JEN INGRAM - Take Your Life Back Queen

Hi, I'm Tammy Gross, the Scriptprenuer. Welcome to Reel Life Stories where difference makers come to share their Hollywood worthy transformation stories. I love interviewing people who faced a mountain, overcome it the hard way, and figured out a solution to help the rest of us conquer that same mountain. Because when we share our stories, we change lives.

Okay, so we have another special guests, you know, I've been bringing you really great guests. Well, today, we have Jen Ingram, she is what I am calling the take your life back queen. She's a confidence catalyst and business mentor saving hustling female solopreneurs from the chains of corporate America. Now that is a cause I can get behind her passion lies in helping women through their self awakening, so they can finally break free, turn their side hustle into the business of the dreams, and live a life full of time, location, and financial freedom. That is such a cool thing. Welcome, Jen. I'm so glad you could join us.

Thanks, excited to be here.

Oh I you know, I just want to hear more about your story. Because what you do is like, it's kind of like superhero type stuff to me. You know, I mean, a lot of us come from a corporate background, a lot of us come from just a very busy family background we have, we have different backgrounds and everything. And it is very easy to kind of get lost in the world that we're at. But for you, I don't I don't really know your origin story. I guess that's kind of what we're doing here is sort of an origin story. But I'm really curious to know, like, where are you we're at, you can take us as far back as you want. Or maybe it's not that long ago, it's up to you. I want you to kind of be the teller of the story here. But let us know, you know, when where you were at and what your life was, like, when you realize that there was a problem to be solved? Maybe it was your own problem. Maybe it was somebody else's problem. Maybe it was both but where were you at in life? And and how did it become something super important to you to want to, you know, see a mountain that had to be moved, you know, see that there were problems that other people were experiencing? Take us back to

where you were? Yeah, yeah. No, I would love to, I'd love to and I love I love that you came up with take your life back clean? Because it's it's such a powerful moment. You know, I think, I think there's a lot of women, and probably not just women, I think people in general, you kind of reached this point in your life, where you have what I like to call your awakening, where you kind of wake up one day and you go, how did I get here? Like, what, what led to this? How am I in this job, this family this life, right, and you kind of go, you kind of take a step back. And I like to call that the awakening, because it's kind of the point where you, you instead of just going through life, and somebody's pushing you lots of people and things society, corporate America, family, values, faith, all those things, pushing you in certain directions along the way, you kind of go down all these nice pre paved roads, right? And then one day, you're like, I don't even like this pre paved road. Like, I don't even think I want to go down that road. Right? And, and I think is kids, we easily question or I don't I don't know, I don't want to do that. But it's some point. At some point, we kind of follow the path, right? We kind of go down this. You know, even if you think about the American dream, you go, you go to college, you get a job, then you start a family, you buy a house, then you get a better job and a bigger house, right? Like you get this this thing. So, you know, I was one of those people to where life just just kind of happened. And, and I like to say that so much of my childhood and what have you, I think it was like a lot of families, you know, our parents did the best they could with what they had. Right? That that's it and so for so many of us, that might mean that our parents had their own traumas. And sometimes that was what was used as their parenting style. So, you know, that kind of got me through life, but there were all these things that just kind of happened. So you know, in my early 20s, for example, I got pregnant on the second date with someone and you know, and I had a

life changing life. Yeah,

why? I'm changing rights. Um, so had a child at the age of 24. And, you know, was with somebody, we we ended up being together eight years, like we gave it everything we had. Wow. Unfortunately, it wasn't. It wasn't we were getting to the point where we were toxic to each other. We had long we divorced. And again, I just kind of went through life, you know, all those things that happen post divorce, there was there was debt, a lot of debt. There was, you know, unfortunately, through that divorce process, I ended up with a foreclosure that was not just financially debilitating, but talk about an ego, like, wow, I was working as an accountant, I ended up in the accounting industry, miserable with my job, because the reason I had gone into in accounting was at the encouragement of my now ex. couldn't imagine how exciting I was with that career. So I'll bring you all to my big awakening, it was in 20. What I point is 2016, it was 2016. I had, right 2016 I and you know what's funny is I've met other people that had that same year, I don't know if there was some sort of retro grade that year, but I'm telling you there was something powerful. And so I had just undergone the second restructure at work. And once again, got pushed somebody else's path, am I here I am, I'm in a job I don't want to be in. I'm at my heaviest weight, I'm very overweight, my finances are a disaster, I can't get credit. I had shoved everything for my divorce kind of under the rug for six years. The job I was in the salary wasn't paying the bills. I had two classes left to finish my bachelor's, but I was getting turned away for promotion opportunities and restructured below my capabilities simply because I didn't have the piece of paper. Like it was just all these things at once. Now, I went out, I should say, I remember the day that I was sitting at work, and I was sitting around and I was looking out at all the big windowed offices along the wall as I was sitting in my cubicle, and I was looking at all of them thinking, why don't any of these people believe in me? Why don't they believe that I'm capable, they just keep passing me over. And I thought, You know what, they can't believe in me, because I don't believe in me. I haven't shown up as the person that's capable of more. And it was kind of through like that awakening that I was like, I don't like my life. There's nothing I don't mind, my financial situation, my job, my Wait, how I feel nothing about my life. And I just I said right there. I said one year from now, I will not be sitting here I will not be sitting in this desk, I won't be at this job. I won't be making this miserable salary. I won't be at this weight. And and I remember like I'm saying this out loud. And one of my co workers was like, are you okay? I was like, I'm great. I'm just letting you know, I won't be here next year. And just like, okay, all right, that is so important. You voiced

