The Fundamentals

We all love a fresh start—the New Year’s resolution, the first-day gym selfie, the excitement of a new project. But 30 days later, most people have quit. Why? Because they mastered the start but ignored the sustainment.

Today, Jenna Williams shares the Jenna 2.0 blueprint. After surviving a stroke and having to relearn how to walk and talk, Jenna realized that "diving into the deep end" doesn’t work. To build a life that lasts, you have to stop being the hare and start being the tortoise.

In this post, we’re breaking down:

• The Law of Sustainment: Why consistency beats intensity every single time.

• Frequency & Vibes: How to tune your internal "transmission tower" to attract the life you want.

• Brain Hacking: Using Cognitive Ease and the Zeigarnik Effect to bypass stress and finish what you start.

• The Compound Effect: How tiny shifts—like reading 10 pages or swapping one soda—triple your results over time.

• The Power of Hard Things: Why I stopped explaining myself to people committed to misunderstanding me.

Stop waiting for an easy button and start using your biology to propel you forward. It’s time to shrink the task, raise your frequency, and finally sustain the change you’ve been chasing.

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Watch the episode here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLy6sNVRWF0Y9dDwEjunlJkcjHgjrm-2ox&v=5MSGnxs8WFU

Listen to the podcast here

The Fundamentals

The Law Of Sustainment: Your Brain Defaults To Comfort

Welcome back to Just Call Jenna. Thanks for coming back. I want to get through some of the fundamentals that are important to understand as we go through the journey. For part of this journey, the important thing is why we call the fundamentals. Some basic concepts, understanding them will help you in the journey. Number one is the Law of Sustainment. It’s great to make a New Year's resolution. “I’m going to the gym.”

You might go to the gym, great. Good for you, but probably 30 days later, many of us are not doing that because you sustain what you are consistent with. The Law of Sustainment is your brain's way of determining whether it would be self-sabotage, giving up, or saying to other things, “The Law of Sustainment is what you identify as you will become.” Your brain will fight you, being the new version of you versus the old version of you. Your brain wants to stay comfortable with what it is.

Remember that whether you're fighting a saber-tooth tiger or you're just having a hard conversation, your brain does not know the difference. It will send the same signals to your body. If I go back to my stroke, it wasn't just enough for me to get better and change. I had to sustain the new version of me and end the old version of me. That included changing my habits, my lifestyle, everything.

Sustainment is not the root of what you planted in the ground. It's the fruit you see. You might identify without knowing it or knowing it as a certain version of you. That is what you identify as. The Law of Sustainment says that no matter how much you change, you will keep reverting back to that until you actually can identify as something else. You have to sustain the steps to allow you to grow into the new you. Think about planting a seed for a harvest. You plant that seed. If you plant apples, you're not going to get strawberries. You actually have to plant the strawberry seed, nurture it, water it, let it grow, and then you have strawberries.

Sustainment is not the roots of what you planted in the ground; it's the fruit.

What do you identify as, and what sustained action or consistency will you take to get there? For me, it wasn't just about diet and exercise. In fact, taking care of my body is probably my weakest point, but I'm really good at taking care of my mind and soul. I started using those to improve the physical stuff that I wasn't good at. I'm not the person who gets up at 5:00 AM and goes to the gym.

I am the person who gets up at 5:00 AM and reads. I am the person who walks my dog when I can. I am the person who chooses water over soda. Before the stroke, I was the kind of girl who could drink two big gulps of Coke in a day. Now I'm lucky if I drink two cans of Coke in a month. It's a treat. I still like it. I'm not going to deny myself all of it, and right away, it seemed too hard to do.

Slowly, you make the choice of, I'm going to have the water and not the soda. Before you know it, your brain starts identifying with it. Now the water is my strawberry, and the Coke is my apple. I'm not planting an apple and hoping to get a strawberry. There is a story that someone had told me, which hit me hard when you talk about consistency and sustainment and what you identify as. Let's say we take two people. One person decides that for an entire year, they're going to eliminate a hundred calories from their diet for a day.

