Jenna or Sarah is a concept I’ve borrowed to help demonstrate the two worlds us soul seekers operate within.

Although Jenna and Sarah are not real “flesh and blood” people — their traits are absolutely real and based on real people.

You’re currently in the world of one of them.

Which one? …you’ll need to read the rest of this page to find out.

But know this … one of them sends you in a loop of feeling flat, wondering what the hell to do with your life next because you have a feeling you’re waiting for something, a sign of some sort, permission even. The other one just does it.

‍One last thing… I have taken the time to write this out in full, so please read it through to the end, because this could be the depth you have been searching for.

I’ve tried lots of things. I’ve improved a lot of my ‘old ways’ and I like yoga, pilates and mindfulness, although now it feels as though I haven’t time for everything I want to do.

I want to reduce my job down to part-time because I want to do something more meaningful with my life. I’ve started my own part-time business with my spiritual interests.

Well, I say “part-time”, but I’ve really been “dabbling” with making my spiritual interests a full-time occupation since 2007.

I’ve got lots of ideas for my own business, I do many different things. It’s difficult to explain really. I’m what you’d call a “jack of all trades". LOL.

- Jenna

I change stuff up all the time, I stuff up sometimes too, but it doesn’t seem to bother me. I feel quietly confident and prepared for whatever life has to throw at me.

Like my friend Jenna, I’ve been doing this crazy spiritual stuff thing since 2007.

The beginning was difficult as hell, but as soon as I realised a few “truths” – it got a whole lot easier.

I now run my life with confidence. I can balance everything I want it to include.

I no longer live someone else’s life.

- Sarah

Decisions

Recently I watched a brilliant video by someone considered to be within the best thinkers of our time, Simon Sinek.  One of the things he said, is worth mentioning here:

“…sometimes you say you're leading with your heart or soul. I hate to break it to you, those aren't other body parts controlling your behavior. It's all happening here in your limbic brain, the part of the brain that controls decision-making and not language”.

I’m going to circle back to this quote at the end.

‍Why I’ve written it will make perfect sense then. It’s important … for you.

But let me first continue to explain the big DIFFERENCE between Jenna and Sarah.

You see… back in July 1996 I was thrown into the deep end.

I realised I wasn’t for the corporate world even though I was just starting out in life.

Like millions of others I had realised getting on the train every morning was my very worst nightmare.

Right then and there…

‍I made a decision that completely changed my life.

I didn’t take the safe road, like everyone else I knew. You know, start determining your worth by the job you do, the convention you follow, the dinner party talk, the people you don’t want to disappoint.

I’m certainly not judging them. But for me, I wanted to hit the reset button on how I lived my life.

I was 23 years old. I was foolish and hungry enough to believe I was brave.

So I took the risky decision.

‍I found the guts to roll the dice.

‍I had absolutely no idea what the hell I was going to do. I just knew I didn’t want to fit a 'box'. For starters, I didn’t want to commute 2 hours a day on a sweaty train or be told what occupation I should follow.

So I went looking.

The BIG CULL came quickly, by September 1997 I’d been officially dis-owned.

I wasn’t exactly ready. I don’t think you ever are.

The “chop” didn’t take long. I wasn’t spoken to for years.

I can’t remember how exactly I was given my marching orders.

But my bedroom was cleared out, in a couple of hours, I was told:

‍“Thanks, but we no longer want you here!”

‍My parents were mad, frustrated, sad, angry… all the negative emotions. They were feeling them all. In their world, I had betrayed them.

But I was happy.

It felt strange because I was supposed to feel like my friends and sibling would have done.

Yet I was 'as happy as Larry'.

A weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

The weight of fitting in with what someone else wanted of me.

The next day… well, that was my very first day being myself… or was it just “rejected” and wondering where to go.

Didn’t matter though. Because this was when the rubber hit the road.

I wasn’t where I wanted to be (yet). I didn’t have a “master plan”.

‍Truth was… I really had nothing at all; no house, no car, no partner, no 'job' (in the conventional sense) and as I said, no plan either.

It was scary as hell

‍… and this is when—without knowing it—I started “operating” as a Jenna.

During my “honeymoon period” I had joined a bunch of classes, mailing lists and did everything.

So I was getting hit with offers every flipping day of how to sort my life out. Three things were 100% certain back then.

1. I was alone
2. I would become the 'cat lady'
3. There would be a new 'shiny-object' to follow each morning

…and with the little bit of money I had in the bank, I went on a buying spree.

