Episode 185: The Promise You Keep | Jenn Farrer on Follow-Through

Guest: Jenn Farrer, certified executive coach, keynote speaker, and author of Make Them Think: How to Coach for Ownership, Insight, and Action.

Episode Summary

Jenn Farrer has spent nearly 20 years helping leaders think more clearly. But when it came to putting her own thinking out into the world, under her own name, she spent almost three years stuck in a "creative sabbatical" that produced nothing but notes. This episode is for the expert who can solve everyone else's stall except their own.

Key takeaways from this episode:

• Staking the ground feels different: Helping other people think is a well-practiced skill. Putting your own point of view out where it can be judged is a different kind of vulnerable, even when you're the expert in the room.
• The real fear underneath the freeze: Jenn's honest answer was the fear of being seen as a hack, an old worry that has nothing to do with actual competence and everything to do with tying self-worth to other people's opinions.
• The choice comes before the follow-through: A twelve-week public deadline didn't create Jenn's self-trust. It revealed a self-trust that had already been chosen and was waiting to be practiced.
• Data, not a verdict: Learning to receive feedback, even critical feedback, as information to adjust from rather than proof of who you are.
• Keeping promises to yourself: The same standard you'd hold for a client or a loved one, applied honestly to the commitments you make to yourself.

Guest Bio and Links

Jenn Farrer is a certified executive coach, keynote speaker, and author of Make Them Think: How to Coach for Ownership, Insight, and Action. She has spent nearly 20 years working with leaders, coaches, and high-performing professionals on one deceptively hard skill: asking better questions and listening in a way that actually moves people forward. An award-winning researcher in communication, collaboration, and influence, she has coached and trained thousands of executives, athletes, and teams. At 26, Jenn survived a life-threatening stroke, and it sparked a question she has spent nearly two decades researching: what does it actually take to help someone change?

Website: https://jenniferfarrer.com/
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jenniferfarrer (weekly newsletter on thinking, leadership, and conversations)
Instagram / TikTok: @jennfarrer
Additional resources: Make Them Think: How to Coach for Ownership, Insight, and Action — available on Amazon and at barnesandnoble.com (https://a.co/d/0jeJC4hM)

Full Transcript

Dawn: Welcome back to the Self Trust Solution Podcast. I'm your host, Dawn Ledet, the self-trust coach. And today I'm joined by Jenn Farrer. Jenn is a certified executive coach, keynote speaker, and author of Make Them Think: How to Coach for Ownership, Insight, and Action. For nearly 20 years, she's worked with leaders, coaches, and high-performing professionals on one deceptively difficult skill, asking better questions and listening in a way that actually moves people forward.

But what we're diving into today is a very different kind of challenge. After spending years helping others think, decide, and act, Jenn stepped into a season where she had to face something much harder, putting her own thinking, her own voice, and her own work out into the world. Jenn, I'm so glad you're here.

Jenn Farrer: Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. I really enjoy your show.

Dawn: Well, thank you. I'm so excited for myself and for the listeners to all really hear about these shifts, because you are someone who makes such a big impact out in the world with leaders, and your experience of that, sometimes we can automatically just believe that it must come easily to you, right?

Jenn Farrer: Oh, yes. Yeah, I mean, I believed it myself for a while. I was like, "I'm a coach, certainly I can manage to do these hard things on my own," right?

Dawn: Yeah. So before this shift, you had built a career helping others think, decide, and grow, like we just said. But take us into that season of what your work looked like and how you saw yourself.

Jenn Farrer: Sure. So I had taken a step back from my work as an executive coach and corporate trainer, for what I intended to be a six-month creative sabbatical. So I intended to take everything I had learned from working with business leaders and athletes and put it out there in lots of different products, for lack of a better term, for teaching people how to have better coaching conversations with others, and also how to have better conversations with themselves.