it, not only not only to yourself, but obviously somebody else heard it. I mean, that's actually that's powerful.

You know, I'm telling you, when I say it was like, I was sitting in my cubicle and an energy came over me like, Girl, what are you doing? What are you doing? And so, I you know, I remember I sought out a life coach I had seen now this is kind of funny. I had seen a reality show about life coaches. And I was like, that's what I need. Like I had done therapy. I had gone through, you know, therapy from divorce childhood trauma, like, I'm like, I don't need therapy. I need someone to come along with me. And point out, kind of call me out on my stuff. And point out, Hey, you're, that's a good example right there. You just limited yourself. You didn't do this or you know what I mean? And I was like I am so I looked and and I didn't I couldn't find one. So I requested from my work that I'd be assigned a work mentor, because I was like, Look, if nothing else, I'm fixing this job situation. Yeah, so I really lucked out. I was blessed with an incredible mentor. And the first thing he did is he said, Where do you want to be in five years? And I was like, well, not here. So, I, he said, Well, I want you to write down all your goals, and I want them to be SMART goals, you know, they really need to be drawn out. And so I, I just wrote, and I hit on every single level of my life. Now, there were a couple that he he kind of was like, Yeah, okay, I'm your work mentor, I can't really touch on that. But there were some that he encouraged. So my very first goal was to lose weight. And he's like, Well, why do you want to do that? And when I said, Well, here's where I want to go in my career. And I know that I need the confidence to be able to show up and to speak confidently about what I can do. And I just don't even feel good about myself. And if I can't show up and confidently take care of myself, I can't share with other people how to help them. Right. So, so let me keep that and some others. And so if we I just started ticking away at each one of those things. I set out a five year plan. And I achieved it in two and a half years. I lost 120 pounds. I finished my bachelor's I enrolled in my masters and finished my masters. I got that foreclosure and all that debt wiped. I took care of it, I either paid it off or and I also worked with an organization who was able to get the foreclosure deleted from my credit report. I became a first time homebuyer. As a single mom, that was a big deal. I, gosh, I don't even know what oh, and I got two promotions. Now, here's the thing. And here's the piece of the story that's so important. All these years along the way of my career, I almost always had a side hustle. I had even left. Yes, I had even left the corporate world for two years, and did freelancing work. And it was at again, the pushing and nudging a family to say to get quote, a real job, if you will, right. Because this isn't the path. It's not the pre paved path if you don't have this job, quote, unquote. Um, and so I went back, right, the pressure of a family saying, Hey, you're a mom, you need to, you need to make sure you've all you've got this steady paycheck and health insurance and is, which is such a belief, but that's okay. Our parents and family do this because they want to keep us safe because they care. Yep. So when I set out that five year plan, I was very strategic and what I wanted to do, I wanted to get into a role where I had autonomy. And I wanted to get into a role where I made more money, so I could finally do something with my side hustle. Now, I, at that point, didn't know it was going to be coaching at all. I had been a corporate trainer many times over. And and I had done what I didn't even realize was coaching. It was through my master's degree program, I was introduced to coaching and consulting and had to do a lot of coursework. And it was through that, that I said, Oh, this is it. So I wrote as my final project for my MBA, a business plan for coaching and to help other people take their business off the ground. And so that kind of evolved a little bit into what I did. And I slowly started out, you know, people started reaching out to me how I knew I was on the right path. People saw me on social media, okay. Hey, girl, how'd you lose all this weight? Oh, you've got like two promotions this year. Okay, how? What are you doing? What are you doing with your life? How are you doing? I want to know. And and so I originally started in the health coaching niche, right? Because everybody want to know we can see right? Weight loss is something you can visibly see. Everybody could see I was wiping out debt. I was improved. My own personal development. You can't see those things. Right. Weight

