In today’s podcast, MultiFunding President Lynn Ozer, aka SBA Queen, and I talk to Jessica Harrington, owner of Journey to Yourself, a company she started in 2020 that provides a six-month series of interactive corporate workshops focusing on habits and tools for employees as well as 1:1 coaching for employees on stress management. Jessica tells us how keeping the small stuff under control and nipping aggravations in the bud early on can prevent burnout or damaged relationships.
"My mindset on stress is that a lot of it is self-caused on how we perceive it and how we're handling it," she explains. "And so that's what I want to teach people is what stress is, because it is every day, and making sure it doesn't become something chronic or burnout."
Jessica started her career in the drug and alcohol addiction field before going back to school and earning a master’s degree in public health. While she is not a certified therapist, she specializes in implementing actionable steps.
"My main bread and butter would be my corporation workshops. I go into offices once a month for six months, 45 minutes, no meditation, no yoga, no PowerPoints, just super interactive activities of working around what is stress, communication, time management, all those kinds of fun things, and bring that into the office place," she says.
Stress, whether in your personal or professional life, typically builds up from reactions to everyday, mundane occurrences.
"We tend to focus on the big stressors in life. We can talk about the bills, we can talk about relationships, we could talk about the drama at work, but those little things – that there's no creamer when I thought there was supposed to be creamer, the traffic, the Dunkin donut line – those things are what starts to add up and what helps in the blow up when we actually have a bigger stress," she says.
Breakdowns in personal relationships also tend to build up over a series of small things that go unchecked until it is too late.
"Those tiny things add up because that's how life works. A lot of times we all are just having our own racing thoughts that we don't even realize when we hurt or bother somebody else sometimes because we are all in our own little world," she said.
Listen here as she also discusses how to navigate perceived tone in texts and emails and the importance of face-to-face interaction in a remote world.