So I intended, as I said, for that to be six months. Well, almost three years in, I was sitting with, like, every permutation that that one idea could take, about 10% of the way done in my Notes app. So I had really nothing to show for my creative sabbatical. I had a couple book outlines. I had a bunch of business ideas. I had a podcast idea, an online course idea. But I hadn't actually created anything. I had been doing a lot of thinking about it. And it really started to erode my sense of self and how I was relating to myself, because I thought, while it's good that I've had this time to think and I've gotten everything out of my head and onto paper, I haven't gotten one thing over the finish line.

Dawn: What was happening during that time, do you think, that was preventing those from being completed?

Jenn Farrer: Well, I didn't recognize it as such at the time. I think in hindsight I can talk to you about it and say, "Oh, I was scared." My whole career I made space for other people's thinking and helped them have breakthroughs. But then when it came to actually staking the ground, saying, "I've been doing this almost 20 years, here's how I think about it, here's what I believe, and here's how I do it," putting that down on paper and out in the world, it just felt incredibly vulnerable and exposing. I started having dreams about being naked at school, being naked on stage, being naked at work. I really think it was that vulnerability of having to happen.

Dawn: I love that you bring that up, because you said getting it out on paper and getting it out in the world, and my instinct is to ask which was it, but I think it's good for us to hear that sometimes even though getting it out in the world is the vulnerable part we're talking about, we can go one step forward and even prevent ourselves from getting it fully out on paper. So what would we have noticed from the outside? We're just watching you, we have a little sneak peek of what's happening internally. What would we have noticed externally during that time?

Jenn Farrer: I mean, I have been a very successful entrepreneur and successful coach, and I'm an athlete. I'm a runner, an endurance runner. So I think most people, even close to me, will be surprised to even learn that I am, I'm very much on a self-trust journey. The book just came out at the end of January. And it wasn't like I developed self-trust and then wrote the book. I started to learn about my own self-trust through the process of writing. But I think people would be surprised to even know that I doubted my thinking enough to feel vulnerable about putting it out there.

Dawn: It's so good to share that, because so often we think that it's just this external view, and people who are successful and strong also have doubt.

Jenn Farrer: Oh, of course.

Dawn: And we can present differently externally and we can feel differently internally. So what was that experience for you, kind of having that dissonance of the external viewpoint versus what's going on internally?

Jenn Farrer: Well, like I said, I think I didn't know I had a problem.

Dawn: What did you think was happening?

Jenn Farrer: Yeah, I mean, I think that I was really keeping some promises to myself, but I was sacrificing other promises to myself. So here's what I mean by that. I'm a mom, I'm a wife. I had taken back some client load on. So I would tell myself, "Well, I need to do this client thing, I need to prepare for this, I need to..." All of these other things that were sort of external, family-related, career-related. Or, "I'm training for this race, that's gonna take a lot of time." So I was upholding a lot of the obligations that I had in the external world, but here I had this kind of internal desire to express myself creatively in any number of these different ways, and I wasn't doing that.

Dawn: Well, it was sort of like responsibility is what it felt like to you internally. Like, "I'm being responsible, I'm handling this client load, I'm handling my family, my running." But there's this thing that's being unanswered, this desire.

Jenn Farrer: Yeah, it was a way that I really was not... I think it was like I was showing up for everybody else, and this was a big way that I was not showing up for myself. And I don't think I could have pinpointed that at the time. I mean, when we're subject to all of these things, it's hard to look at them objectively. Now with some distance and talking to you, I'm like, "Oh yeah, that's what was going on with me," but I definitely didn't recognize it as such at the time.

Dawn: So you've done some objectively hard things. You survived a stroke, you pushed yourself physically, but you mentioned that this felt harder. Tell us what made putting your ideas out there feel so different.

Jenn Farrer: Well, yeah, it was terrifying. And I definitely think of myself as someone who does hard things, can do hard things. As a runner, you intentionally put yourself in discomfort regularly, daily. But I think part of it was, it was the first time I was not practiced in taking up space, right? It was the first time I was really not focused on someone else. I think it's interesting, I notice a lot of the people on your show, a lot of us are in helping professions. We're coaches, we're counselors, mentors of different kinds. And I was really, really well-practiced at making space for other people and helping them sort through their own thinking, and asking great questions, and being a great listener. But then when it came to sitting down with myself, even sorting through my own thinking, it was not something I had spent a lot of time doing. So it felt very new. We get a lot of praise and self-worth as we grow up by serving others, and that's something I had really attached strongly onto, that part of my purpose was kind of being more behind the scenes and helping others soar.

