How to Trust Yourself and Your Intuition More Deeply with Jennifer Finley

Christine Li  0:01  
Welcome back to the Make Time for Success podcast. This is episode number 121. 

If you're wondering how to maximize your performance, whether it's at home or at work in your social life, or with just plain old regular decision making, you're going to want to learn from my special guest, Jennifer Finley who is an expert in guiding others to do just this type of excellent mental performance work. Jen is trained in multiple coaching methodologies and holds two certifications in neuro linguistic programming. She's also a certified trainer in yoga, mindfulness and meditation. She was a leadership coach at Lululemon. She is a Reiki Master and has apprenticed for many years with Master healers, learning the art of intuition, energy healing and psychic reading. She currently is CO hosting the Mind your business podcast with her partner, James Wedmore. She is the head coach of James's performance mastermind, and CO leads a premier leadership program with James called indispensable Leadership Academy. James has called her team Wedmore as a secret weapon for her psychic insights and guidance on the business. I enjoyed not only interviewing Jen live, but also getting to read listen to this episode. So I could get a deeper sense of the insights that Jen was sharing in it. Let's go listen to this wonderful conversation together now.

Hi, I'm Dr. Christine Li, and I'm a psychologist and a procrastination coach. I've helped 1000s of people move past procrastination and overwhelm so they can begin working to their potential. In this podcast, you're going to learn a powerful strategies for getting your mind, body and energy to work together. So that you can focus on what's really important, and accomplish the goals you want to achieve. When you start living within your full power, you're going to see how being productive can be easy, and how you can create success on demand. Welcome to the Make Time for Success podcast. 

Hi, my friends. It's Dr. Christine Li here again. But today is a little bit different because I have a very special guest Her name is Jen Finley and her skills and her being and her personality are just so special that I feel like today's a very special episode. She is a mindful performance coach. And she's a psychic, intuitive. And I myself am curious about what those terms actually mean. What she does have, she puts her experience and training and love of all things, intuition into her work. And I just want to thank you at the get go, Jen for being here today with me. 

Jennifer Finley  2:58  
Oh, thank you so much, Christine. It's such a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Christine Li  3:03  
I appreciate your being here with us today. Could you share with us a few words about just who you are? And how you came to be such an expert in the area of intuition and things that are really personal and so meaningful to each of us and how you became such a wonderful teacher?

Jennifer Finley  3:24  
Oh, yes. Thank you so much. And thank you for the compliment. So I started my journey on developing my intuition over a decade ago. But I grew up a very intuitive child and an intuitive house. So I grew up with, but I think I believe as I recall, my grandmother when we were about 10 years old, I'm an identical twin. She told us the family has a gift. And we can read each other's minds. And it was presented to me as a gift within the family. Or because I was an identical twin. I always had that psychic link with my twin. And growing up. It was very common for us to have experiences where I'd say, did you watch this movie at two o'clock in the afternoon because all of a sudden, the soundtrack started playing through my mind and and I thought, why is that coming into my brain? And my twin sister would say, Yeah, I was home and I was watching that movie at that time. So I grew up with a very easy access to intuition. And it was always encouraged, especially by my mother. When I was four, I lost an item and I found it and she said how did you find it? And I said, My angels told me where it was. And I just went right to the spot. And instead of saying, You're what she just went, Oh, that's wonderful, good. You're communicating with your guides. So it was encouraged growing up. And then when I was 23 I was teaching fitness in LA and my father had become ill by something that was very hard for doctors to diagnose. It was something that was going on neurologically, but they couldn't pin it down. And I felt quite helpless in my capacity to help him and I I'm teaching at my fitness studio. And this beautiful woman walks in. She's about 20 years older than I am. And she has this long fairy queen like hair. And she just walks up to me complete stranger hugs me, and whispers in my ear, it's not your fault that your father's sick. And even to this day, as I say that I get chills down my body. And I just burst into tears. And she just held me for a moment. And then when she left to go into the locker room to change for the class, I turned to my manager and said, Who was that magical woman, they said, Oh, that's my best friend. She's a Reiki Master. And she's crazy intuitive. So she does that to people. And I just went, I want to learn everything that she has to learn. So I started taking Reiki courses with her and did my master level training with her for four years. And I just said, can I please be your apprentice? I'll trade you a Reiki healing every week, if I can just sit at your feet and ask you questions. So every Monday for four years, I would go to her house, I would do my my practice my Reiki healing on her. And then she would just allow me to ask her anything. And I shadowed her. I participated in working with clients with her I trained under her. And she woke me up to this world of psychic ability beyond my family, being able to sense energy, being able to tune to people, learning how to meditate, what the chakras are, and where energy gets trapped, stuck or as colliding in the body. And then after that, I just kind of went on this renaissance journey of awakening those gifts in any way that I could. We I studied NLP, she introduced me to NLP and did my first certification with her. And then I started studying the Toltec lineage I studied under if you've read the book, The Four Agreements that all had Ruiz Yeah, his appearances I met. When I moved back to Texas, I found a little flyer that said, Spoon Bending class. And I looked at my mom and said, like in the matrix where you can bend a spoon, we have to go do that. And when I went to the class, there was 40 people in a room and one woman in the center, and she was bending the prongs on a fork back with one finger. And that was like, You're my next teacher. And that was the apprentice or Don Miguel Ruiz. So I studied with her and I just kept anything that that woke me up to this experience of things beyond the physical of the things that are going on in the body, in the spirit in the mind, the things that we can't touch, but we can perceive and, you know, is there and then I did my Reiki, and my Reiki training, my yoga training, I have over 500 hours in yoga and meditation. And I just kept finding mentors and teachers that could crack me open to that world of performance, but also intuition. And so I like to say that my specialty is in meditation, mindset and intuition and where those bridge together, I say, mindful performance coach, because I believe that performance is deeply rooted and the thoughts we think, in our own mind. And that I experienced that from a young age. Actually, just this week, we did a wonderful interview on my boyfriend, James's podcast, the mind your business podcast, with my volleyball coach, and I was telling him that at 17, that's when I identified I can be a mental performance coach, because I discovered as an athlete, I did not have the athletic natural ability. I was too short, too scrawny, not enough natural athlete talent to be at a automatic varsity level. But my mind was fortified. And I could train my brain to focus and produce the results that multiple coaches would say, well, she shouldn't be able to do that, you know, like, you shouldn't be able to run that fast. And because your, your legs aren't long enough, or whatever it is. And so I started playing with this idea of can you shift? Can you enhance performance by the way that you think and by meditation, and my high school volleyball team is where I began to apply that really steadily at 17. And it just became a passion and truly a passionate obsession of mine. I am obsessed with what makes the mind work. How do you enhance someone's ability to perform in all arenas through meditation, mindfulness and intuition, and then began applying that throughout my career in sports. In yoga, I used to work with young athletes. I spent over a decade working for Lululemon. I was a performance coach inside of Lululemon. I led teams as a manager inside of Lululemon and was always interested in the how do we get the team dynamic to function at its highest capacity? If mental performance and yeah really just cultivated this interest in, you're developing your relationship to self, but also your relationship to everything that we can't see, that's out there guiding us.

