with less, especially in the immigration process, where you’re just not allowed to work, you know, for a period of time, that he would have ease with finding work as a software engineer. And so Seattle was just a very obvious choice, because lots of jobs there. And that’s how it how we you know, how it came to be. And while we were waiting for a fiancee visa, through the embassy, and you know, the UCS at UC USCIS. It’s called Exactly. We got pregnant. And so then our lawyer was like, well, we might just, you know, if you get married, then we can just change it into a spousal visa, it’d be much faster. And so we ended up doing that and had a very fast turnaround for a really sweet, wonderful wedding in Washington State. And, yeah, and then we really started to build our lives there for the last night. From 2018 to 20, November 21, is when we moved to Western Michigan here. And that was really a big shift. Because although we really liked our family there in Washington and how we’d landed there, and the places we’d lived, and we’d moved into a nice house, we just, you know, we’ve never quite put roots there. Like, it just never felt like this was our endpoint. And then in the fall of 2020, I found a found a thing called unschooling, and so at this time, my firstborn daughter was just under two, about 20 months old. And we started thinking about, you know, because we had gone through all the, you know, Attachment Parenting steps, like lots of, you know, people who are familiar with that will know what that means. It’s just very intense parenting mode of basically, you know, bed sharing, or co sleeping, which we actually didn’t do for a while, but notes of breastfeeding and carrying and those kinds of things. So, very respectful, loving way of parenting, and it felt like a net lead naturally onto unschooling, and really, it was such an amazing fit, when I started to learn about it, it just made sense to me, because there’s
Jana Hendrickson
so much merit for me, and the child always being given the freedom to choose what they want to learn to follow their interests, and to be supported in those, as opposed to being prescribed what they need to be learning at different stages of their, you know, schooling. And so, I, you know, I still coach a lot of people who are in their sort of, you know, mid 30s, or 40s, even, and they’re like, I don’t even know how I got here. And I don’t like this. And I don’t even know what I like, or what I’m passionate about. And I felt like if kids grew up that way, and schooling or free learning, as they call it to, then they wouldn’t have that problem of needing to find themselves in their 30s because they’ve been allowed the space. And really, it’s a luxury, right? It’s a privilege to be able to explore what you want, when you want, and just being loved and supported by your parent. But I felt like hey, they wouldn’t need someone like me and
Anna Lundberg
my whole job, my whole business idea would be gone if they hit Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. curiosity and passion. Absolutely.
Jana Hendrickson
Absolutely. Yeah. And so I love this whole concept of like, just nurturing from below rather than being like giving the structure from a top, you know, and so, I, when I look back, I was like, Yeah, well, what did I learn at school that I’m using now English, for sure. That that’s about it, like anything that I did after school, my degree in marketing, my finance career, I will learn all of that on the job. And I didn’t need to have a specific thing, like I think it’s, it’s, there’s merit in certain forms of education, higher education, when you want to go into particular career, but I also learned from grown unschoolers, that there’s nothing really preventing them from doing that later in their lives, you know, if they choose to go into a specific direction that requires degrees and stuff like that, then great, otherwise, I’d be encouraging them to, you know, make their own stuff, be creative, and, you know, create their own businesses by the age of
Anna Lundberg
- Just as an aside, I’ve got a marketing colleague from my corporate time, who has, I haven’t talked to her in ages. And I recently reconnected and she had, when I talked to her last, which was almost 10 years ago, she was retraining to be a doctor, and she’s now you know, qualified doctor and doing that, which is really inspiring, because I would always flippantly say, oh, unless you got to be a doctor, of course, which you have to do in younger but no, if you have the interest in dedication, you absolutely can do that later.