And to put my own point of view out there, where it's open for comment and other people's opinions about it, and where people could look at what I said and be like, "Oh, that's the wrong way to do it," I was just really tied up in knots about other people's reaction to what I put out there. Even though it was something that I know intimately how to do. I have more certifications than degrees and training in this.

Dawn: What do you think was really at stake? I like to think of what it's offering you as evidence, that's evidence of the fear. What do you think the fear really thought was at stake?

Jenn Farrer: I think that the real fear was someone thinking I was a hack. Right? It's like I had built a really successful coaching business. I've been a leader of other coaching companies. And it really was that feeling of, okay, but if I give them a glimpse into my head and how I think about coaching, then what if it's exposed that I actually am not a very good coach? Which is one of those things that... And we all do this. It's kind of an irrational idea, if people have been hiring me as a coach for years and years and years. But I think that was what was at stake, is that I would feel, it was tied into my own feelings of worth.

Dawn: So good to recognize, right? Because even if someone were to say that, it doesn't make it true.

Jenn Farrer: True. Yeah, it doesn't erase all the humans you've helped, and all the people that you will help in the future.

Dawn: Absolutely.

Jenn Farrer: I know. I do think that's so funny. I say in the book, sometimes breakthroughs feel like an aha. Most of the time, though, they feel like, oh, crap. Like, oh man, I didn't know I was thinking that or feeling that. But I think when you get to that level of the "oh crap," that is usually where change can happen. Crap thoughts, I mean, they're always gonna be there. Our invitation is to relate to them differently. It's like, oh, there's that "oh crap" thought, what do I wanna do with it? Do I wanna engage with it? Do I wanna let it just slide by? Do I wanna ask it some questions? Do I wanna give it perspective? So different than when we're just like, "Oh crap," and then we just let it land like a big pile of sludge.

Dawn: Yeah. Well, it's the whole thing about, you can be subject to it, or you can look at it from a distance so that you can look at it with some objectivity and curiosity. I love that you said, I'm going from this space of always holding other people and their thoughts and helping them and impacting them and serving them, to this, sharing what I think and what I believe, as if those are two different things.

Jenn Farrer: I know.

Dawn: It's so good, because our brain is offering us something that's just reminding us, the way I relate to my brain anyway, it's actually reminding me these are the same things. But because there's a little fear there, we can hear it as if it's opposing that in some sort of way.

Jenn Farrer: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And I think that's one of the most beautiful and frustrating aspects of being human, is that we are full of contradictions. We often think two things that could be interpreted completely differently about the same thing, same situation, kind of all the time. You say the same statement with just different inflection, and it takes on a whole different meaning for you. That's why often I'll invite clients to say the same words but in a British accent, or in a robot voice with no tone. Because our inner dialogue, I like to remind people, doesn't have a tone inherently. We have to assign one. And so when we have this one for so long, then it makes sense that we hear it that way. But if we just remove the tone, we can be a little more objective with it and relate differently.

But I love hearing you reflect back to me my own thinking, right? Because essentially what I was saying was, this is my brain. I was saying on one hand, my value in the world is by helping people help themselves, and I do that one-on-one very well. But on the other hand, if I were to put one of these products out there and help people help themselves on a mass scale, whoa, that's terrifying.

Dawn: And you're like, "Hm, that really doesn't make much sense, now does it?" Well, it's just reminding yourself, it really, each one of those people, it's one-to-one for them. They don't feel like they're part of the mass. So you're still doing that one-on-one work, you're just doing it through a different format.

Jenn Farrer: A different medium, yeah.

Dawn: Yeah. You mentioned a turning point in Mexico City where you hear something that changes everything for you. Can you take us to that moment?