Christine Li  10:14  
Okay. Thank you so much for that wonderful. I long winded answer. No, I'm thinking mini biography, because I'm sure there's so many different experiences that you skipped over in telling us the highlights, but really also managing to give us a really good sense of your own journey through exploring all of this and checking in with yourself and saying, Oh, this is actually what I'm super interested in. And I understand well, so let me use my interests to guide my journey forward. And you did that from a very young age.

Jennifer Finley  10:52  
Yes, we were just as we were talking to my coach, when I was telling him back when I was 1516, was, I saw that I could be a value to others to support them. One of my close friends in high school was an A junior Olympic athlete and incredible volleyball player to this day, when she goes back to visit our high school people whisper her name in the hallway. Oh, there's Michael, there's Michael. And she and I bonded because she was a freshman, and I was a senior, and she had all this psychological pressure on her. And the psychological pressure would affect the physical performance. And I saw that I could support her and keeping her focused. And that reward of being able to like I can help someone focus in their brain to produce the the performance that they're capable of. And I think everyone can relate to having moments in their life where you know that you are capable of a badass, amazing performance. And then something psychologically happens, whether it be stage fright, or pressure, or anticipation or just perception worrying about what people will think. And you walk off the stage or away from that performance, and you think I didn't deliver at my best. And I saw that I could be that Dumbo feather effect for people where I can I can support them in, let's make sure that in your mind, you are producing the best possible outcome for what you're capable of.

Christine Li  12:27  
That's a wonderful skill. And I love that you get so much joy out of Oh, yes. Can you tell? I've also been at conferences where you have hosted meditations and discussions, were really your lifting the whole rooms at a time and inspiring people to really go back go deep, go into where their greatest potential sits. And the first time I witnessed this with you on stage, it's really mind bending, mind blowing, because you're, you feel like you're being transported somewhere, I will just share my own experience. And that there's something. Yeah, and I think there's something really special going on, as a community when when you're doing this kind of work together, but also within yourself that you don't really have to stay at a certain level of performance, you can always Elevate, I think, and that's what I'm learning from you. And so I had mentioned James James is James Wedmore, who happens to be Michael, and Jen's partner, partner in crime and partner in life and podcasting. Yes. So, yeah, so may I ask the 20 or so questions that I have just about your mini biography? Now, let's talk about the twin element, if you don't mind, because I know you're a twin, but I don't think I know much more about the special energy that you might have just been born with because of your status as an identical twin. Can you talk a little bit about what you feel you understand about that?