It started slowly, because I was broke.

Perhaps a new magic pill each month. It was like a drug. I was helpless. I constantly needed the next shiny-object “fix”. The big promises of easy quick ‘fix your life’ and make it all go away.

But each thing pulled me in a completely different direction.

• I was signed up to everything
• I was listening to endless personal development stuff hounding me to be different, but still feeling useless
• I was a graduate determined not to fall back into the corporate ‘trap’ so rebelled by doing mind-numbing dirty jobs (one day I cleaned 30 toilets)
• I was writing out affirmations (because the gurus said I should)
• I was feeling grossly inadequate and defensive the moment anyone was curious about what I was doing
• I couldn’t make a decision and kept changing my mind
• I ate only rice for a month (before fad cleansing was popular)
• I became an ‘apprentice’ for a ‘spiritual guru’ (aka I became the provider of advertising spend and taker of a rage-a-holic)
• Emotions switching between an excited puppy and depressed teenager, I wondered if I would ever ‘get there’ (wherever ‘there’ was but, that didn’t work because I had no focus)
• I wanted my life fixed, making excuses for what I was and wasn’t doing…

I was spinning, never feeling quite good enough and constantly comparing myself to friends or hiding from them.
‍
I felt like giving up at times.

What I had didn’t feel like a real life. I was an “opportunity seeker”.

No two ways about it (honestly, I think this is where most of us soul seekers start our journey into the unknown).

My flawed process looked something like this:

…meaning that any little “shiny object” that presented itself to me — I would drop whatever I was doing at the time — and shoot off on a tangent as I explored one shiny object after another, never really sticking to anything and avoiding the real issue of how rejected I felt.

That flow pretty quickly turned into a health problem as I played the game with little results to show for my efforts.

Opportunities (the perception of an opportunity that will produce a quick and easy result) in the “have a spiritual awakening and make no effort” space is rife…

But you probably know that already.

I’m not telling you anything new. Our personal inboxes are a stark reminder of this fact, each and every day…

…as the next “magic-bullet” tactic pierces our mind-space and wrestles for our immediate attention.

Before I knew what the hell had happened… I was a couple of years into doing my own thing.

‍Results?

‍Barely getting by.  Worse still…

Knowing where I was going?  Not a clue.

That was 2 years “lost”. So I chalked it up to lack of experience.

That was around 1999. I was more savvy in 2000. I felt I had learned by my early novice mistakes. I’d be more selective.

‍I was wrong.

‍I went on a massive do everything yourself campaign and don’t let anyone in. I put on a brave face yet felt deeply ashamed of the path I’d taken (big mistake). I thought everything I represented was 'woo woo'. I felt like my family were right.

That I would be forever rejected for following an ‘impractical route’, doing what I wanted. I’d be left behind, a failure, never able to pay my bills doing anything I loved.
‍
By then I was doing readings, teaching a few classes when I was allowed to (the rage-a-holic had decided I wasn’t allowed to do anything within 20 miles of where they practiced, but I was still to pay their advertising bill).  2000 ended and I was royally shafted!

Results?  Better. But still rubbish (in terms of my potential). I was still caught in a net of wondering if I’d done the right thing... I wondered, should I go back to the old way with my tail between my legs? Did I now know where I was going? Not really — I was “jack of everything” with the mindset focus of a teenager.

Then 2001 rolled around  …I had an epiphany! …the penny dropped.

I realised that the “role” I was operating as, was a Jenna (although I had not yet labelled this trait a “Jenna”).  …and I had probably maxed out what a Jenna could do.

A Sarah operates completely differently to a Jenna.

Sarah “manages” her attraction to shiny-objects. She’s not addicted. She can control what she believes and what she chooses to ignore.

Her attention is more selective and focused. She values her time.

Sarah’s view looks something like this:

Sarah doesn’t believe her spiritual, sensitive self and intuitive interests are shameful. That’s not how she views what she’s about.

Sarah builds her long-term assets…. Sarah builds her future.

Sarah serves the needs of her authentic self (and centres herself around a pocket of positive, but not delusional people) — Sarah is not all things to all people.

‍We’re now in an age where empathy, balance and sensitivity are positive traits. No longer seen as a weakness, a sign of an inability to cope, but as elements of human nature to help us remember what is and what isn’t acceptable and for us to not only recognise, but understand how a society gets to a dark place.

In times past, yes, being “Toooo sensitive” was often used as an excuse to upset or minimise the effects of an insult, but now, things are beginning to change.