Practical Application: Identifying &  Nurturing Habits To Change Your Identity

The other one decides they're going to add a cookie a day. Not very much. It's a cookie. At the end of a year, the person who ate one cookie was 20 pounds heavier than the one who eliminated 100 calories. It was never one cookie. It was the habit of eating multiple cookies, like one single cookie a day. Doesn't sound like that much, but over the course of a year, it sure added up. Sustainment is the consistency, it's choosing not just what am I gonna do, but what am I gonna nurture?

What am I gonna sustain? That was an incredibly hard lesson for me in healing from the stroke. How could I sustain a version of me that I didn't even know? I didn't know who I was at that point. I knew who I was before the stroke, but after the stroke, Jenna 2.0, how did I not revert back to what I identified as?

How did I allow my habits to sustain a version of me that didn't exist yet? How did I create that? How did I become that? How did I consistently make the right choices to get there? How did I identify as a healed person who could go back to work, who could walk, who could talk? At the moment, those things were happening. My brain was like, “We can do this.” My body was like, “Not so much,” but sustained effort.

What I identify as was step one, which allowed me to create the habits and the consistency to stay with them. Consistently doing things, you have to give yourself a little bit of grace. It's impossible to try to be perfect, especially when you have things against you. I had a great therapist who worked with me more often than not, that's what you're going for. Let's not give it a 40/60, 80/20 rule. Let's just go more often than not. You're allowed to be human. You're allowed to have a day where it hurts so bad.

You can't get out of bed. You just can't do that three days in a row. I sustained from what I identified as? I identified as a healed person who could get there. My actions, my motivation, everything moved in that direction, versus I identify with the person I was before the stroke. The person before the stroke is very different from the person now. I would like to call myself a recovering party girl. I was a party girl before, and had a good time.

I like a good time. I just had to learn how to have a good time differently. I had to realize that the new version of me couldn't identify as that anymore. What things could I do? To sustain this consistent effort, for example, I like to read. Reading was a thing I could do for my brain. Puzzles are a thing I can do for my brain. These are things that I need to do to sustain the effort of who I am to keep identifying with. Now it seems easy. The road when I started was very hard.

The most important thing for you to think about in the Law of Sustainment is that you will do what you identify as. Your habits will create that. Somebody used to tell me all the time, how you do one thing is how you do everything. It's a character thing. If you procrastinate at one thing, you're probably procrastinating at a whole lot of them. If you're doing something right, you're probably doing a whole lot of things right.

Sustainment is how you identify that. Find the pieces of yourself that help you. Thank yourself for the things you do that are moving yourself into the right goals. That will help you sustain who you want to be. If you tell yourself, I'm a healthy person. Every time you eat something healthy, you say thank you to yourself for more healthy. You're telling your brain with neuroplasticity, more of this, this is good. Keep doing this. That will help you sort of change to what you want to sustain.

Remember, your brain will do everything it can to make you the version of you that it is most comfortable with. If you want to get outside of your comfort zone, you have to sustain new things. One of the biggest ways is to understand that the Law of Sustainment is there, and what you nurture is what's going to happen. Your brain will default back to what it knows.

Your brain will do everything it can to keep you as the version of yourself it’s most comfortable with. So, if you want to get outside your comfort zone, you have to sustain new habits.

That is why growth is so hard. Your brain doesn't know the difference between growing a little bit, becoming a healthier person, or learning to walk a driveway at a time. It doesn't know the difference between that and fighting a saber-tooth tiger. It literally doesn't know. It goes into survival mode. It tells your nervous system everything else to fight it. Understanding the Law of Sustainment is what you identify with, is what your brain will want you to do.

You will fight yourself to be what you identify as. That's the short way to say it. Another important one is to understand cognitive strain and cognitive ease. What does that mean? It sounds fancy. Ease is what the brain wants, mental shortcuts. It wants to be easy. I like to joke and think that my brain wants to be lazy. If it's strained, it's going to go into survival mode following the Law of Sustainment and try to push me back to what it's comfortable with.