Jennifer Finley  14:14  
You know, I was really fascinated with this in college of going are all twins, psychic? Are they all linked and every time I need a twin and it's funny, James is a twin magnet, he attracts so many twins, our podcast editor as a twin. his executive assistant is a twin. His best friend is a twin. And so whenever I get with the twins, one of them will compare notes of Do you find that this happens and it's phenomenal. Most twins in my experience, had life experiences where they can feel their brother's physical pain, like our podcasts editor was telling me an experience where his brother was injured and he could feel his pain in a different city and physically in his body and My sister and I are personalities are quite different from one another. But we have the ability to tap into each other and I receive her emotions a lot. So if I have a random emotional day, I'll check in with her and say, Is there anything going on with you? Because today I am just feeling so emotional. And whatever emotion is random for me, be it sadness, or disappointment or frustration. Every time it's like, yeah, that's Julian, I'm just feeling for her. So there is a link in that way. And I think that some of the challenges with being comes with being a twin is that people naturally group you together, they refer to you as the twins, or they. And sometimes people even when we were in college, I was surprised that people treat you Oh, I wish I had a twin, I would get so much done if I had a twin. And Julia and I would go you know, it's not a clone. Sibling that was born at the same time as you you can have diverse interests, you can have very dynamic personality traits. But she and I complement each other in so many ways. And the the way that we can bounce ideas off of each other, if you watch her, she's a very highly creative. She's a writer, a screenwriter, she, she writes some of our copy for us. And if you watch us, in an idea meeting, we'll be finishing each other's thoughts. And it says an ideas without knowing that we are and then James will be like, are you watching? This is fascinating, because she'll start a sentence and then I'll finish it. She'll be like, yep, that's what I was thinking, Okay, and what about that, and it'll feel like to the outside or the it would sound like she's not completing a thought. But I'm getting everything that is coming through her. So yeah, it's a really, I think that being a twin primed me for understanding how to unlock intuition. And I say unlock because my experience until I was in my 20s, of intuition was that it really resided within my family. And then I had to learn how to push it beyond myself, and tune into others. And so I conditioned myself it was with meditation and silence and these different little exercises that I cultivated, and now I teach often have, how do you dial up intuition, but having that foundation of this is real with my sister, and we would do thought experiments on each other where she'd go, Okay, I'm thinking of something really, really random. So I want you to tell me what I'm thinking of. And the night that I said, you're thinking of a pink Tiger standing on top of a white ball and a blue room, and I just completely creeped her out. She was like, Don't Don't stop it. So, um, yeah, I think that that being a twin can set you up to believe in intuition, which I think is foundational for if you want to awaken it, there's so many people that are like, Well, I wish that was real, but I'm just not sure if I believe and I truly believe that. That's foundational to to to stretch anything, you have to believe that it's real. Because if you're operating inside of that's a Fantasyland, then it'll be very hard to condition it and to exercise. And I think intuition is like a muscle. I think everyone has it. We've just learned not to use it. And some people's intuition has atrophied. And we've got to get back in that intuition gym and learn how to condition it and reward it and cultivate it. And then everyone can awaken their ability to be psychically intuitive.

Christine Li  18:42  
As you were talking about you and your twin and the special energy and understanding you have between each other, my thought went to being a psychologist therapist and my relationship with my clients and or just people's relationship with each other, just any two random strangers can potentially have a deep level understanding of how each other works, maybe not instantaneously. But sometimes people have that with each other. And that there is some sort of process through development or through societal training, where this stuff where this awareness gets shut down, or suppressed, or maybe made fun of or pushed aside. And that's why I wanted to ask about your renaissance and what had happened before the renaissance that you had to kind of maybe like keep it private, or just ignore it or, or devalue it, rather than say, like, this is what I'm digging deep into. I'm relying on this all the time. And this is my best. This is my best compass that I have.