‍The second I changed my viewpoint of what I was doing and why things weren’t going my way even though I’d made a change, analysed things to death and was trying – positive change happened, almost instantly. I became a ‘responsibility receptor’ of accepting life isn’t about who you are, it’s about what you stand for.  I began to know when it was me and when it was someone else.

‍Knowing where your own responsibility lies and when it’s someone else, is the life blood of every confident person. What I did from that day onwards—the epiphany moment—was to take charge of my own transformation and operate far more focused and strategically.

Going backwards was not an option. I built up a life of commitment to my transformation. I became my own transformational leader and decided to lead myself from the front, rather than being the armchair self-critic I had previously engaged with.

I became the good example (to myself) and imagined a troop of individuals inside of me, all looking for their leader.  In fact, I established an inner place for the disjointed parts of myself all to meet.

I took them on the journey from the false to my true self, escaping the need for approval on the march to freedom.

I positioned myself as MY most trusted advisor, EVEN IF I made mistakes.

‍The shift in thinking was a game-changer.

Big difference, MASSIVE difference.

I looked at the world out there as my friend and what I wanted to engage with, I did what I had read in the famous Earl Nightingale quote: “Watch what everyone else does – do the opposite. The majority is always wrong”. I made it a point of deciding I was no longer going to be concerned with what other people valued within me, I wasn’t going to fit in with a perception of who I should be, I was going to be who I am.

I was no longer concerned with being weird. Within a short period of time I had developed my own business, bought a car when previously I had to sell the one I had in order to live. A year later I met and married my husband (we’ve been happily together now for 22 years) and I bought a house I never thought I’d ever be able to have.  That's a big difference from when I was the struggling graduate cleaning toilets.

‍So you see...

A Jenna sees opportunities as events — where she’ll only engage if she can guarantee a specific outcome.  A Jenna is a 'jack of all trades and master of none' because she starts with enthusiasm then drops things as soon as they get to the point of deep emotions. That’s primarily how I describe a Jenna.

Each “shiny-object” is the big answer — the reset button — for a new life. But, of course, that’s just an illusion setup by the desire to run from your own emotions.  …shiny objects act as a 'Jenna venus fly trap'. The outcome is always inevitable and predictable.

‍Sarahs are different…

‍A Sarah knows that building your inner world is a process, not an event.  It’s something that gets worked on, continuously and never-ending. The road ahead is not easy. Not one little bit. It requires blind faith sometimes, pig-headed discipline, determination and mindsight A Sarah is focused on bringing together all the divided aspects of herself to create what she missed out on. She is no longer a prisoner of an unexamined past, she can therefore take charge of her life with a new sense of vitality and freedom.

Sarahs are all around you; from leaders at the top, to workers struggling on nightshifts.

It starts with the right mindset (anyone can think like this). It’s executed through an integrated mindset called, what the interpersonal neurobiologist Daniel Siegel refers to as, Mindsight.‍
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Mindsight is the acceptance the mind exists beyond the brain, as human beings we are an energy flow, intelligent systems which exist beyond skin and bones.

‍Modern culture has obliterated our inner natural capacity of belonging and our ability to see ourselves more than just a brain that does.

‍Developing mindsight helps to bring back belonging, for the mind to no longer feel caged in despair, numbness and low grade depression, even when you have everything in the world you should want.  What Daniel Siegel called ‘Brain Brushing’ helped return my whole system back to a place of regulation, like Sarah’s.

‘Brain Brushing’ means you confront your challenges and don’t withdraw from them.

This creates new brain connections which help to build the functionality of your pre-frontal (brain) functioning, especially if your mind has experienced prolonged emotional trauma - trauma which may have been there your entire life.

‍Research shows empathic training promotes bodily regulation – your gut becomes healthy…

Communication becomes attuned to others – they HEAR what you’re saying.

Emotional balance, the EXTINCTION of fear, the ability to pause before a response…

Insight into yourself and empathy for other people without taking the responsibility of it all…

And…  A morality which extends to a realisation you are part of a greater good.

Plus best of all…  Accessing your deepest intuition.

My ‘brain brushing’ mindsight required something transpersonal, outside of myself because humans I no longer trusted.

Not a God… Not an Angel…  Not a saviour…

‍I learnt how to become my own guide and I did that through the principles of consciousness.

‍How I saw it - there was no knight coming…

Suppose there was a knight…

Did I want to be Rapunzel in the tower?