Jenn Farrer: Yes. So I live in New York, and I was down in Mexico City for a meditation training. So I've been meditating for decades, but I'd never had any real training in any one tradition. So I was in Mexico City learning how to practice Vedic meditation, so in the Vedic tradition. And in the Vedic tradition, you sit twice a day for 20 minutes, and it's just a mantra, a sound that kind of wafts in and out of your consciousness. And I remember raising my hand and asking the meditation teacher, "Okay, if I'm sitting in meditation and I get an insight or a creative idea or a sudden dose of inspiration, is it okay to stand up and write it down so I don't forget it?"

And he kind of was like, "Hmm." He said, "Yes." And he said he used to do that in the beginning too. And then he said, "But what you'll find is that the same ideas keep coming back to you, and you don't need to write them down, because they're not gonna leave you alone until you do something with them." And he used the phrase, "You have to clear your creative backlog before you have new ideas." And I was like, "I know exactly what he's talking about." I've had these ideas for different formats of basically sharing the same thing, how to have better conversations in a coaching context with yourself and others, and I have done nothing with that, and every new idea I have is some version of that.

And so for me, the idea of clearing my creative backlog was a turning point, because I really felt like, and it's not as if I all of a sudden heard that and developed self-trust and then wrote the book. I think that moment made me tired of my own BS. And so I then put the structures in place in order to write the book, and learned self-trust in the process of writing.

Dawn: I think you unveiled it. I think it was already there. I would say you unveiled it, that it was already there, because you were already exercising that. I think of when you say that thing about the backlog, it's so true, but the urgency to move is actually a scarcity tactic, right? It's when we think we can't hold on to it, or it's not really ours, so we have to hurry up and go write it down, or we have to act on it right now. And it was always there. It was gonna keep coming back because it's what you're meant to do.

Jenn Farrer: Yes.

Dawn: So it was just giving yourself permission to see that.

Jenn Farrer: I love that so much, because here's another thing that woke up for me, and maybe this will ring true for someone else as well. What else comes forward is, if I don't just get up and write it down, maybe there's more to it. Maybe it goes deeper. Maybe there's more for me to learn, that if I rush and get up, I miss out on. I mean, it will come back, of course, but maybe there's this beautiful evolution of it, the blooming of it, if you will, is what comes to mind.

Dawn: I love the way you tied it back to purpose.

Jenn Farrer: I think that's so true. And a lot of times with coaching clients, I sort of will be not that interested in their healthy habits, right? A lot of people meditate and they journal and they exercise and they eat well, but then they'll be in a job or a relationship or a situation that they're totally miserable in. And it's like, well, you have been getting this whisper, this inkling of something that is going to guide you closer to your purpose, and you're not acting on it. So I'm almost like, I'm not impressed with how much you meditate, right? But you know.

Dawn: Habits can become their own kind of prisons or shackles sometimes.

Jenn Farrer: Excuses. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dawn: So you decide to write. I mean, you've made the decision, but now you're like, "Okay, not only have I decided, it's time." You set a 12-week timeline.

Jenn Farrer: I did.

Dawn: And you didn't just set a timeline, you made it public.

Jenn Farrer: Yeah, I did. Well, like I said, I think it was one of these inflection moments, right? I got really tired of my own BS, and I needed to... 'Cause when I think about, okay, what works in coaching conversations with others, it is, how do you help them take ownership over the solution? Because when people feel ownership, then they act. So I sort of flipped that question back to myself. And I was like, "Okay, well, what would actually make me feel like taking ownership and actually moving on this?" And so I really thought of it like almost a training plan for a marathon, where I gave myself 12 weeks. I hired a coach, I actually went back to the meditation teacher, who is also self-published several books, Light Watkins is his name, and talked to him about coaching me. And we set weekly milestones, daily milestones, and I did. I went out on social media and I was like, "I'm writing a book, and it's coming out on January 27th." Which at the time was just me looking at the calendar and being like, "Yeah, 12 weeks from Tuesday is January 27th, that's the publication date." And then just keeping to those, I think once it was out there and it was public, once I had a plan, I just executed on the plan. I just showed up every single day and did my task for that day.