Jennifer Finley  19:52  
Yes, it's your secret weapon when you start to develop it. Yeah, I think in my 20s What When I was just learning to awaken intuition, I had a fear that if I opened the door, something dark would come in. And that's a that's a valid fear, because my experience with energy is that there is light and dark. And Harry Potter's real. There's just slithering magic out there. So one of the things that my teacher I was very blessed to study with someone who is skilled and prepared, and let me teach you how to have spiritual boundaries, and how to sense what's dark, what's light, and how to be clear in your communication. I'm communicating with the light. And that's been validated by every spiritual teacher that I've had after meeting her even we work with a shaman now, and he'll say, I only work in the light. And I'm clear that's I work with the benevolent ones is what he'll say. So the way that I tuned to that, when I was learning was to let my sensation in my heart guide me of like to ask, I would like to communicate with the light, I want to communicate with this specific Guide. For me, I grew up with a Christian background. So the archangels always felt like a very safe connection to me, I want to I want to connect with Angel Gabriel. And I would ask myself for, for protection. And at one point I was, I used to do psychic readings for others. And I stopped doing that because now I find so much more joy and benefit in teaching people how to read themselves, essentially, because anytime you're going to a reader, you're running the risk that they're misinterpreting the data that they're receiving about you. They're you know, we all have brains. And we're as you receive pictures, images, sounds, information, the reader has the capacity to then form an opinion, a judgment and assessment, and then communicate that in a way that maybe isn't as clear as it would be to you. So now I'm interested more in teaching people what I did to access my intuition. And one of the things that I did was, I paid attention to the moments where I didn't listen, I can remember one specific instance, where I heard a voice behind my left ear, just clear as a bell. Don't wear that today. And it was I was putting on a ring at the time. And it was a ring that I wore every day that my mother gave me. And I thought that's so funny. Why would I was that a very neurotic thought am I thinking is my thinking brain just worried that something's going to happen in this ring. And I just shuffled off and went about my day. And it was such a random like, whoa, plot twist moment, because I was on my way to work. When I got to work. It was in Australia, I found out it was a bank holiday, which I didn't even know what that was. But you don't go to work on bank holidays in Australia. And my friends and I randomly decided let's just go cliff jumping. So we went to a waterfall. And we're out there, sliding down a waterfall. And as I'm playing around, in this waterfall, my ring fell off my finger and falls into this pool of water gone forever just gone lost in the Australian rainforest. And at first I had this heartbreak moment of I've just lost this precious gift that my mother gave to me. And then I remember, don't wear the ring today. And I became fascinated by that of that's a gift. When you can look back on some part of me knew. Then we and you asked yourself what part of me how did I receive that? What's so intriguing about intuition is we all receive it in a different way. I like to think of it like love languages, everyone if you've read the book, The Five Love Languages, which I love. Everyone has every love language. It's not like there's people floating around out there that's like I hate gifts. Do not buy meat. Well, maybe there is but most people are like, well, that's not my primary, but I'll receive it and I think that that's the way intuition works is there's there's the Claire's which is Claire clairvoyant is being able to see Claire audience being able to hear clear sentient being able to feel and Claire cognizant, being able to know and then there's these these fun ones that are clear, gustatory and clear olfactory, which is being able to taste or smell. Those are more rare, the the primary, or the first four that I listed. And I found that for me, the first one that woke up was clear audience. And as I started to realize that I'm like, oh, yeah, I've been receiving messages in my left ear since I was four. If I ask a question, I hear the answer. And so I started conditioning that and I would do these little experiments where I'd, you know, get in my car and just go I want to be guided by my intuition. Where do I need to go? I want to talk to the light. I want to talk to my angels and then I would listen and whatever they would Say I would take a direction. And I've told this story on on James's podcast before. So if you've listened to both episodes, you'll hear