Your Journey Happens for You
Happy Friday feels, Tribe! I hope you’re having an amazing day! Have you ever had a moment where you realized you’re a completely different person than you were a few years ago and are overcome by all the best feelings? And when you go to put it into words, the only way you can describe it is gratitude.
That’s how I’m feeling today. Seriously! Just a little while ago, I was sitting with my husband, and I started crying for joy. Making money used to be difficult for me — it’s not anymore. I make money effortlessly, and the work I do to make it brings me so much happiness. It was a rough road getting here that included debt, disappointment, multiple degrees, and disrupted paths. But as I sit here on the other side of things, I realize that all of it was positioning me to have the life I have today.
In this post, I’m going to briefly tell my story, and through it, try to show you that everything that has happened to me has actually happened for me — and that it’s true for you too. When you trust that life is happening for your benefit and choose to be grateful for every experience, you attract the kind of abundance that just makes you cry tears of happiness! Let’s dive in!
How I Left My Teaching Job to Be a Nutrition Coach
I began my teaching journey in 2011, and I taught several different grades. I was a kindergarten teacher, first-grade teacher, and a special education resource room teacher. I spent some time as an interventionist and ran the school when my principal was gone. On top of that, I was an aspiring principal, which means I had two postgraduate degrees.
My plan in life was to become a principal. Why? Because I’ve always loved helping people — it was my favorite thing on the entire planet. I knew that I was meant to help people, and the only way I knew I could truly help people was to be a teacher. When I realized that I could help even more people by being a principal, I fast-tracked my master's degree in 2014.
I stumbled into entrepreneurship by becoming a nutrition coach a few years later. After hating my body for pretty much my entire life and walking through a difficult relationship with food for as long as I could remember, I found Crossfit. The day I found Crossfit was the day that I found strength in myself beyond my appearance. I began to understand that my self-worth was so much more than my physical body, how people looked at me, and how others thought of me. Whether or not I was liked by other people or invited to their things, it finally clicked that my self-worth was a hundred percent inside me.
Around that time, I began to see how many women struggled with the same thing I did: finding their worth and identity in their appearance, likeability, and career. So I became a certified nutrition coach. I coached and coached and coached. I was honestly a great nutrition coach. And I knew I could help so many people, but I didn't know business at all. I didn’t know how to set my own rates, what a social media strategy was, or how the hell to have a frickin’ sales call.
I was grasping at straws, consuming all of the free information in the entire universe, and not moving the needle an inch. That’s when I realized that if I really wanted to build a business and make good money helping people, I needed help with business. So I hired my first business coach. It required an $8,000 investment I did not have. Even though I had just pulled myself out of $12,000 of credit card debt, I put more money on my credit card and started my business. I just knew that to get where I wanted to be, I needed help.
What’s Possible After Three Years in the Online Coaching Space
That business coach was incredible! He taught me how to build a one-on-one coaching business. I started with him in November. By June, I was consistently making $12,000 a month. That business grew and grew and grew until it was a multiple six-figure nutrition coaching business. By that point, I had left my job as a teacher in one of the best school districts in Michigan. Which meant I left a job I loved every second of and walked away from my dream of becoming a principal.
Since then, I dove headfirst into my coaching business and invested in other programs, memberships, mentors, and different experiences to grow. All of that led me to where I am today: September of 2020.
My business has already doubled our revenue goal for the year. With about three and a half months left in the year, we are projected to go way beyond our original goal. Every single day our impact and income grow as we help hundreds of men and women grow and scale online businesses. I helped retire my husband from his corporate job, and he is officially a part of the business. We recently bought an RV, and we're selling our home.
You guys, this is MY LIFE! It’s wonderful and amazing and all sorts of magical, but I wanted to share the whole story with you because I want you to see all the ups and downs and degrees and credit card debt that accompanied it. Okay? No one handed this glorious life to me. I fought for it, and I chose to receive everything that happened in my life with gratitude, trusting that it was guiding me to where I was supposed to end up. And it has.
Here’s a closer look at the mindset I chose to welcome all the ups and downs in life and what gave me the life I desired.
What to Tell Yourself When Roadblocks Show Up
Maybe you're in a place where you're struggling. Maybe you're in a nine-to-five job that you cannot wait to get out of. Maybe you are a full-time entrepreneur who has been stuck at $9000 months for the last seven months. Maybe you have a multiple six-figure business right now, and you're like, “Well, how the hell do I actually take it to the next level?!”
Wherever you're at in your life or business, I want you to know that you are in this exact place for a reason. Every single thing — good or bad — that brought you here happened for you, not to you.
This is what I want you to do right now: Name the worst thing that happened recently and say, “_______ happened for me.” This is exactly how I handle my own roadblocks. I say to myself, “Okay, this is happening for me. I might not know the reason right now. But I know the reason will show itself. Until then, I will trust and have faith that this is happening to get me to where I need to be.”
Having faith is a huge part of achieving your goals and not giving up when roadblocks present themselves, or things don’t happen on your timeline. One of the ways that you can build your faith is by looking at your past. Think about the last five years of your life and ask yourself, “What is something that happened and set me up to do or have something I have and absolutely love right now?” Another way to think about it could be, what situation from the past got you here?
My answer to this question is how I got into business mentoring. I heard so many stories of men and women that invested in themselves and didn't get what they wanted, or the program wasn't what they thought it was going to be, and they didn't get what they needed. So, I decided that I would be the business coach who changed that for her clients.
Looking at our past and seeing the things that led us to where we are grows our faith that everything in life is happening for us even when things are not going our way! Tribe, wherever you are in your business, you can still dream and take action to move towards them. Trust that life is on your side and keep moving!
Why You Need to be Grateful to Attract Abundance
Now that you’re looking at your past life experiences as things that got you to where you are today, I want you to cultivate a grateful attitude towards them. EVERY experience — the good experiences and the bad ones, all the ups, and all the downs, the mentors that helped you explode your business and the ones who left you hanging — I want you to get grateful for all of it. Choose to live in immense gratitude regardless of the circumstance or situation.
When you live in complete gratitude, happiness, and celebration, guess what's going to happen?! The law of attraction will go to work for you, and you’ll start to attract more gratitude, happiness, and celebration into your life.
If you’re like, “That’s great, Jenn, but my brain doesn’t just find the good around me and get grateful like yours does. You don't understand how hard it is for me.” Listen, your brain is not wired to find the good, excitement, love, and joy in life — neither is mine. Your brain is wired to find the problem, the difficult, and the crappy because it’s wired to make a way for you to survive. In a pre-modern world, you needed to avoid all the bad things to stay alive, so your brain was on a mission to find all the bad things and avoid them. But we don’t live in a world where you need to fight for survival anymore. We live in a world where we can fight to thrive!
Instead of letting your brain do its natural thing of looking for the negative so that you can survive, train it to look for the good so that you can thrive and attract massive abundance into your life!
Why You Need to Get Grateful for Your Journey Right Now...
You guys, I’m so excited about what the next few months hold for all of us. Remember wherever you are in this year — crushing your goals or wondering whether you should give up and try again in 2021 — the year isn’t over yet! You still hold power to make this the best year ever. Choose to be grateful for everything that has brought you to this moment and trust that the Higher Powers are making everything work out in your favor!
If this episode spoke to you in any way, take a screenshot of it and share it on social media. Tag me @thejennkennedy so I can see who’s listening — I smile whenever I see one of you loving this content. And follow me, if you haven’t done that already!
That’s it for today, Tribe. Choose immense gratitude this weekend, and I’ll chat with you on Monday!