Cognitive Strain & Ease & Shrinking The Task

Cognitive ease is like, “This is easy, this is good, I'm going to do more of this.” That is why, when habits are good or bad, we just keep repeating them because it's easy. That's what your brain wants. It does not want to think. It wants to do what's normal, what's comfortable. When you're healing from a stroke, there's no such thing as comfortable, but understanding strain and ease. It was actually my mother who told me when I was healing from a stroke, “You don't have to make it harder on yourself. You can take the easy way if it's moving you in the right direction.”

I think about that a lot, how do I not make it harder on myself? How do I make life easier? Sometimes that's setting the coffee pot the night before. Me times it's cooking the meals on Sunday that you're going to use through the week. A little bit of prevention, giving you sort of the gratitude for the past you that made the future you better off. That's great. That's thinking about strain versus ease.

The way I think about it is, how do I make it easy on my brain so that it can be lazy? I know that sounds funny, but that is the easiest thing. Understanding that is a fundamental of how to hack your brain and move from what you identify as to the new version of you. Understanding that your brain wants easy. You have to make it easier for your brain. A lot of that is like, shrink the task.

Think about it in manageable steps. I like to think about things, for example, shrinking the task. What is easy for me? Let's use the example that I'm not good at, which is going to the gym every day. If the goal is to go to the gym for an hour a day. Now, maybe that's your A game. You're going to do that. You can't really sustain that every day because it's new. Your brain doesn't want that. Maybe version B is that I got up and I went to the gym for twenty minutes. Version C is I'm lazy. I want to kick this can down the road. I don't want to do it, but I'm going to commit to just walking around the block for five minutes.

That might be what you do when you're at your lowest vibes and can't manage it, but you're committing to sort of those shrink the task. How can I make it something that I can do at the lowest of me? Yes, we all want to strive for our A game. Nobody wants to fail. I don't want to fail either, but if the task is manageable, I can do it. If it's okay, like during the stroke, I had to learn to walk again.

It was manageable if each day my goal was just one more driveway. I shrunk it to where it was manageable for me to sustain the effort. No, I'm going to get to the end of the block. My body wouldn't have cooperated in that. That might've been ten driveways, but maybe I could only make it three. If I said, “I'm going to go three, maybe today I did three. Tomorrow I'll push myself for four.”

Shrink the task to what you can accomplish. Don't overwhelm the brain. It doesn't understand. You can't strain it. Straining the brain and not giving it the easy path, it doesn't know what to do. Mental shortcuts. Again, if you think about a path, you walk through a hill, there's no pathway. You just walk one way through the grass. If you walk that same path 6 or 7 times, a path starts to form.

Before you know it, there's the path. There's the easiest route from point A to point B. Shrink the task. Neuroplasticity is a huge one to understand. Your brain can make connections. Some of us have heard that old dogs can't be taught new tricks. Actually, the brain is very malleable. There is really never a time when you can't retrain your brain. It is a fascinating organ. I'm not even sure that I could ever even understand it is complexities.

Neuroplasticity is again neurons that fire together, wire together, and make new connections. In my stroke, there is a small section of my brain that lost its complete connection. The way I could explain it to others is imagine you took a section of a DNA helix and you just cut out one diamond shape, and you asked the two ends that had never talked to each other to make connections. That's what my brain had to do. Somewhere in there was a concept, but there was no pathway like walking through the grass with no path. You've got to forge a path.

Again, the brain wants it easy. Make that pathway so all those connections can happen. The brain wants shortcuts. Give it the shortcuts. That's really neuroplasticity. Rewire your brain. The brain that you were born with is not the brain you have today, which will not be the brain you have later. You can retrain yourself to do anything. It's a skill.