it again. But when I was doing these experiments of I'm going to condition my intuition. I really want to learn how to be clear on this one day, I come home from Australia. And I was like, I'm just going to spend a whole hour driving around being guided by my guides. And I would here turn left turn, right, there's a bookstore, you're looking for a bookstore. And I was following these directions in my hometown going, what there's not a bookstore up here, I know this route. I know where I'm okay. I'm just going to and then pull over and I see a goodwill. And I'm like Goodwill as goodwill. They have books, I think they have books go in turn left. And I turn left, and I see this bookshelf. And Christine, it was like in the movie where they put a spotlight, there was this Sunbeam coming in beaming this spine of a book, and it says rare birds of Australia. And I pull it out. And it's $2.02 of my friends in Australia, we're getting married. They're park rangers. So I I'm like, this is perfect wedding gift. I'm gonna package this up and mail it off. It takes forever for it to get there because I mailed it, snail mail. And a month later, the wife reaches out to me and says, How did you know? Where did you find that book. And I said it was so random. I was just being guided, I went into a goodwill in Texas. And she said that is a rare edition, out of print bird field guide that my husband takes with him any time he goes into the rainforest. And he's said for years that he wants a copy that's new, just to put on the coffee table. I just got chills. And we've never been able to find one because they don't make that book anymore. I can't believe you found that book. And that was like those confirmation moments. And when I say I've got chills, that's a clear sentient signal for those of you out there who are like, oh, yeah, I get it, I get a feeling in my gut. Yeah, or like your chest, your chest, like I could feel that I feel pressure in my chest. Or for me, when I say something that's true. All the hairs on my arm stand up, and I get rolling chills. And the more true it is, the stronger it is. So James will test and you know, some something that nobody knows, like, what killed the dinosaurs? And he'll ask me and then he'll run through answers. And I'll be like rolling chills, rolling chills, rolling chills. And that's my signal of like, that's the truth. So I think that experimentation was the my, that was the the Awakening was, I'm going to see if how, how psychic I can become and my teacher was just so naturally that way like she, she you know, like, she didn't learn how to just walk up to a stranger and know what's going on with them in their life. She just came in that way. And she was part of a five generations of women. They were all different healing modalities. But her mom was an astrologer. And everyone in that line had that capacity. And she would say you gotta meditate and open your third eye. And I'd be like, Okay, well, but well, how do you how do you like, surely you can work this out, surely you can do exercises to condition it. And that's when I became just experimenting with myself and then teaching it. And to your point of what you said of this isn't broadly accepted in mainstream society, what I've learned is that the things that awaken intuition, silence, meditation, paying attention to your own body, and that's not easily accessible in our modern day, because where do you go in your day where there isn't music playing these days, or there isn't noise. And intuition speaks in a whisper, it isn't a huge loud bang on the top of your head, or like an a Looney Tunes, the anvil falls from the sky. And that's all you know, the roads blocked. It's quiet. So you have to quiet yourself. And when we live in a society where there's so much chatter in the mind, and external chatter around us music, talking loud noises. And then we we really reward in our society not being still busy, busy, busy, you gotta have always have something to do always be in motion moving, moving, moving. And that's where yoga expanded my intuition, again, because I learned the value of stillness, and that when you hold the body, still, you can actually tell what's going on in the body. And as long as you're moving it all the time, it can be difficult to identify what the body is trying to tell you. And I believe the body is the subconscious mind. So I think that everyone has access to all of these levels of intuition and Claire's, but you find the one that speaking the loudest, and as you turn up the volume on that, then you'll start to unlock and awaken the others. And the more still in silent and paying attention you become the more you reward it versus going. That's weird. Why did that happen? When you say yes, thank you. Keep talking to me. Tell me more. That's like any conversation The universe begins to lean in. Oh, you're listening. Now, I have so much more to tell you.

