[00:00:00] Okay, we are, we’re here. We are recording the first ever episode of Not Another Mindset Show. I cannot tell you how long it has taken to actually get to this point. I mean, I could tell you, but I, I won’t bore you with that being our first episode. Um, I have been on probably a hundred podcast episodes as a guest.

I currently am a guest probably Two to four times per month, on average, on other people’s shows. And for the longest time, I thought, that was enough. I don’t necessarily need my own show. I am perfectly happy guesting. That’s, that’s fine with me. I don’t have to go through the production. I don’t have to think about episodes.

I can just show up and then leave. But, here we are, [00:01:00] obviously, right? And, I kind of got to the point where there’s Always more than I wanted to say, or I would get really good ideas from being a guest on podcasts and then not really have anywhere to go with them. Well, I could take them into an Instagram post or an email or something of that nature.

But I wanted to dive deeper into some of these topics. And if you know me, if you’ve spent any time in any of my programs, you’ve learned from me, you’ve been mentored by me, you know that I can, I can talk and I can go off on some specific topics. And I will do that. Inside my my community, certain coaching containers inside the health mindset coaching certification.

We have weekly calls where I will dive in deep into specific topics. And I found myself really, really enjoying that. Enjoying that far more than a Instagram caption. So here we are. Welcome officially to [00:02:00] Not Another Mindset Show. And I really wanted to spend some time today helping you get to know me and how I got to where I am today.

I actually had a question asked of me on a podcast recently asking a little bit more about why I do have a PhD in psychology and if I actually regret it a little bit because I’m not currently doing any research. I’m not teaching as a professor. I’m really truly not using my PhD in a conventional manner.

So do I regret it? Absolutely not. Do I still use my PhD every single day? And that is exactly how I answer the question when it was asked of me on this other podcast. And I wanted to share a little bit more about, again, how I actually did get to where I am today, given that I did go such an unconventional route.

And I do have notes because Again, I tend to be a little bit, uh, [00:03:00] tangential. I’m gonna try not to do that because I would really love to keep these episodes relatively short. So, with that said, how do I currently use my PhD? Obviously, I’m not, okay, that’s, I was gonna say I’m never doing, like, statistics or analysis, but I definitely, I definitely am doing those things at a very low level, not to the degree that I ever was, obviously, during my PhD, but I am doing math.

I am running statistics. I am running formulas in some way, just not to the degree that I was while getting my PhD and doing research, right? So I may not be using that part of my PhD, but I will tell you, almost every day in my work, I have to either A, Think like a researcher, and or be, use topics of behavior change and mindset, whether I’m using it with myself, I’m using it with my clients, my students, my, my mentorship clients, [00:04:00] or again, sitting down to talk to you lovely people, I’m using this all of the time, and tell me that psychology is not used in our everyday everything, especially if you’re an entrepreneur, we’re talking sales, sales, Marketing, advertising, conversations with prospective clients, content creation, buyer decision making, human decision making.

So much of what we do every day involves psychology, not just from like a professional perspective but also a personal perspective. So having a PhD in psychology, where I specifically researched. for nearly five years, growth versus fixed mindset, and specifically, even more specifically, how that applies to health and fitness behaviors.

It’s, I mean, I use it, I use it every day, and have now been able to translate a lot of the, the basics of human behavior, human behavior change, decision making, as I mentioned, [00:05:00] into all of these other avenues from an entrepreneurial perspective. So, on that note. I want to take you back. I want to take you back to, we’ll go down memory lane for a little bit here.

I originally fell in love with research. In the prison system, I actually, believe it or not, wanted to be a prison warden for a very long time. I was originally interested in psychology from a forensic and criminology perspective. I actually, fun fact, have a dual degree in psychology for my undergrad. I have a degree in psychology and also a degree in the sociology of law.

Criminology and deviance was very, very, very obsessed with this stuff. But here’s the thing. Everyone’s a little bit obsessed with this stuff. Everybody likes a good crime podcast. You know, NCIS has been around frickin [00:06:00] forever for a reason. So around the same time I was doing this, I was also I was literally doing research.

As an undergraduate student and going to jails and prisons, I was studying the behavior of children of incarcerated parents and looking also at things like recidivism rates and how things like that could be adjusted. So for those of you who don’t know or aren’t familiar with the term recidivism, it is the idea that when someone is essentially going to re offend, you know, the, the chances of them going back out into the world after they’ve been in jail for a period of time.