The Zeigarnik Effect

I wish I could tell you there's an easy button. I wish there were an easy button. There is not, but it doesn't have to be difficult. Go back to the Law of Sustainment. You have to sustain the effort to be what you identify as. With cognitive ease and strain are going to take us into something called the Zeigarnik Effect. I am probably pronouncing that wrong. Do not come for me. The Zeigarnik Effect says that the brain or the mind will remember unfinished tasks better than finished tasks. For example, the best way I can explain that is like a movie with a cliffhanger. If there is a cliffhanger in a movie or a show, your mind is not settled until it sees the conclusion. It goes back to that Law of Sustainment.

The mind will remember unfinished tasks better than finished tasks. Your mind is not settled until it sees the conclusion.

By sustaining tasks, you can finish them. If they are unfinished, your mind will be unsettled. The brain wants shortcuts. It will fight for safety. It wants cognitive ease. Let us talk through that. When you are thinking about how your brain works and wanting ease, cognitive ease, and strain, the more cognitive ease you have, the easier it is on your brain, the more automatic it can be, and the more space your brain has to deal with things that are straining cognitively, or in the Zeigarnik Effect, what is unfinished.

We want to shrink those tasks a little bit. Remember the reward loop and the quick hits of dopamine. That is how your brain works. Essentially, we are going to hack our brains a little bit. We are going to use our biology to help propel us forward. Shrinking the task is bypassing the amygdala. The amygdala is the fire alarm system in the brain. When something is hard, and you hit cognitive strain, your amygdala is that piece of your brain that goes, "Hold on, alarm bells stop. Danger, Will Robinson, danger."

That is your brain fighting itself. You want to bypass that and hit your prefrontal cortex. That is logic. Your prefrontal cortex is what is still developing in teenagers, and why they are all crazy. It might be the only time in your life that you can be considered legally insane. Your prefrontal cortex needs logic for the brain to process things. We want to bypass the alarm system or the amygdala and get to our logic brain, the prefrontal cortex. That is done by presenting cognitive ease over cognitive strain.

The Zeigarnik Effect will come into play. Your alarm system in your brain or your need for things to be closed will help you. Unfinished tasks will help you. To better explain the Zeigarnik Effect, I am going to paraphrase my understanding of it. If I’m wrong, sorry. Essentially, this was a woman in her twenties. She noticed by watching waiters that they could come and they could remember orders step by step, all the details, and then magically, when the order was fulfilled, they would forget it and have space for another order.

We are going to essentially follow the same effect that is natural in the brain. We are going to, as we finish tasks, make space for new things, all following cognitive ease versus strain. I want to bypass the alarm system and get to logic. We are grownups, we are adults. We all have different kinds of crazy in us. Every one of us is capable of being crazy, myself included. I do some things where I am like, “You knew any better.” I was left unsupervised.

Understanding how the brain works, shrinking the task, understanding some of these things, it does not mean I am going to be perfect. I am going to give myself a little grace to be human and make a mistake. More often than not, I am going to move in the direction I want by controlling where my frequency is going. What am I sustaining today? Can I shrink the task where my brain is not fighting itself?

My brain, your brain, everybody's brain. The amygdala. It does not know if you are fighting a saber-tooth tiger in real life or if you are having an uncomfortable conversation with someone you love. It does not know the difference. It is the same frequency of alarm for it. Remember, the brain is neutral. It does not know good or bad. Those are your definitions. That is how you feel about it. It processes information. The dopamine loop will keep reinforcing what we like.

The brain does not know whether you are fighting a saber-tooth tiger in real life or just having an uncomfortable conversation with someone you love. It does not know the difference; it registers the same frequency of alarm either way.

Understanding the Zeigarnik Effect in cognitive ease and strain is extremely important. We want to simplify it in the brain. The easier it is on the brain, the more likely we are going to be to be successful at said task. We understand that the brain is going to remember things until it is completed. Once it is completed, it will make space for new things to come in because it will remember uncompleted tasks.