Christine Li  30:06  
On that note, let me ask you what your thoughts are about anxiety because we can have goosebumps of all kinds, right? And I guess, because of my profession and my experience working with people, the overwhelming presence of anxiety, worry, specific, worry, General, worry, catastrophic, worry, consuming worry, distracting worrying all the different levels and types. I've always wondered, how come people gravitate towards that, rather than towards something like intuition and having a more playful fluid system to put your thoughts through and put your situations through? Because they're both systems of evaluation? I think so what are your thoughts about the anxiety piece for people?

Jennifer Finley  31:01  
Well, there's a few pieces to that one. Have you ever read many lives, many masters, it's written by MIT psychologists, fascinating book, and he speaks a lot on now. He used to be completely ScienceBase didn't believe in any of this woowoo stuff, until he had a patient that no one can cure. And as he started doing hypnosis on her, she was going into past life regression. And so him and his wife started studying this phenomenon of is the anxiety arising from this lifetime, or from something that you brought in with you. So I think there's there's a real tangible element into a tangible element perhaps, to the there could be anxiety arising around something that you've carried in either from your ancestors, or from something unresolved in a past life. I truly believe in that, like, my mom always jokes with us, my family's Native American, and my great, great great grandmother walked the Trail of Tears. And anytime that I've always said, How come I have have had to resolve it feels much more resolved than it did in my early 20s. But in my early 20s, I was always scared of abandonment like that, that whatever I had was going to leave me abruptly. And I would say to my mom, this makes no sense. I had such a structured, balanced, protective upbringing, where it was very stable, and very linear like trauma with a with a little t not a big T note, no big childhood trauma. And she would say, Well, honey, you know, in our bloodline, look at the Native American Indians, you're going to naturally have a sense of distrust, a sense of abandonment, a fear of your culture, your home being ripped away, that's just in your blood. And I think that they're, they're proving that more and more with science, that trauma can be hereditary, that you can bring that in from what's in the past. But I think that one of the things that stands out to me about anxiety is that I think anxiety, for a lot of people is connected to our human desire to control the future. And when you want to control the future, but you can't, it can naturally produce this apprehension, tension or anxious feeling. And what I've learned to lean into around intuition is that sometimes the path that the universe is guiding you towards or that you're, you're being set on, if you saw all the things you have to go through in order to get to that path, you would be like, opt out. I don't think so. Because who's gonna sign up for a painful journey. But if you if you're constantly pulling in from the universe, I'm, I want what's best for me, I want to be connected to my highest good, then things will unfold in your favor. And it might involve some obstacles. Like there's a saying in yoga, the mountaineer needs the mountain, you can't be a mountaineer unless you learn to climb a mountain, but none of us would sign up for yes, I would like to climb over the hardest possible peak in my life. And so the anxiety can arise from this need to control the future in some capacity, like I want, I want this outcome. But I also want to control the path in which it takes to get there, or people are anxious because the it looks like things aren't going in the direction of the outcome that they want. And so they think, oh, that means my outcomes not going to happen, or I'm not going to reach that destination. And that makes them feel anxious, when in reality. And actually, my boyfriend James and I are a great example of this because our love story is so winding but if you would have told me when I met him when I was 20, I truly believed that's my person. And if you would have told me, it's going to take over. It's going to take about two decades for the two of you to come back together in a way that's meaningful and lasting. But throughout those two decades, you'll enter and exit each other's lives in significant ways. And you'll cultivate this partnership and development that's going to be for your highest scroll down. And then at the end of that this is you're talking to 20 year old at the end of that, when you're almost 40, you're gonna reconnect and fall in love, I would have been like, what? No, I do not want to sign up for that program. And that would have given me a lot of anxiety. But when you when you start to tune into, I want what's best for me. And it's it's a trustful into the universe. And that's where I think real anxiety, the other side of anxiety is some version of peace. And that comes from trust. And so I think intuition can support you, in learning to trust your own self of even though this looks bad, even though it looks like things aren't working out. I know, things always work out for me. And I know, things must be conspiring in my favor. And that can ease the anxiety, because you just know, it's, it ends, well, you know, my sister, when we were younger, she struggled with anxiety. And she would always say, you are just offensively calm in these situations. We were late to an a plane ride one time and the taxi was late picking us up and she was so worried we're gonna miss the flight. And I was just, you know, well, we're in the we're in the cab, now we're on our way. And she looked at me and said, You are shockingly cavalier about this, if we miss this flight, we are going to be in big trouble. And I said, we're not gonna miss it. Because we're just going to cause that will make it and I think that that's something that you're not on a track like a train in your life where you where it's, I don't believe in that sense of fate of like, no matter what you do, you're doomed. And that to me produces anxiety of like you can't get out it's it's headed for a crash. I think that we are magnets for you know, we're electrical beings we can we can shift and mold our reality based on our emotions, our thoughts, our focus, our intent. And so as you begin to cultivate and hone that this is the law of attraction. There's there's so many ontological laws that you can work with the law of integrity, the law of attraction, the law of that the universe hates a vacuum. So if you create a space, something has to fill it, that's a law that we see over and over in science. And so these experiences that we have that seem like we're off track, or it seems like the future is not how we want that produces anxiety, because I think you can tell me as as a psychologist, I believe anxiety is always rooted in the future, it's, it's anxious thinking about something that hasn't happened yet. And the beautiful thing about what hasn't happened yet, is it's immutable. It's responding to you on a on a, on a minute by minute basis, there's actually a really cool movie called The Adjustment Bureau where they have a concept in the movie that every time the character takes a choice, it creates these ripples that go throughout everyone else's choices, and they show it like a map in the movie. And I think that's such a cool representation of the law of attraction that we're always navigating our life, but where your mind is at in the present is also controlling the future. And the paradox about worry, and anxiety is that anytime you're in worry, you're in a form of fear. And when you're in a form of fear, you're thinking about a future that you do not want to create. So actually, the surest way to produce that future would be to remain in that worry and anxiety and fear. And so one of the best, most healthy things you can do is to allow yourself to produce some sort of habit or practice that reduces anxiety. For me, that was yoga, because the practice of yoga beyond what we do in the West, like, I'm not talking about hot yoga, where you're just there to sweat and tone your arms and get a great ab workout. I'm talking about like the the asana practice, the way it's designed, is designed to place your body in an uncomfortable position, and to exert effort, but to also find the ease. And there's this challenge of can I be exerting discipline, effort and heat, but also find the stillness, the cool the peace and the ease and the pose, and it's challenging. And as you learn to do that, you can literally train your mind and your body to be comfortable in uncomfortable positions. And then that ripples into the way that you approach a lack of control in your life where you start to just lean in and go, I can breathe through that I can cause the outcome that I want.

Christine Li  39:46  
That is a wonderful explanation of anxiety and how it functions so thank you. I have I've done my own mini explanations in the past just from not from training but really from observation from from within my myself and how I tend to use anxiety and try to cope with it. And also the experiences of my clients. And I love how you also bring in the other side, which is the ability to say I trust, either the situation, the potential future, and or myself, and that all of those things I feel like trust is the most Yeah, complex and wonderful word and concept. But people really have difficulty getting to that point to say, you know, what, I'm going to opt to trust that things are going to work out in my favor, or even just work out and yell