And I think that the structure, I hesitate to use the word accountability in coaching, because I think sometimes accountability can almost trigger a defensive response that can actually shut down our creative thinking. But I think the structure helped me have public accountability, helped me take ownership over it. And during that season, so it came out, the book came out January 27th, so I started writing it beginning of November. We had Thanksgiving in there, Christmas, my family celebrates Hanukkah as well, we had all the school breaks, I totaled my car during that time, my 10-year-old was home sick with the flu for a week. So life just kept going and tried to throw me off track of the plan in every possible different way. But I just really kept going. I wrote in the airport lounge, I wrote on vacation, I wrote every day except I took Christmas Day off, but I wrote Christmas Eve. And I just got it done.

Dawn: Yeah, you said something really powerful, that this built self-trust in a way that all of your previous accomplishments never had. Why do you think that is?

Jenn Farrer: Well, I think part of it was going through the discovery process of even realizing that a lack of self-trust was there, or realizing that the fear and the vulnerability were even there. Like we talked about earlier, I was telling myself the story of being responsible by keeping up with all these other obligations. Well, then once the book was written, there was this period of a couple of weeks between the time that it's done and out. And I had early readers, maybe 20 or 30, these are all very close friends, close colleagues, former clients, current clients, all trusted people. And the second I hit send on the email with the manuscript, it was like terror. And I think that was when I really was like, "Oh, that's the thing, this fear and vulnerability is really the thing that kept me from writing." And by not keeping the promise to myself that I said years ago at the beginning of this creative sabbatical, that I was gonna put my perspective out there. And it ended up being a book, but I had different ideas of what that would look like. I was, in essence, really not showing up for myself. I was not keeping promises to myself.

And so I think discovering what was holding me back, and then discovering the antidote through the process of writing it, which for me was like, okay, if I say I'm going to do something, I have to uphold my own promises to myself the same way as I would to a client or a loved one. That process was really showing me, okay, this is how building self-trust will look in all areas of life.

Dawn: How has your definition of self-trust changed through this, would you say?

Jenn Farrer: Well, it's funny, I think I told you this before we started recording. When I was first starting as an executive coach, my most popular corporate training and keynote was conquering self-doubt, or overcoming self-doubt to be a more effective leader. And what I taught in that, and what I was doing with my executive coaching clients, amounted to... I got into coaching kind of, I grew up through the social sciences, psychology and communication theory and neuroscience. And so I would come into these keynotes and come into these client sessions armed with so much data. And of course, in an executive coaching context, that would be like 360 feedback, feedback from colleagues. And I would say, "These are all the things that people appreciate about you, and if you could internalize what these other people think about you, then that's gonna unlock all the ways in which you feel limited about your self-worth or worthiness, or it'll cure your imposter syndrome."

So I was very much taking an outside-in, data-driven perspective. And I think there's still a lot of value in that, but of course it's very limited too, right? Circumstances change, people change, people around you change. And so what I learned about myself that has now, through this kind of journey, is it really is about how I'm relating to myself and how I think about myself, and it's much more in here than out there. And also more intuitive. I mean, there's certainly a space for data, and it's really important. But there's a yin and yang between how other people feel about me, how I feel about me, what the external data is telling me, and what my intuition is telling me, and just learning to keep those things in the right balance. And so the shift, I think for me, was very much one of looking out there to now looking in here.

Dawn: Yes. Because out there, it's just a rocky foundation. You have to have the firm internal foundation. When we are looking, if people think this about me, and then I start shaping myself around that, then when someone doesn't, then I don't know what to do with it, or I have to change myself instead of just adjusting behaviors. Very different.

Jenn Farrer: Yeah.