These are important things to know as you are trying to sustain things, because sustaining is actually the hardest part of it. Anybody can start. It is not that hard to pick up the phone and make a phone call. It’s much harder to make ten phone calls every week for ten weeks straight. That requires dedication, commitment, and sustainment. What is going to make it easier to sustain? We are going to shrink the task, understanding that the easier it is on my brain,the more I can bypass the amygdala, which will be very emotional and set off all the alarms, bells, and whistles.

The Compound Effect 

The prefrontal cortex can come in and logically remind me why I am doing things, why I want to finish them, so I can create space for something new. I am going to keep it moving. I am not going to get stuck. Understanding some of these rules is very important. A huge portion of that all comes with the compound effect. The compound effect is like the cookie story. It wasn't one cookie. It was a cookie a day for a year, which added 20 pounds. That's the compound effect. We are all affected by the daily things that we do. Think about what you're compounding. Again, it doesn't have to be night and day.

It doesn't have to be the drama you find on TV. Most of life is found in the boring moments that we don't think of. “I got up today, I did this.” Information is going to fly at you, but if you compound in the direction you want to go, you can get places fast. Let's go back to walking, walking, compounding step by step.

They told me I'm going to need a cane for the rest of my life. My dreams of sticking with golf were never going to happen. I get out there, and I golf. Not very well. I can't quit my day job for it, but it's a lot of fun. It's going back and going there and understanding things might be different. I show up, whether it be walking or golfing, I just keep showing up and trying for little small improvements, giving my brain the shortcuts it needs, and I can get there.

It's funny, I've lost my drive engulfing, but my putt got much better. Again, it's showing up and doing it and compounding. It's not like any day I'm going to get up there and suddenly win the Masters. I would love that, don't get me wrong, but it's probably not going to happen. Just showing up and each time looking for that improvement, I'm compounding. Maybe in two to three years, I'll be a good enough golfer that people will want to golf with me again.

That's not really what matters. What matters is showing up and compounding. I'm telling my brain, if I show up in my golf clothes on the course and I do this, I'm going to be able to golf well again. Now, again, golfing is not for everybody. It's mine. It's what I love to do. I just get up there, and I go. I show up, and I hang out with the friends I'm with.

I breathe the air, I move my body, and I compound those skills and tell my brain, “More of this. This is good. We should do this.” My brain filters that stuff in that I want to see. It's also how you're going to get to do the power of hard things. As adults, we've all seen many hard things. Hopefully, your hard things are not as bad as mine with a stroke. Hopefully, your hard things are nowhere near that. On a scale of 1 to 10, that stroke is a no-go.

I hope that you can figure out that you have the power to do hard things. That power is absolutely in you. You have the mental fortitude and everything you need to push yourself into what seems impossible. When that comes up, remember cognitive ease and cognitive strain. Remember, you are biologically wired. Whether you like it or not, your brain will tell you, “Easy way. Don't do hard things.”

You have the power to do hard things. That power is within you—you have the mental fortitude and everything you need to push yourself into what seems impossible.

What about when hard things come up? How do you do that? Remember how your brain thinks it wants shortcuts. It wants to sustain what's comfortable and good. You can shrink the task and go for what's easy. Find the pathway to give your brain the easiest way to do it. If your brain thinks it's easy, you will get out of survival mode. It will not be firing everything at your body to go.

Run, stop, fight, flight, freeze, do any of that. Do anything but this. Your brain is wired to do that. If you can figure out how to make it seem easy, “Not so bad. I'm going to get up. I'm going to show up at the golf course. I'm not going to worry about whether I can drive it straight down the middle 200 yards. Maybe I go 25 yards, and it goes straight.” That became easy.

The Power Of Hard Things

The next time I show up, the brain goes, “We went 25 yards today. We're going to go 50,” which is a terrible golf drive, by the way. It's still forward and findable. I'm showing up each time telling my brain, “We're doing this again.” With the Compound Effect, I want to bring up an important thing. It is the power of hard things. I do not want you to have to hit my level of having a stroke to do the hard things, but let us go back to Bethany Hamilton. She lost her arm. You talk about balancing on a surfboard when you are missing an arm. She learned to paddle differently. She learned to do things differently.