Jana Hendrickson
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I you know, there’s so much data now and statistics about how
universities really like to take homeschoolers and unschoolers, because they’re just intrinsically much more motivated, they’re much more likely to, like by a few percent likely to complete their studies and stuff like that. So I was just, you know, feeling quite encouraged on that journey. But then we started to look at, okay, well, where will we have that where we have that opportunity? Obviously, in the US school is not legally, you know, required, like in Germany, for example, where you cannot do that. And so that was easy, but we definitely were looking for community. And we were looking for having an environment for our girls where they would be flourishing, right, of course, as any parent would want to have that. And so we started looking at different locations in the US and where we might find what we’re looking for. And so we made again, a big list of all the requirements that we are needing in a location. And in the end, both my husband and I arrived at Michigan as a state because independently actually, because he was looking at it from flooding risk weather to NATO’s sustainability for like the next 1020 years. And I was looking at it from the unschooling perspective, and I found this lady on on Instagram through a podcast, who I just loved. All right, Kara, because she was sharing her life with her two daughters. It was relatable because I have two daughters. And, and it was just looking beautiful. You know, it’s always like beach and forests, and they were cycling. And you know, it was just wonderful. And so I reached out to her at one point in September, end of September of 2021. I said, Where is this place? This looks amazing. And she was always documenting, like, the unschooling and homeschooling community and the Co Op that they had founded and stuff. And so she said, Oh, we’re in Michigan, you know, up at Lake Superior. So I started looking around there and asked her again, a couple of days later, where exactly, so we started this little conversation. And within, I think six days from that finding out about this place called Marquette, Michigan and up here at Lake Superior, I found our house, I just looked up on Zillow, and I was like, This is our house, like, it’s got our name all over it, it’s perfect for us, it was way out of our budget. And I was like, we’re gonna make it happen as this is our house, I just No. And so the flow really continued, we made an offer on that house on that same day, and got that accepted. And we’d never bought a house never applied to have a house never played to have a mortgage, you know, so we’re really naive about the whole process. But it just was interesting how it was, there was so much energy flowing that direction working out, we got help from this person help from that present, they connected us this person, it was just amazing. It really wanted to happen, basically. And so with the help of my former babysitter, Cami has you, we will always be grateful for her because she basically saved my life. In that time. I had a small, you know, 910 month old and Lily as a toddler, and we packed up the whole house and you know, moved us 2000 miles east to here. And over about six days of road tripping with small children. And so you can probably hear screaming in the background, having fun, I assume. But yeah, so we landed here, just the day before Thanksgiving and 2021. And, you know, like a picture book, it started snowing when the movers came and unpacked, Oh, stop. It’s just been adorable ever since. So, yeah, we’ve really, you know, for us define success in terms of life. And the way of like, we wanted to have a family, we had our two kids pretty close together, 25 months apart. And, you know, it was, you know, very much centered around setting up the life as a family that we wanted. And professionally, you know, for my husband, Chris, it was an evolution of different, you know, jobs in software. And now getting much more into AI and creative stuff. And for me, it you know, beautifully I could continue what I was doing wherever I was anyway, and through the pregnancies and through the little years, I just kind of dialed it down a little bit. So it’s really hard. I don’t know, if people were listening to, you know, who might be able to put themselves into these shoes. But when you have a baby at first you kind of think like, oh, well, they’re always sleeping, but to time, planned coaching call with a client for a nap time, that usually doesn’t happen exactly when you needed to. And stuff like that was complicated. And I started, you know, going for walks and carrying the baby and you know, kind of, you know, doing audio calls, or just really trying to make sure I could be available for my clients. And they were very generous and very understanding at that time to so I could just retain my client base. And then in about April of last year, I started to like ramp things back up. And meanwhile, you know, it took about five and a half years for this whole immigration process to be over and to finally have the unlimited green card and like all of that sorted. So obviously in the middle of that we had Corona COVID Corona, as they would say. And so we were in lockdown and just had babies, you know, so it was kind of easy for us to be honest. It wasn’t like we weren’t going to go