Dawn: I always say you can change your choices easily, but it's really hard to tell yourself that you have to be different when it doesn't align with who you really are. If you have that firm foundation of, this is who I am, this is what I value, and you have a decision of firm self-trust, then that feedback does become data, it doesn't shift your identity. It gives you, like, "Oh, maybe I do wanna approach this differently, or I wanna communicate differently in my work, or I want to learn this different skill." It becomes data instead of a verdict on yourself as a human.

Jenn Farrer: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Well, it just gives you, I think, a more well-rounded understanding of what you already know to be true about yourself.

Dawn: Yeah, and where you wanna evolve and grow. We always are, it's a beautiful thing. We're actually, we seek that, we seek evolution and change and growth, while we also seek comfort and safety and try to avoid discomfort and energy. So we have those two sides, and there's a way that we can, I call it the unified front. But there's a way to do that, for sure, but it means relating to yourself differently, to your point. So for someone listening who knows they're sitting on something, an idea, a project, a next step, what's the first promise they should make to themselves?

Jenn Farrer: Well, I would say, I guess I would encourage them to just look at themselves and hold themselves to the same standard as they would hold somebody else when it comes to promises. So maybe the first promise is, "Okay, I'm going to be really honest with myself about how I keep promises to myself." So for most of us, it's like, we all have that flaky friend, right? We all have a flaky friend who's always running late, or you make plans and it's a 50/50 shot whether they're gonna show up. And over time, you start to relate to that person as not being very trustworthy. And I think when we don't keep promises to ourselves, that's chipping away at the way we relate to ourselves at some level. And so I think just being really honest about, okay, do I uphold the commitments I make to myself in the same way that I uphold the commitments I make to other people?

Dawn: So tell us now, what are you focused on? What's the work you're most excited about right now?

Jenn Farrer: Yeah, well, I've had the best time with this book, which is so funny. We've been talking about how much hesitation I had for so many years, and now I'm like, "It's the best thing I've ever done."

Dawn: Right, that's how it often happens, right?

Jenn Farrer: So right now I am doing a lot of teaching within organizations, so either they're coaching accreditation organizations or within companies, and they're bringing me in to teach their managers how to have better coaching conversations. So that work is taking the framework that I eventually got down on paper and out into the world, that is now in the book Make Them Think, taking that framework out and then teaching people how to apply it in their lives, with the people whose lives they wanna impact. So that work is really lighting me up, and I also am still doing some one-on-one coaching work. But it's starting to evolve a little bit more into coaching coaches, and helping to apply the practices in the book into their work.

Dawn: So where can people connect with you and learn more about the book?

Jenn Farrer: Sure. So the book is available, it's called Make Them Think: How to Coach for Ownership, Insight, and Action, and that's available on Amazon and barnesandnoble.com. I also am very active on LinkedIn at Jenn Farrer, F-A-R-R-E-R. I have a weekly newsletter there where I talk about reflections on thinking in leadership and how to have more meaningful conversations. And I also am active on Instagram and TikTok at Jenn Farrer.

Dawn: Awesome. Jenn, this conversation is such a powerful reminder that even those of us who spend our lives helping others grow still have to walk through that process ourselves.

Jenn Farrer: Oh, yeah.

Dawn: So yeah, thank you so much for being here and sharing this.

Jenn Farrer: Thanks for having me.

Dawn: If today's conversation stirred something in you, I want you to take one step before you close this episode. Go take the self-trust identity map. Before strategy, before motivation, before effort, you need to know where your identity is operating from, because that is what determines everything that follows. It's free, it takes three minutes, and it will give you a precise read on where you're operating from right now and exactly where to focus next. So the link is in the show notes, along with all of Jenn's links, go check that out. And if you're a coach or expert who already knows what's in the way, if you're done operating from almost and ready to claim the authority that actually moves your business forward, Claimed is my private coaching container for exactly that. That link is in the show notes too. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss what's coming. These stories are just getting started. I'll see you next time.

Ready to know where your foundation is actually operating from right now?

Take the free Self-Trust Identity Map. It takes three minutes and gives you a precise read on exactly where to focus next.
https://www.theselftrustcoach.com/identity-assessment-page

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https://www.theselftrustcoach.com/the-floor-your-build