Jennifer Finley  40:43  
at me now is that sometimes you can use anxiety as there's an alarm bell going off, you know, I've actually, that my journey into being able to trust myself came from a very pain, the most painful experience of my life, where I was forced to make a decision, an important decision. And I made a decision that was best for what I thought everyone else thought, or I was externally looking for, like, what's the right path. And, you know, I got to figure it out, externally, outside of myself, not internally. And internally, I felt an extraordinary amount of anxiety around what I thought I was going to choose. And then because I when I chose wrong, it rippled actually into I would label it a trauma, because I not only did the choice that I made, not align with what I wanted. It also made me question my whole self of like, who am I? Am I not capable of making a choice? That's, that leads me in the right direction. And I think all of us can look back in our lives where there's times in life where you literally have a fork in the road, and you have to choose, you know, as a young adult, that could be what college am I going to go to, or, like, I was just talking to my volleyball coach, I was asked to play college volleyball, and my doctor always also told me, if you continue to play, you're gonna run your shoulder. So it's surgery, or you can keep playing, and I chose I'm not going to play anymore. So those are big choices that we have. And though that example is a little choice, but people are faced with choices that sometimes are literally life and death, like I remember my mom having to choose, what path are we going to take to treat my father's cancer? And she had a lot of anxiety around what path and the anxiety was coming from. I don't know the right answer yet. Or I'm about to choose the wrong thing. And she said she prayed for guidance. She's very spiritual and rooted in her Christian faith. And she prayed for guidance, and then woke up in the middle of the night. And there was a beam of light in the hotel room. And she was like, this was so bizarre because the windows were shut, there was no way that light could get into this room. But the beam of light was pointing in a direction. And I said, I don't know what direction that is. But that's the direction of his healing. And they had to choose between two doctors. And when my dad woke up, she said, what, what doctor is in that direction, and it was pointing do north and he was like, That's exactly where this clinic is located. And she said, that's the one. And he was healed of his cancer, he had a 3020 or 30% survival rate. Like he said, when he went to see doctors, they were giving him the GO FISHING speeches, what he called it like just as enjoy you the time you have left. And there was one doctor that said, I can cure this and they cured it. He's been in remission for 25 years, you know, and my mom credits that moment of, there was anxiety of what do we choose? What do we do? And then as you lean towards this A B choice, when I lean into a do I feel more anxiety or less. And I've experienced that of like to use your anxiety as a barometer to tell yourself, maybe that's a clue in your body. Like, when I was considering moving to Australia, I was also up for this big promotion that I had been working for. For five years. It was like all I wanted in my career was this promotion. And finally, I was getting an interview. And then I had gone to visit Australia and there was this other part of me that was like, oh, but wouldn't it be nice to go live in Australia. And my best friend at the time was Australian. And I get this phone call that you're finally gonna get an interview the founder of the company, he's flying down to interview you. And I said to my best friend Nikki, well, I'm not moving to Australia then because I'm gonna get I'm gonna get this role. I know, I know I am. And then I would start to hyperventilate, which is a symptom of anxiety. A lot of people that have anxiety, they their breath shortens, they cannot breathe. And those two are paired together. If you think of that, that's how the the mind the emotions and the body are all one. So the body starts to react with short breath. And I told her, I don't know why. But when I think about this promotion, I can't breathe. And when I say I'm going to live in Australia, I can take a deep breath. And she said, Well, maybe that Sure clue. And that was one of the first times where I'd experienced this pressure of you've got to, to me at that time. Now, looking back in his adult, maybe this wasn't true, it was what I was saying to myself, but you never know, maybe it was, there was a window of opportunity in which that was my one and only chance to go live abroad in Australia. And that window was going to close. And if I didn't take that window, I'm getting chills, then it was going to shift the trajectory of my life. And I chose Australia and then had one of the most amazing years of my entire life living there, and awakening my intuitive gifts even more. And just experiencing that sense of being separate from my twin. So as an identical twin, one of the things that can happen is you're used to making decisions together, because it's, where are we going? And what do you want to do? And I just want to be with you. So what do you want? And I'll do that, and to be in a foreign country where I didn't have access to that anymore. And I had to choose, what am I doing? What do I want, that developed myself. And as I started to hone in on, I can make choices. And I can be forced with a difficult decision where it is either worthy. And sometimes James is great at saying, why does that have to be either or let's find a way to create an and, and I love that. And there's choices in life sometimes where you do have to choose, it's this doctor or that doctor, it's this job or that job. It's this relationship or that relationship. It's this city they live in, or that city they live in, and you have to make a choice. And when you can trust yourself that I made a choice. And it worked out for my highest good. And I feel I feel good about it, it benefited me, it moved me forward on my path. There were so many gifts for me within that rather than saying I was forced to choose. And I chose the wrong you chose poorly. You know, like it's that Indiana Jones moment where you have to choose one cup to drink out of it, then you die. People relate to choices like that, that it's going to kill you if you choose the wrong thing. And what I encourage people to do is, in those moments where you realize you've chosen the wrong thing, can you look backwards in retrospective and identify some part of you that knew that was the wrong choice. And sometimes that might be anxiety, it might be that you couldn't breathe, that you were having panic attacks that you couldn't sleep at night when you thought about that, or that you heard don't do that. Don't do that. And so we joke that anytime I experience anxiety, that's the Boulder the universe through a pebble, I received a sign I got a dream, I saw a vision, I heard a voice, but I didn't pay attention. And then it throws the boulder at me. So that I go now I'm hyperventilating. And I need to choose differently. So it can work in both ways, you know, to trust no matter what the universe allows you turns. So even if you mess it up with your decision, you can come on come on back the other way, but learn from it and extract what you need to know about yourself about the way you make decisions, because you make decisions in a way that other people don't. And I've had to learn that. My sister and James, they are some of the most decisive people they know right away if they like it or not. And James says this inner barometer of Is it a nine or a 10? Nine or a 10? For me on a scale of one to 10? Do I want to do that at a level nine or 10? That I'm gonna do it. And when he started coaching me in that I had a lot of trouble going oh, I don't know. I think it's like an 8.5 to nine. And he was like, it's just a feeling. It's a feeling I can feel it. It's a nine. And I'm like I don't I don't know that I feel it at a nine How do I know what a nine feels like. But I've learned that I receive is that the right path in a different way. And I think people should explore that rewarded. And then don't beat yourself up when you make the wrong decision. That's just going to be information on how to hone your intuition.