Are they going to re offend again? So, recidivism rates are chances of re offending, or the actual re offending. So, how did I get from that to studying mindset for health and fitness? During college, while I was doing this research and falling in love with the process of research, period, I was also falling in love Personally, with [00:07:00] strength training, nutrition, in my spare time, I was spending way too much time on bodybuilding.

com for those of you who also were in that era. And I started to wonder how I could be applying my knowledge of psychology to health and fitness. Because obviously that’s a big part of it, too. And as I noticed how health and fitness was really changing my life for the better, I started to wonder how it was even possible that so many people know that they need to take care of themselves.

They need to exercise. They need to eat healthy. But we have this huge epidemic on our hands of obesity and just, in general, people not taking care of themselves. Everyone is aware that they should be doing these things. Everyone is aware of the benefits of these things, but they’re still not freaking doing it.

So what’s going on here? Obviously, something psychological. At least that’s [00:08:00] where my head was at. And when it came time for graduation as an undergrad, and I started to think, like, I, I really want to spend some more time in this area. I know the, the forensics and the criminology route was where I was going, but again, it feels like everyone is interested in those things to a degree.

The health and fitness stuff, that’s not something everyone’s interested in. So I started to look around at different programs, whether that was a PsyD, PhD, master’s degree, and I landed on a program at North Carolina State University. It was a social and community psychology program, and there was a researcher, her name is Dr.

Jenny Burnett, shout out Jenny if you’re listening to this, my amazing PhD advisor, and she was doing research on mindsets, and more specifically, she recently went through some research and released a paper on obesity, and essentially, and we’ll get into this in a separate podcast, but when the American Medical Association labeled Obesity as a [00:09:00] disease, what did that mean for people’s mindsets?

And therefore, how did their mindset about that impact their actual health behaviors? And I was so intrigued by this. I’d never heard of a science of mindset until I came across this. This sounded a lot like maybe a way for me to start to answer this question. Why are so many people not taking care of themselves when they all know they should be doing it and they’re all very aware of the benefits?

Maybe this mindset thing has something to do with it. So, I applied, I interviewed, I loved, loved, loved, still love to this day, Raleigh, North Carolina. And it just felt like an amazing fit. I enjoyed all of my interviews. For those of you who are not familiar with the PhD interview process, it really is like, interviewing for a job.

You fly out, you have a series of interviews with different faculty members, you’re usually staying with a graduate student, and it’s basically two days of like networking and interviews. And [00:10:00] it’s, it’s quite draining. I did that at a variety of schools, but I did end up landing, landing on NC State in the Mindset Lab, literally the Mindset Lab.

So when people try to tell me that there’s no science to mindset, when I literally have a PhD from a lab. Cold the mindset lab. That’s where it’s really fun for me to get into, but I digress. I kind of decided that I wanted to to pursue obviously the health and fitness route with mindset and at the time Dr.

Jenny Burnett the leader of the lab, the faculty member, my PhD advisor, she had just started to dabble in that health and fitness realm. So I really took that as an opportunity to spearhead a lot of the research on combining health and fitness behaviors with mindset. So I spent four and a half years doing that, got my PhD, and then it was like, okay, now what?

Big girl job. We need to find a big girl job. And going into my PhD, I never [00:11:00] really thought I wanted to stay in academia. The idea of being a professor didn’t really seem super exciting to me. And also just, also the idea of having to constantly ask for money to do research, like writing grants. However, I was open to it.

I was open to my mind changing, which That is a very important thing from a mindset perspective, by the way, and we’ll likely get into that in future episodes too. I was open to being swayed in a different direction. I was not swayed . In fact, I feel like I was actually pushed the other way in a lot of cases.

So where I really wanted to go is I wanted to continue to do research likely in the industry. So industry being, you know, health and fitness industry. We’re talking Fitbit, apple Health, weight Watchers. That’s where I saw myself going, places where they had. Plenty of money to do the research and then I could be there to help on the mindset health behavior change side of things and there were all of these companies are doing research with their, their own funding.[00:12:00] 

So long story short, I got the corporate runaround from Some of these companies, I’m not going to name names, but one of these really big companies, one of the three that I did just name, did the whole schmoozing thing, flew me out to New York City. I had, I’m not kidding guys, over the course of six months, probably 10 to 12 separate interviews with different people at this company.

They told me they had a spot for me, they wanted to bring me on, but they just didn’t know exactly who I was going to be working under and where I was going to fit. And this, yes, was a six month process. Now we’re talking. I have my PhD. I need, I need a job. I need to start making money beyond the health and fitness coaching that I was doing on the side and had already been doing that for four to five years at that point, and I got sick of it immediately.