anywhere anyways. But yeah, lots of things happened since then. And now I’m actually you know, you’re I mentioned this a little bit before the podcast. I’m like also in the stage of like reimagining my business been in business now for over 13 years. And it’s it’s always around the same sort of thing, which I figured out isn’t actually as much career coaching or executive coaching, as it is more to do with the nature of relationships, because my clients want to have a better feeling relationship with themselves with time with their work. So I don’t mean relationship coaching in the sense of like couples and finding love. Yeah, I know a little bit about that. But that’s not my area of expertise. It’s really more about what I call call work life integration where we want to have it all right, we want to have it all especially you know, as moms but you know, I coach a lot of men and there’s so much strain on the work aspect of life that they end up feeling not being present for family not you know, feeling guilty for taking time for themselves and not feeling connected to the partners or Not feeling you really freedom. And so it’s, it’s still that work. And now I’m kind of in the process of, you know, growing, I have some revenue targets for the next couple of years. And so I’m kind of reevaluating how I’m going to do that, because I was all, you know, quite under the radar, I never really spend a lot of time marketing building an email list or anything like that. So it feels like I’m starting a whole new business in that regard, I was very word of mouth and referral base for the last decade, at least. And so now it’s like, Instagram and building an audience and email list and online products. And really, I want to have an online business because it would serve continue to serve the life that we want to lead, right, I don’t want to work more than 1520 hours a week. Currently, I do mostly about five. And that works really well and is already a six figure business, but I just want to be able to create things that are, you know, at different price points for different people, but really are allowing us to, basically for Chris not to work and for us to be really family and whether traveling family or not, but really just being free learning family
Anna Lundberg
next decade. Well, I mean, we’re very much kindred spirits. I mean, work life integration is one of my key pillars. And it’s something that I play around with more and more this idea of wholeness and the whole person and showing up as a whole selves. And I’ve been fortunate enough to create that for myself. And just to be so if I’m running a training online or in person with I feel so it’s the same, right, I’m the same person, obviously, there’s still things that you share, and not share. But it feels to be wonderful. Whereas I know a lot of people feel perhaps that they have that sort of work persona in their home persona. What I heard you say, and thanks so much for sharing. And I think there’s so many, so many insights and experiences. So thank you so much for taking the time to walk us through that. A couple of things. One is I heard and you correct me if I’m wrong, but you had started with, you know, what makes me alive. And it’s very me focused individual. And I think that’s often the case, when we first have that kind of transition and break away from work and relationships and so on, then, obviously, you met Chris, and it became, what do we want to do as a couple and that sort of honeymoon period, as it were, I love how you then made really intentional choices about where you want to live, and YouTube came together for that. And then, as you said, you’re looking more at not only but also your goals and your future as a family and the answer the longer term and where you want to be longer. So I suppose that’s an observation. I’d be curious to hear what you think of that. And secondly, did you or have you grieved the identity of the previous election because I always get this, you know, the cliched metaphor of like the butterfly emerging, blah, blah, blah. It’s true. But you know, the reality of the chrysalis is that it’s very messy and painful, and that you have to kind of disintegrate before you can build yourself together. And I’m just curious, I also went through a very adventurous phase, which I sometimes think back to, you know, I was kind of going down that path. And I don’t regret now living in the van. And, you know, doing that whole life, which a lot of other people do amazing things and so on. On the other hand, I do try gradually trying to build in elements of more paddleboarding. And I’ve got my sailing license, and I would love to travel more and so on. But I’m curious about that kind of, yeah, the grieving process of having to let go or choosing to rather let go of single, alive, Jana, or having to let go of honeymoon period. A couple, you know, there’s so many positives that come with the next phase, right, but there is still a process of your identity shifting and your definition of success is changing as well. Okay,
Jana Hendrickson