I remember reading a quote that she said, "I do not need easy, I just need possible." That is how the brain works, too. You push yourself. There is a science behind effort. Doing hard things makes you better. You think of all the great athletes, leaders, and people we know, nobody got there by taking the easy road. The brain wants the easy road, but you need a little stress, which, remember, I am about stress poisoning.

Effort—doing hard things—makes you better. Nobody got there by taking the easy road.

You need a little bit to push you further. Just like Bethany paddling differently on a surfboard, just like all the great leaders and athletes we know that did hard things, just like me walking one more driveway every day, compounding until the massive shift happened. You have to stretch your brain a little bit. Muscles get better from straining them. By working them out, they get stronger.

You do not see the guy who is 100 pounds the day he goes to the gym, and suddenly he comes out after an hour, having worked out 120 pounds of pure muscle. Doing hard things and going back will get him there. There was a story I read in a book about habits. There was a guy who tried to create a habit loop in his brain to go to the gym. The breakdown in his habits was that his brain fought him. Remember the cue routine reward.

His brain fought him about going to the gym. His brain saw going to the gym as fighting a saber-toothed tiger. To break down the habit, compound it, and change that reward loop, he went to the gym every day for 30 days. He put on his shoes, his gym clothes, and went to the gym. He worked out for five minutes, went home, and did it again the next day.

He simplified and shrunk that task until it became automatic. The reward in his brain was going, putting on his shoes, and going even for five minutes. It was not about the length. It was about the habit of becoming the kind of person who went to the gym every day. Shrinking it down, but doing hard things. This is what it is going to take to build a life you want to live.

You are going to have a lot of uncomfortable moments. You are going to have to let people misunderstand you. The power of hard things and that effort is going to create peace. For me, people who know me now will hear me say, "If it takes my peace, it is too expensive." There were some seriously hard things for me to accept in shrinking the task and doing hard things. One of the hardest things for me was a psychology lesson.

If it takes my peace, it’s too expensive.

I had to let people misunderstand me. I had to not explain myself. My childhood wound is that I did not feel heard as a child, so I needed to tell my story to everybody. I needed to be able to explain myself, and I needed to tell everybody. It was my deep-seated trauma wound of who I was and how I felt about myself. I felt I needed to explain myself. The hard thing for me was accepting that I do not have to explain myself to anybody.

I could allow people to misunderstand me. Do not think for a second that being here on this video, releasing this show, is not one of the most frightening things in the world. Do not think I came out here like an expert. I am going to take on the world. I said I am going to do the hard things. Remember, I created a plan for sustaining how I was going to do this and commit to doing it.

Just like in my journey of healing and noticing stress or learning from it, I had to learn how to not explain myself, how to be okay with myself when somebody else did not understand me, and to actually be okay with the fact that this thing is out there on the internet. I have a website. Everybody I have ever known in my life knows about this, and I could end up with some egg on my face. I could end up a complete failure.

I could have trolls on the internet telling me how horrible I am. I had to be okay with myself no matter what. When you are talking about that being one of the biggest trauma wounds I have, “I need you to understand me. I need you to like me at all costs. Your opinion matters to me,” guess what? I want you to like me, but I am going to go home and sleep like a baby, whether you understand me or not. I can sleep knowing that I am putting this out there in my most vulnerable state, sharing myself with the world, opening up invitations for people to throw eggs and teepee my house. It is totally possible.

That is the power of hard things. I am aware that what I refer to myself as now is Jenna 2.0 after the stroke. Jenna 1.0 existed before. I thank her for everything she did to get me here, and somewhere, Jenna 3.0 is evolving. I am aware that future me is happy about everything I am doing here. As hard as it is, as scary as it is, putting myself through all the cognitive strain and fighting myself like I am a saber-tooth tiger. I am human. This is not easy. I imagine you could see every celebrity out there, and their life being out there would scare them. It scares the bejesus out of me.

