Here's to the Untangling

On pausing, performing, and the woman behind the curtain...

My kids are supposed to be doing “quiet time” but they’ve both chosen that being with a parent is more fun than being alone. So the quiet time I personally dreamed to use for writing is now a scene that many parents can probably relate to where I’m trying to focus but my kid is asking me how to spell words every few sentences and asking me where the pencil sharpener is.

My computer is also already dead, so we’re off to a great start here, am I right?

We’re in that weird purgatory week between Christmas and New Years where time isn’t real and I genuinely don’t know what day it is unless I check my phone. I haven’t been alone in over a week and I’m not exaggerating.

I get followed into the bathroom and I get followed into the laundry room and I get followed into my own thoughts because someone always needs a snack or has a question or is crying because her sister looked at her wrong.

I had this fantasy that I’d use this quiet hour to write something profound, maybe set intentions for the new year like a woman who has her life together, who wakes up at 5am and journals before the house stirs and has a word of the year already picked out.

Instead I’m sitting here with a Pinkalicious Tonie playing in the background while my daughter writes a story about a giraffe named Daisy next to me, and I’m trying to figure out how to tell you something I’ve been holding onto for months.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably curious about my “big decision.” I’ll get there, I promise. But to give you context, I first need to tell you about Wicked.

We finally let the girls watch it after months of them memorizing every single song and assigning each other roles and belting the lyrics at full volume in the backseat of the car. And there’s this moment where the Wizard appears as this giant, terrifying, floating head and my 4-year-old got scared and I had to hit pause and pull her close and tell her, “That’s not who he really is, baby. He’s just a normal guy behind a curtain.”

I’ve been thinking about that moment a lot lately.

There are many versions of me. There’s one that the internet knows well, but that’s only part of who I am. That version is true and authentic, she’s just not the whole picture. She’s got the entrance music and the lighting and the produced audio and the polished delivery, and I’m proud of her, but she’s not the only one in here.

There’s also this version. The one sitting in the mess with the dead laptop and the Pinkalicious soundtrack, trying to string sentences together while spelling “beautiful” wrong. The one who doesn’t have the answers wrapped up with a bow. The one who is just a normal woman behind the curtain facade of the internet.

This is me, trying to meld those versions together (and the countless others, because honestly I feel like a woman with a million personalities crammed into one body and they don’t always agree on things). Removing the entrance music and letting you see the ordinary human who’s been here the whole time.

And I guess that starts with finally saying the thing out loud: I’m officially pausing my podcast, The Goal Digger Podcast.

Yes, the one with 968 episodes that I’ve been doing for nearly a decade. The one that’s been downloaded over 115 million times and is on the cover of my book and is basically synonymous with my name at this point.

I'm telling you right here, right now, in the twenty minutes before someone needs something from me again. Because that feels like the most honest way to do it.

My marketer brain says right here is where I should build the tension and create some intrigue, but I’ve been sitting on this for months and I just need to say it out loud already.

(*My marketer brain just twitched, by the way. I’m patting her on the head and telling her to go lie down. She doesn’t get to run this room.)

I don’t really know where to take this post but I’ve been wanting to write more. When I think back to the roots of where this (*gestures wildly*) began, it all started with me typing up my words. I’ve always loved writing because for me it’s easier than speaking and when I was a kid and had something hard to share, I’d write it.

This space, I want it to be where the wild things grow. Where I can just show up and type whatever is swirling around in my head without wondering how it’ll perform or convert or whatever. I have ADHD and the fastest way to kill something I love is to cage it with expectations.

I’m not the first woman to say what I’m about to say and I won’t be the last, but sometimes it feels like the voices saying it don’t get as loud as the ones telling us to optimize and scale and 10x everything. So I want to say it here…

I’m not the first woman to say what I’m about to say and I won’t be the last, but sometimes it feels like the voices saying it don’t get as loud as the ones telling us to optimize and scale and 10x everything. So I want to say it here…

“This is how women actually build things. In the cracks and in the margins.”

Not in the pristine morning hours with a clear calendar and a team handling everything, but in the hour we carved out while the Tonie plays and Daisy the giraffe's story unfolds beside us.