loss is like the poster child for what's happening on the inside. Yeah,

yes. Right. Because the weight was a symptom of all the other crap weighing me down. Right, right. That was just the symptom. Yep. So that was where it started. But it was through that. I got to about the third client were trying to help them in Their journey, we figured out, they didn't necessarily want to lose weight. They wanted to quit their job. And I was like, well, that's my story. And when I realized that I had really very strategically done things, in the promotions that I went forward, they were very strategic. And how I did it, and how I was kind of slowly inching my way out, I thought, okay, there's a, there's a bit of a strategy to this. And there is something that could really be shared, and how to set your goals and how to completely change. You know, it all starts with that belief. I think we also sometimes get to the point in our life where we're like, Well, I'm too old to change. You know, I've done this for so long, why would I, I would have to, quote unquote, start all over. Right? And I'm just here to say, it is never too late. You're not starting over. There is nothing about starting over that I'm doing, you're really leveling up. Right? You're taking everything that got you to this point, and you're going, let's, let's see if this can lead down a different road that hasn't been paved for everybody else. Yeah, it's, it's so powerful, getting to experience and watch other women kind of go through this process of how they're awakening and, and create something that was just a bigger dream. And you don't, and we have it, it's that that entrepreneurial spirit that at some point, kind of dies. You know, I, I was the third grader I was selling stickers on the playground in third grade in recruiting my friends to help me sell those and garbage pail kid cards. Remember that Garbage Pail Kids were like prime real estate, okay? for like, five cents, whatever, because I lived in sunny Southern California at the time. And the place across the street sold popsicles for 25 cents. And I had to walk home every day in sunny California. And I was like, if I sell at least five stickers today and get me a popsicle. So so I knew, like, the business like what do I need? How many do I need? What am I going to, I don't like what happened to that girl. She's still there, she's there, you know, the girls walking down the street with their wagons pulling their cookies, curl your, it's there. I

I love that. Because, you know, I think I think a lot of people couldn't really relate to everything you, you know, went through, and then discovered how you can also help other people. For me, the big word in my life was always I always got to a point, maybe five to seven years down a road. I'm old enough that I've had a lot of five and seven year roads where I get stuck. And and it's just it's so stuck, stuck, stuck. That's that's where I you know, and then I feel helpless. Because it's like, even if I want to do this, I don't even know where to begin and everything. And I never had the person like you who could like kind of hold my hand through that and, and help me, you know, have those little breakthroughs. We all have had some magical people here in our lives now and then, but having that one strategic partner that really is helping us so I love that you that you experienced all that and that you came out of that in a way where it's like you just made you want to help more and more other people. And so now here you are, you're helping people take their lives back because they're getting stuck to or they're going down that road that it's like oh my gosh, whose road is this? This isn't the road that I chose it I just ended up on it. You know, and I love that it to me, you are a powerhouse and and the fact that you you know basically focus on women, you know that that makes it so it just makes it so focused. And I love that because sometimes we want to be all things to all people and I'm sure you can help man you can help people in all different situations and everything but I'm also really just loving that you've found a lane and you're you're in it and you're doing some good things. Hopefully you're not feeling stuck in there because it's a very powerful lane that you're I love it. This is this is exactly what I was hoping to hear is that is that, you know you had to kind of travel the road yourself. And you came out of it a better person and are helping other people to do the same. And so you actually have something that you're going to be sharing with us that is Is it five tips to beat the odds and make your goals stick I love that that is something we're going to definitely make sure that we have in the show notes so that people can get to that. And can can get that. And that will also help them kind of enter your world to figure out, you know how and if they can work with you. And if, if it's a good fit, men or women, right, they can actually contact you either way. I encourage people to go and get that for sure. But I also want to find out a little bit more about you about like, what is in store in the future, you know, you're on this road, you're on this path. So I have my final question that I asked everybody and you can answer it any way you want. You can actually ignore the question and just say whatever you want, but here's, here's, here's my, my, my, my question. And that is, if money were not an issue at all, how would you live out your legacy?

Yeah. So I love this question. Because, again, you you touched earlier on the fact that I had spoke something at one point in my life to existence. And of course, I did follow it up with writing it down. And so every day I do write this down. And ultimately, I want to be traveling across the world, and really embodying other cultures, and learning about them. And then speaking, on World stages and sharing about those cultures and what I've learned through that, so that I can continue to make an impact and help others take their life back. However that might be for them.

Oh, that is amazing. I love that. That that is I can envision I already see it for you. That is so cool. Well, I also want to give you just the final word. If you have we already know kind of what your mantra is. You can you can say your mantra, you can just expound on that. Just I want to give you the final word before we sign off here.

My final word is believe. Believe that can happen. Because it can.

I love it. Thank you so much, Jen, this has been great.

Thank you.