yeah. Okay, I get you. So with regards to the first question, and the focus going from a Live me, and then we and then we as family, as four of us actually think now, as you know, it’s obviously my family first for me, clearly, I mean, you know, I think most people would probably say that is true for them as well. But it’s almost like now it’s also going, the extension of that is now going into the same model going into the them as well. So what I mean by that is, you know, part of why I’m shifting in the business is because it has been a lot about what works for me what works for me, what works for me, right? And that has meant very high fees for very little time in terms of, you know, the hours I spend, so you know, several, several five figures for a year of working with me and stuff like that. And that was great for a certain audience and I love that work and I love one on one work, but you know, now the going from i to we it’s also going to the world, right? When what can actually contribute that’s a value, what do people need? Right? I have much more scope now that I’m my glass is full, you know, I can at giving out again, or more in that way. So I think that’s a very normal path of consciousness evolving, right, that we’ve ended up in that in that realm. And with regards to the grieving, I would say, it’s, you know, it’s still there like it’s happening frequently. In fact, I had a big I guess, awareness or insight just Ancient in the beginning of the year, through one of my coaching programs that I was a part of, for, for leadership development, where I realized that, you know, there was a, there was a big part of me that was very much still struggling to reconcile that version of myself before children. And now the version of myself now, because, you know, I was feeling really, it was just me and I, and that was all the kids, you know, especially because we’re choosing to parent on high mode, because if you do gentle parenting, attachment parenting, your child led and child focused, and, you know, we practice consent based parenting, meaning that we totally trust and respect our children and their choices. Even if they’re only two or three, or four, as my eldest now is four and a half, that requires a lot of energy, a lot of emotional capacity, and a lot of flexibility, right, because you’re ending up, you know, not treating them, like they have to fit into your, you know, into your life or into your boxes that you’ve laid out. But actually, they come with their own needs and wants and opinions, not just about their body, but about what they want, when they want. And so it’s required a lot of my focus out there on them. And so I think it was very hard to realize, like, you know, I’ve gone from what I felt like was this, like, super successful, you know, skydiving, traveling thing. And plus, you know, we had, you know, a very wonderful time as a couple as well, which we’ve certainly grieved, and still do grieve the loss of every now and then because we’re missing the just the sheer amount of time that we could spend alone. And because we’re parenting, our parenting, we’ve not left them alone for any period of time yet. We don’t, we do have a bit of babysitting help, but we don’t really go away for a week. We don’t have grandparents nearby. And so you know, some people I think, are very easy with, you know, even younger than one year old to kind of just be like, Oh, that’d be fine, you know, but I have made experiences with the girls where, you know, they’re not actually fine. And then I’m not going to have a good time going away. If I know that, you know, my youngest is a breastfeeding, like, She’s waking up currently about 150,000 times a night, it feels like in a sleep regression phase of sorts. And so she wouldn’t be okay, just sleeping over someone else’s house, you know. And so, my attachment wounding has made me make some hard choices, you know, in terms of my parenting, which is really in their favor. But it also means like, I’ve lost parts of myself. And then I was like, Well, you know, who do I want to be be now as mom and that version of myself, and I’m, you know, I’m figuring this out every day. And again, that’s not a concluded thing. Just like work life integration is not a process of getting there is a process of always getting present to was, you know, actually wanted needed seasonal, right.
Anna Lundberg
So I think that’s tough, certainly, because I have three days a week at the moment when the kids are at nursery, which means those are my work days, but they’re also for example, today’s a Monday I went to the gym, I played racquetball with the league that I’ve joined. I mean, I’m total beginner I went to gym, you know, done laundry that didn’t go so well. There’s about a half the day is gone. So so out of the three work days, obviously, it’s not actually sort of the usual eight to 10 hours and say one, and I find that that moment, they’re the real sort of reflection time is the stuff that’s missing, not just because of the hours are limited, rather, because my presence, I’ve just been with the kids three days. They’re there all the time. That you know, there’s currently mommy, mommy, mommy, there’s just as much as we love that time. And so one, I found that the hardest thing is that there’s just very little quiet and very little, you know, just kind of, Oh, what is my meaning of life right now? Right? So I get sort of the strategy done and I get the all my content and everything done. But yeah, the biggest sort of why are we here kind of questions, alas, are sometimes left to the bottom of the pile, which is a shame, which is why of course coaching and going on retreats if at all possible, even for me just go for a run or something it’s really helpful to to have that mind.