NO, to be honest – having some guy climb up your hair sounds both painful and demeaning. If there was a knight – I wanted him to shout up to me, the belief there is a way out…

To give me the confidence there is a door and staircase, just at present I can’t see it…

And for the knight to encourage me to find it, NOT climb my hair as though I’m helpless. Then it would become MY CHOICE to leave the tower…

So that is what I did – I developed my relationship to consciousness, I became the knight as well as Rapunzel, I no longer waited for someone else to fix it…

If I did, I would still be waiting – waiting for too many so called passing knights, tugging at my hair, leaving my-self wide open for the narcissistic ones to decide to climb my metaphorical hair…

‍Some Jennas are very content in that role. She waits her whole life for the knight to save her. She won’t change anything or even try to. She just hopes positive thinking is the only thing she needs. She continues to look for the drug-rush of the chaotic, passionate relationship, to find they disappear on her at her most vulnerable moment.

She then calls everyone to find out how she can entice the wayward boyfriend back, have the snide friend like her, how she can have everything different but doesn’t want to do anything different, she bores the brains out of everyone she knows – for YEARS as to why nothing changes…

Then wonders why her real friends back off from her, feel emotional FOR her, when she goes off to find yet another ‘knight’ – who is just as abusive as the previous one.

‍Some Jennas consciously know they’re a Jenna… but they want to change. But mostly, they just don’t (yet) know how. They want to be a Sarah — if they only knew how.  There’s still hope for those Jennas.

Sarahs build an inner empire.  Some Sarahs build a masterpiece. Some their own business, some their perfect idea of the life they want to create, some just want it simple, they’re happy with simply the ability to feel better

‍…but, and this is critical, the essence of a Sarah is always the same; building your inner world is a “process”.

‍The most successful Sarahs are those who:‍

• Escape from wanting external approval and they
• Get to a point where they feel in control

Here’s a picture of what that looks like and how it works (see below).

It is an easy to follow 9 stage plan, which is like a ‘paint by numbers’ insight into Expanding your Consciousness – it's great, you just keep pressing play.

In the mean-time let me tell you the rarest Sarah trait of all - the truly great Soul Seekers don’t do this to just help themselves (it is not their primary motivator) – no, they pay it forward by making their contribution to raising the vibration of our collective consciousness.

…but and this is also critical for you to understand, they do this first by raising their own vibration because as Abraham Lincoln put it “you can’t help the poor by being one of them”, meaning you start with yourself and then you help others – never the other way around, that’s known as avoidance.

Recently my team and I decided where we fit in the grand scheme of things and what our contribution to the collective is.

We did this by writing out and agreeing our mission:

‍Our mission is to provide an outstanding service for sensitive people recovering from the trauma of a damaged childhood so that, they may create for themselves an abundant, happy adult life using the power of the unconscious and meditation.  We work to facilitate their transformation whereby their child-self no longer feels the world is unsavory and can’t be trusted.  Sensitives can create, find and enjoy kind environments that reflect their own empathic nature.  We encourage and inspire self-responsibility and acknowledge that even though there may be reasons, there are never excuses.  We are doing our part in raising the collective consciousness so that the future, and whatever it brings, is a reflection of a more positive collective consciousness.

‍It all comes down to a choice, a decision and an attitude. None are wrong. It just depends on what you want, and for what reasons.

What about you?  Are you a Jenna or a Sarah?

‍If you’re currently a Jenna — then you have a decision to make (watch again Simon Sinek’s video from earlier).  But whatever you choose, know that it’s the right decision (for you).

Does it feel right?

I made the decisions I made because at the time I thought it was the right decision. I didn’t know I was a Jenna. I didn’t know how to think like a Sarah.

In 2001 I had decided to change my core thinking. I became a Sarah. That was my decision. For me, it paid off. Massively.

‍I chose to care. I chose to be different. I chose to have a voice. I chose to help others find their voice. I chose to maintain my core values and never “sell out”.

I chose to help change the world, by helping to change myself, one soul at a time.

What about you? Have the guts to roll the dice. Perhaps it’s time to make the right decision.

[CONTINUE]

SUMMARY
1. I learnt how to become my own guide and I did that through the principles of consciousness
2. There was no knight in shining armour coming to rescue me
3. I developed my relationship to consciousness, I became the knight as well as Rapunzel, I no longer waited for someone else to fix it
4. So are you a Jenna or a Sarah? Is it time for you to make the right decision? If so click the [CONTINUE] link above