I had never really worked a nine to five to begin with and had like a true boss. And prior to that, it’s been like, you know, part time jobs here and there, worked at restaurants, you [00:13:00] know, the usual, right? But I’d never been it. Here’s your salaried job offer. You are coming to an office from nine to five every day, Monday through Friday.

I had not had that either and I was honestly a little bit scared because I really enjoyed having independence in my schedule and having a flexible schedule and not doing the same thing every day. So the fact that I also was now kind of, again, getting the corporate runaround from this company and not really knowing where I was going to go and also just like not feeling valued at all in the process.

It really irked me. And again, I was health and fitness coaching on the side at the time. So I really started to think to myself, what if I just, I gave this entrepreneurship thing a chance. I had some other people in my life at the time that were going down that route. And so they were great examples for me to see what I could potentially do.

And I did. I opened up my health and fitness [00:14:00] coaching roster again, very quickly filled that and we will get into probably later how I was able to do that and how we’re still doing that at KJO coaching to this day. We’re talking, gosh, that was 2019. Now it’s 2024, so five years ago. Filled my roster, brought on an assistant coach, I knew I didn’t just want to coach.

So here’s the thing. Yes, I have a PhD. No, I don’t regret it. Yes, I use it all the time. I did not want to get a PhD in psychology and know what I know about human behavior and only use that with my own clients. I wanted to do something at a greater scale, which is where the Health Mindset Coaching Certification was born in 2020.

So a year in a few months. After I completed my PhD in 2019, I was launching the Health Mindset Coaching Certification. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with that program, it is a 13 week certification program developed by yours truly. So as a health and fitness professional, you can [00:15:00] learn how to leverage the science of mindset and behavior change with your own clients without having PhD.

So I can kind of share with you all of this knowledge without having to go back and get like a full fledged degree. Because here’s the thing, you don’t. need to. You really don’t. So let me teach you instead. So that’s kind of where I ended up, and I think it’s an important conversation to have too, because I really wanted a seat at that table.

At the, the big, Business corporate table. I saw myself, you know, this was an opportunity to maybe eventually climb the ladder and become chief science officer at Apple Health, you know, and I saw a really big opportunity and I really wanted to be part of that and. Instead, I built my own table, and I think a lot of my success in general I really, really, really do attribute to my own [00:16:00] mindset, and that decision to essentially leave any conventional route with this PhD, take a really big chance on myself, and not get a lot of support, um, from family, and family.

I really recognized there and then how important it was to have a growth mindset, and I was really seeing it now for myself. I didn’t want to keep waiting for someone to invite me to the table to take a seat and to feel important and to feel valued and to feel like I really was able to contribute something.

When I knew I had those things, and like I said, just build your own table. Don’t, don’t wait for someone to ask you to take a seat. Build it yourself. And I will say too, like, part of the reason I was so ready to take a [00:17:00] chance on myself is because of the corporate runaround from that one company. I was also offered a position at a pharmaceutical marketing company locally.

And the salary that they offered me was basically below the median in Raleigh, North Carolina. And as someone who just finished eight and a half years of school to become an expert in this area, it felt a little bit like a slap in the face. And I was getting very frustrated with, again, just not feeling valued.

So instead I took the value that I knew that I could offer and Created something on my own and the universe clapped back and was very, very excited for me and everything has worked out honestly, really well. And that’s not to say that there has not been difficulties. Oh my goodness, the difficulties of being an entrepreneur and.

Oh my goodness, the amount of mindset work I am doing on myself nearly every single day. Which we also [00:18:00] get into. Oh, we’re gonna, we’ll get into that stuff. Definitely we’ll get into my own mindset issues. But. Anyway, I just kind of wanted to set the stage for you guys with this first episode of kind of where I came from and what this looks like today.

Again, I own a health and fitness coaching company and we have a handful of coaches who do the fulfillment of that service at this point. And we are really the greatest example of how to use Mindset and behavior change from a scientific evidence based perspective in health and fitness coaching. And then, of course, on the other arm of my business, it really truly is a separate company at this point, is the Health Mindset Coaching Certification.

And I also do lots of one on one consulting with folks, too, who are in their own businesses at this point. And yeah, so that’s just laying the foundation for you all and who I am, how I came [00:19:00] up in academia and very quickly left and did my own thing and will never ever, fingers crossed, never ever look back.