Jana Hendrickson
I totally get that. And I you know, I’ve gone from basically having about an hour to myself a week, where I would go for a walk or something to really like slowly climb back a little bit time here and there. But for example, I did go for a couple of months. I went back to CrossFit last summer and it was just always like a 90 minute turnaround time like it was a long 15 minute drive there and you do your hour and then you come back and it was just not working for us as a family and so we ended up finally buying a peloton, you know, so that’s like me then doing 20 minutes instead of 90 minutes. Or you know, and so, it is really challenging, especially because I feel like I’m you know You’re saying three days a week, you know, I really feel like I am with the kids 24/7. And, you know, it’s a, it’s a relief sometimes when we have a babysitter, but it’s not. We’ve we’ve tried varying levels of that, you know, of like three hours and, you know, per week to 20 hours a week. And we found that even at 20 and 25 hours, it wasn’t giving me more relief, really, it didn’t feel like because I was still working at home, like, it’s still mommy, mommy, mommy, like, if, if I was out there right now, Lucy was just screeching. It’d be like mama, you know. So she was just not ready for that, for that really been deeply engaged in play last summer. So that’s just starting now. And we obviously have activities with our local unschooling homeschooling community, twice a week, and we go to the library and stuff like that. But I’m also thinking like, I don’t really want to hire a babysitter or nanny, while I grow my business. So they can unschool my children. That’s kind of beside the point. And so, it really, like just highlighted to me that it made very, very, it made it very clear that if I spend my time working, it has to be a very high value work. And, and otherwise, I don’t really want to lose these years, especially the first 10 years, when I’m still their most favorite person in the world, to building a business, I don’t know I have a business, it’s over six figures, it can grow up great. If it does, if it doesn’t, not a problem. So I really only want to do things that I find valuable that I love doing that are like adding joy. And not just to be busy. You know, and I’ve recently I posted recently about this where I was presented with an online business structure that would have me be a lot like on lots of DMS and zoom calls and sales calls. And I was like, that is just not how I want to spend my life. You know, I don’t want to have 20 calls booked in my calendar every week, that would make me so annoyed about the week on a Monday, you know, then I can just go and get a job. And so it really had me evaluate different ways of growing the business in a very different way.
Anna Lundberg
Yeah. And I love that post, I saw that. And that’s one of the key questions I think people don’t ask, perhaps unfortunately, because again, when just starting out or with the pressure of cost of living. And so now there is that kind of urgency of needing money. In some cases, if you don’t have the privilege and the you know, the achievement of already having the six figure whatever you need and want as a basis. And I think those are the questions we have to ask, there’s so many My goodness, my Instagram now is exploding legged is like, Hey, do you want to get more 20? More calls at No, thank you. But those are the kinds of things we have to keep resisting, and I’m with you, although I haven’t, you know, I’m fascinated by all this unschooling and so on. It’s not something that I’ve pursued, but and my whole reason of being like my whole business structure started because I wanted to be free, and nomadic, and I was single, and so unlike you now, and it allows me also to manage it alongside the kids. And if I were to put them into full time childcare, we also haven’t done a lot of betting. I mean, we’ve had a babysitter once a few weeks ago to have a family dinner with my partner’s family for an evening a couple of hours, then that would kind of be beside the point for me. But you know, these are such individual decisions. But I yeah, I’m very much in the same place. And it makes it hard because as we said, You hinted at it before. And as we talked before we started recording, I’ve been out for 10 years now, of out it sounds like I’ve been out of prison, which sort of makes sense. And so I reconsider things. I’m working more with corporates now, funnily enough, because I no longer have the baggage that I had of having to escape the environment. Now I see really exciting opportunities there. And my ambitions increase a little bit. Now that I’m sleeping a bit better, and the kids a little bit more independent, and so on. So I think it’s just so interesting. And I think that’s the key takeaway from everything is the evolution of these things. And you don’t have to have all the answers. It’s both stressful to some extent that you have to keep thinking about these things, but also hugely empowering and reassuring that we don’t have to have all the answers because it can and will evolve. And if you do have a few more minutes, I’d love to double click a little bit on what you mentioned in terms of the marketing stuff, which is a bit more mundane than all the fascinating meaning of life questions that we’re looking at. But I’m curious because it’s, it’s really insightful to hear and I think reassuring to some people to hear that you’ve managed to build that six figure business on what sounds like quite few hours. And as you said, referrals obviously doing an amazing job and having that that word American sight word and I’m curious, what is it that’s driving you now to want to show up more and to embrace all the marketing and the personal branding and so on? Yeah, great