Christine Li  48:46  
I would just add one piece that's coming through my mind, which is that decision making does not actually have to be heavy that you used to have kind of a playful, experimental, bright ish kind of attitude towards it like, well, if we really don't know, what would we want. And I am reminded of how I asked you to be on this podcast even I don't know if you remember you had just spoken on the stage. I was completely wowed and transformed. And I kind of left to ask you to be on not knowing what would we talk about, or if you would want to be on the show. But that's that's the spirit with which I'm describing this piece that you could just say, let's go let's just see if this could work at all.

Jennifer Finley  49:37  
It's reminds me of that like I am you take the next step and then from there you'll see more you know, go as far as you can see, and then from there, you'll see more and don't you think that if if you were able to make decisions in a light hearted, fun, whimsical way that was we're in this big mystery let's find out. You would also have to be operating from a space of we're working with a net ever Everything works out. So you're not plummeting to your death, you're, you're going to be caught in some way. If it, if it works out, it works out. And if it doesn't work out, it's still works out, you have to operate from that capacity to in order to risk you have to trust.

Christine Li  50:17  
I think that is a very beautiful place to wrap up. And I want to thank you from me, because you I found myself going through my own biography, to just say, What were those moments that were so hard that I was scared like it was life or death? What are the moments that really were the forks in the road? And what were the times that really showed me that there, there are so many different alert systems that I have access to, in myself if I just allow them to be heard, if I allow myself to see and believe in them. And this has been so much fun, and so inspirational. And I think there are a lot of clues, if you, dear listener, go through and replay perhaps and listen to this, again, you're going to hear a lot of different strategies, actually, and tips for using your own current circumstances and your own senses to make stronger decisions and to reduce your anxiety on the whole and trust yourself on a deeper level. So Jen, thank you for being this guide for us today. And for others throughout your life.

Jennifer Finley  51:35  
hours, the time zooms by.

Christine Li  51:38  
Because we could thank you so much for spending this hour with us. I appreciate you so much. Could you share with us how we might stay in touch with you? And I do want to talk about the podcast a bit as well.

Jennifer Finley  51:49  
Sure, yes. So I am James's co host on the mind your business podcast. You if you're in James's world, you can find me I frequently lead group meditations at his events. That's something that we've colored in, because that's my, that's my repertoire on forte. And as Christine said, when you said like you're transported in in those moments where you're in a group, I think that what happens scientifically, and this has been proven is when you're in a group of people and you're breathing together, what happens is when you sync the breath, your heart sink, and when the with the rhythm of the heart sinks, it actually does produce this magnetic field around you. And this is science, y'all. This has been proven. And so when you are at these live events, and we do those breath meditations, there's always a pranayama yogic breath, sneaky little thing that I've slipped in there. It always has roots in yoga, even if people aren't aware that they're doing a yogic breath. That's what we're doing together as a group over a span of five to 10 minutes, that elevates the room in a way that you're able to access things that maybe you wouldn't, and I think that there's a lot of value in the community like that. So you can find me at any of James's events, and especially our live events this year, very exciting. We've got some things planned around meditative practices and experiences for people. And you can find me on on the Instagrams. My my handle is, well, if you've if you find if you follow James, you'll find me very easily. But my handle is JeuneJenni. It's a little French. Wonderful. Yeah, that's it easy as you're in Jame's world, you're in mine. And that's the easiest way to access anything that I'm offering is to come into his world.

Christine Li  53:36  
Yes, I want to give another shout out for the podcast, the Mind Your Business podcast, which was the way that I got into James's world and wonderful community found a good three quarters of my guests on my own podcast. And it's a wonderful podcast filled with information about intuition about decision making about high performance, and business success as well. So it's a wonderful show. James is an incredibly talented host. And, Jen, good luck to you on the podcast in the future and in your work helping the people that you do in this most beautiful way. Thank you so much.

Jennifer Finley  54:15  
Thank you so much. What a pleasure.

Christine Li  54:18  
All right, everyone. It's a wrap for this very special episode. And I want to thank you for being here. And thanks for listening to this wonderful chat. I will see you next Thursday. When the next episode drops. Take care. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Make Time for Success podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard, you can subscribe to make sure you get notified of upcoming episodes. You can also visit our website maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com for past episodes, show notes and all the resources we mentioned on the show. Feel free to connect with me over on Instagram too. You can find me there under the name procrastination coach. Send me to DM and let me know what your thoughts are about the episodes you've been listening to and let me know any topics that you might like me to talk about on the show I'd love to hear all about how you're making time for success we'll talk to you soon!

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