It’s being on a work call while someone barges in needing their butt wiped. It’s one day dreaming about homeschooling your kids at the kitchen table and feeling so sure that this is what you were made for, and the next day counting down the minutes until bedtime and wondering what is wrong with you.

That wavering used to make me feel crazy. But I think that’s just what it means to be a woman holding multiple truths at once.

Wanting to be the mom who picks up from school and makes the snack and wanting to be the woman with her own creative outlet and her own money and her own identity outside of whose mother she is.

I'm still figuring out if I'm allowed to want both. Maybe that's not a contradiction. Maybe that's just being a woman…

Here's what I need you to know. My podcast was truly a gift. I spent years building systems around it that made it hum, systems I still teach to this day because they genuinely work. It was exceptional and beautiful and, dare I say, easy in many ways because I had built it to be that way on purpose. I could have kept going for another decade. Nothing was broken and nothing needed to be fixed.

Everything I taught and everything I shared with you about building a business, about systems and strategy? It all works. In fact, it works so damn well that I’m sitting here with an actual choice about what to do with my life and time and energy.

That’s the whole point. That’s why I can pause.

And now I find myself curious. Curious about who I am when I’m not filling every open hour with more. Curious about what might emerge if I give myself permission to think and dream and rest and just be for a while. What a rare and precious thing, to have the space to wonder.

Months ago I found myself almost in a birds eye view watching myself speak into my microphone and I noticed something that hadn’t always been there. I was performing. I could turn it on and just as easily turn it off and it wasn’t good or bad, it was just a fact.

Here’s the thing about being a high-achieving firstborn daughter. You learn early that being good at things gets you love and attention. So you get good at things and you become reliable and consistent and the one people can count on.

And somewhere along the way performing becomes so natural you forget it’s a performance at all. You just think this is who I am.

And then one day you’re 36 years old watching yourself talk into a microphone and you realize oh, shoot. I’m doing it again.

The thing I need you to hear is that my podcast wasn’t bad. It was one of the best things I’ve ever built. I just felt myself slipping into a version of me that wasn’t fully true, and I got curious about what it might feel like to create some space.

Nine hundred and sixty-eight episodes. That’s where I landed.

Not a thousand, which is what my perfectionist brain screamed at me to push for because a thousand is impressive and a thousand looks good on a trophy. I can hear the bro-marketing voice: you’re SO close, just push through, imagine the PR opportunity.

But that voice is exactly the one I’m done listening to. The one that says the number matters more than the knowing.

My sister joked she’s going to get me a trophy with 968 on it and honestly I might display it proudly because that number represents me choosing alignment over achievement.

And this space? This is a place I want to be mine where I get to create just because I want to. This might be the most radical thing I’ve done in a decade.

Both my girls are in school full time now and I thought when this season came I would be ready to hit the gas. That’s what we’re supposed to want, right? That’s the story. But now that I have the space I find myself wanting to protect it instead of fill it. I really want to see what grows in the margin.

When I started to wrap my brain around pausing the podcast, I keep picturing this image of a book. Almost a decade of episodes, page after page, and I’m closing it now. Not burning it or throwing it away, just placing it gently on the shelf where I can see it and think wow, that was a good one.

Maybe someday I’ll pick it back up. Maybe I won’t. Honestly, both options feel okay.

I think a lot of us are here, aren’t we? In this weird middle place. Women who built the thing and are now wondering what else might be out there. Women who followed the blueprint and achieved the goals and are now curious about what lies beyond them.

I sure as heck don’t have answers. I’m just here to write what’s true, what’s real, what’s aligned and see who it resonates with.

So here I am, in this liminal week between one year and the next, starting something new by going back to where it all began. Me and a keyboard and the simple act of turning thoughts into sentences.

I’m still going to be teaching and launching and showing up in the ways that light me up. I’m just not going to do it behind that particular microphone for a while. And when I write here, every word will be mine. Just me and my voice and my little heart, typing away.

Thank you for being here at the beginning of something I can’t quite name yet (both literally and figuratively!) Thank you for almost a decade of showing up in your earbuds. Thank you for letting me be imperfect while I figured it allllll out.

This isn’t goodbye. This is just me, stepping out from behind the curtain.

“The biggest goal I ever dug for was peace… and I found it.”

Here’s to the untangling.

Jenna

Ps. Daisy the giraffe just got a happy ending, by the way. She made it home safe.