Jana Hendrickson
question, because that was actually a huge breakthrough for me in this last 12 month period because I was despising all of them, like yak, yak, yak and Yak. So I was really ironically having studied marketing and advertising community advertising marketing communications, officially in the UK. Many more years ago when there was no mention of TiC tock Instagram. Yeah, not even Facebook, I think it came out with a year I finished my studies. But anyway, I was really not interested in marketing. And I just observed a lot of coaches who maybe were really great marketers, but not very great coaches. And I also observed a lot of really amazing coaches doing very little marketing, and not needing to, and or wanting to, and so I was always like, you know, I’m a, like, I’m doing fine. Like, I was always just kind of getting clients as and when, you know, it may have not been in the exact time that I would have wanted, or you know, when I kind of needed a bit more money, but it always sort of worked out in the end. And, and I also ended up working with a number of people for quite a few years, you know, which one client I just converted into a business partner, basically, with my with a podcast that we host, Neil, he and I worked together for five and a half years. And I still have clients that are going into the sixth and seventh year right now. So there wasn’t a huge urgency for me to create more business, especially not through the years. But what I really set my intention on in this last 12 month period was systems and structures. So I wanted to create more predictability, and more ability to turn the tap on and turn the tap off. That was one part. And the other is that I wanted to be like build my body of work, you know, as Pam Slim for this next decade. So in my 40s, I wanted to really build something that I’ve become more known for, because I wasn’t known by anybody really, because I wasn’t out there, it wasn’t producing anything of any value in terms of like content, which is obviously now all over the, you know, the world and the news and the media and stuff like that. So I hadn’t found anything that was particularly joyful to produce. And I have a very fantastic defense mechanism of over analyzing. And that keeps me from taking action. So that was very helpful either. But I think, because I started, so I’ve invested about 40,000 in my own personal coaching, leadership development program, and a business coaching engagement this year. And in that process, there were lots of things that one led to another, you know, lots of those kinds of things. But really, I got intrigued because I became part of a group for a period of time, where people weren’t working to scale to like 25k month or 20k a month, which was roughly what I was looking at, but 250 K and 100k a month. So the way that they were thinking was very different to how I had been thinking before. And I was like, Oh, what, you know what they can do? I could do, I mean, some of these people are like 20 years old, not the age is a factor. But you know what I mean? Like, you kind of think, well, you know, that can’t be that hard. And so that changed my mind. And also I just became suddenly interested in the science of marketing as in the, the all the data points that can be measured, and that lead to predictable outcomes, whether it’s email marketing, kind of opening rates, conversion rates, click rates, you know, all of these things, and how they actually work. And so the more I learned about different forms of marketing, all the way through to affiliate marketing, for example, which you kind of, you know, mentioned a little bit there with, you know, just do this and you’ll make 20 grand a week or whatever. I think it just opened my eyes to even more desire to want to build an actual sales funnel, because that is what then allows the predictability what allows to, you know, once you are building a community, which, you know, I haven’t really invested much time in, to have a product to launch a product to try something out. So yes, I’m very deeply in that process right now. So I can’t like share many results. But I’ve run ad campaigns on Instagram, I’ve done lots of you know, professional video produced, I’ve had various different things that I’ve basically tried for myself and what makes me feel, you know, good, alive stills, you know, same litmus test for me. And I’ve just really landed on for now on basically really showing that I live what I preach about work life integration. And so one of the things I recently made a decision on is to not artificially through ads, grow a Instagram handle at you know, at Coachella Hendrickson, but to reconsolidate. Everything back to my personal one. But the reason was, I didn’t want to mix like my children. And so I took all of my kids stuff off where their faces are shown and stuff like that. And so we made some choices around that. But it wouldn’t match. If I’m talking about work life integration to have two separate accounts one that looks all polished. Yeah, yeah, it was all work. Which, you know, I had some strange stories to tell about followers as well. But my point is that, you know, I’m still in the process of that and I feel like if I share about my life authentically, and what is going on in my mind what I’m learning, really inspired by a book called share your work, then that’s at least for me an alignment and with integrity. And then now I’m just going to wait to see what happens. Basically,
Anna Lundberg
I think that’s a valuable and I think it’s what people want to see, right? It’s the authenticity and vulnerability. And it’s, it’s documenting rather than creating, unfortunately, it’s so easy for people to present. I mean, my partner very generously often says to me that, you know, a lot of people have, like this massive showcase at the top and nothing much behind. And he very kindly says to me that I’m sort of the iceberg that you can only see a bit and I’ve got so much more behind. And I think you’re the same what’s amazing after Gosh, 13 years and building your body of work is that when you do show up now, with integrity, you’re, as he said, role modeling the life that you’re talking about. But also you have all the thinking and experience the sound right? So it’s really powerful. I think there’s a bit of a, I can’t, you know, yeah, there’s a bit of a scarcity mindset. I guess, sometimes when we look at other people, like, Oh, I could do that, I could do that. But but you know, that such power in showing up and sort of almost putting the blinders on and not thinking about what those other people are doing. And a lot of people resist, as you said, marketing, and so on and personal brand. But if it’s about sharing with boundaries around me to I don’t share pictures of the kids and so on, then I think that’s a really lovely way of doing it. And I say to my clients all the time, that is the systems and structure that gives you the freedom because I’m sure you experienced that too. When I first quit, my job was like no alarm, and I’m just going to go where my energy is. And that turned out to not actually, it’s a very pure sense of freedom initially, but it’s also very superficial freedom that actually put true freedom, longer term lasting sustainable these things, then obviously, well, obviously I say, obviously, but it’s been a lesson hard learned that it’s those systems and structure flexibly that support that. And yeah, and I’m, I’m conscious of time, both for the listeners and for you. So I want to say thank you so much for sharing my goodness, we could have talked in so many directions. And I hope we will continue whether online or offline. What’s What does success mean to you? I suppose it’s always hard to wrap it up in a little bow but but briefly, with all the things that have evolved in the thinking, and who knows what’s coming next, you know, how do you look at success right now?
Jana Hendrickson
Right now, for me, it really is about genuine genuinely being in the moment and feeling that I do already have it all. And I say that because it’s so tempting and constantly ongoing to do the comparison game. And to think that another 100,000 or 300,000, or something else would give me more of something. But actually, if I can feel you know, if I can look at my daughter’s eyes, and I can just completely be present with her and just be super grateful that she’s healthy. You know that we are all healthy. You know, we have an amazing house and home that we build and that we just absolutely love. Then what else is there that money could buy? You know what I mean? Like it’s tempting to think like I definitely get dragged into like more money will make things better. But I think yeah, success for me right now means to be actually contented with what we have.
Anna Lundberg
I think that’s a part of and especially with the last few years, I think health is something we take for granted. And as we get older parents generation and even around our age, I think that’s a big thing and learning about being present from kids is amazing, right? Because they’re really not very worried about the future. They forget things that happen in the past they really are truly present. I think that’s that’s an amazing thing that we can kind of relearn or unlearn everyone as well. Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing. Thank you for that insight. Where can we find you if you want to follow your very wonderful authentic Michigan?
Jana Hendrickson
Yeah, I am most active I just love the platform of Instagram. So I’m most active there at I am Jana Hendrickson. Jana with A J A and A Erickson. That’s my handle. I am Jana Anderson. And then I have my website, which is just WW dot Jana hendrickson.com. But yeah, most active probably on that Instagram account compared to anywhere else, just, you know, enjoy meeting people genuine, you know, I just connected with the unschooling mom in the UK. So I just, you know, that is the most fun for me, for sure.
Anna Lundberg
It’s always been my favorite part that having these conversations and meeting people, whether it’s Instagram or on podcasts, or summits, or whatever to meet people that you just never would have. And again, a large part of that can be traced back to our interaction many years ago. So thanks again. Thank you so much, Jana. Thank you. Thanks for having me. mazing Thank you. Sorry I went over but
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