Do you think I want somebody saying I am not good enough? I actually had to get very comfortable with myself, accepting that my frequency and my vibe are not meant for everybody. I had to do that, and that thing that I did put me to have this conversation in front of a camera and put myself out there. When I did that hard thing of learning not to explain myself to somebody committed to misunderstanding me, going, "Do you want to tell me two plus two is five? Have a nice day."

Being okay with not explaining myself, healing that piece of me, that super hard thing that I did, it’s hard. It’s one of the most emotionally draining things I have ever done in my life. I reinforced the habit of reminding myself every time somebody did not like me or did not understand me, that was okay. I still liked myself, and I understood myself. The dopamine hit was that I liked myself by doing that hard thing, super uncomfortable. One of the hardest things I have ever had to do. Now I can look back and say, “That was good that I did that.”

Emotionally, it might have been harder than receiving the stroke. It might have, because I am a total extrovert. I live my life in a world where I want to be the life of the party. I get energy from being around other people. To let people misunderstand me and not explain myself, I went through a horrible custody battle in court many years ago. When your life is on display to strangers like that, you want everybody to like you. You want everybody to be on your side.

Because of my childhood wound of needing people to hear me out and understand me, because I felt misunderstood since I was little, that hard thing I did made it possible for me to come here and do this hard thing. It propelled the Compound Effect. When I was in therapy doing that healing, did I ever think for a minute that it would put me here? No, but that is the science of effort. It breathes.

Unlearning Habits

There is learning new habits, but sometimes you have to unlearn habits. I had to unlearn the value of other people's opinions. To some of you, that may seem like nothing, but to me, it was a part of who I was. I thought I needed to, I do not know if you want to call it people-pleasing, name any trigger trauma wound you want. My validation was external. It was completely outside of me. My secret self did not tell people that they hurt my feelings, but I am way more sensitive than anybody would ever imagine. There were nights I cried myself to sleep because of something somebody said. You would have never seen it on my face.

In fact, many of you who know me might even be shocked to hear that. Little teeny tiny Jenna that was inside there from second or third grade wanted everybody to like her. She did not want to be misunderstood. She did not want to be left off the kickball team or picked last in sports. She did not want any of that. Somewhere in there, wherever that wound came from, it spiraled into me living externally, and what came from that was the need to overexplain myself.

I needed everybody to understand where I was coming from. I needed people to understand my reasons and why. I had to unlearn that habit. I had to cue a different routine. When I had somebody that I was talking to, and whether they liked me or understood me, the routine had to change. I was no longer living externally, needing somebody else's view. The reward, the dopamine hit, came from noticing how I liked myself more. My opinion of myself mattered more than other people's opinion of me.

Jenna 1.0 would have never ever thought that that was possible in her secret self. I would not have told you that. You would not have known that about me, but it was true about me. I think that the vulnerable side of me coming here helps you understand why you have to sometimes unlearn habits. The auto cues are still there, just like addiction. I had an alcoholic father. I saw addiction from a very young age. Why do addicts constantly repeat things?

The cues are still there. They can replace the routine for the short term, but you also have to replace the reward. Cue, I want to go have a good time, or I am feeling low about myself, I replace it with a drink. The reward is that I feel better. I do not think there is an alcoholic out there you talk to that would be saying, "I am happy I had a drink." No, they are like me, who lived externally. They are following a habit loop. You have to unlearn some habits, and you have to do that by replacing the reward.

Cue and reward stay the same. Might change the reward a bit, but there has to be a cue and a reward for your brain to actually learn a new routine. You get the behavior you reward, the dopamine hit. For me, the reward became that I now feel better about myself, I am more comfortable in my own skin, and I have learned to accept that some people may not like me.

Many people misunderstand me. I have been misunderstood a large chunk of my life, but learning to be okay with that, being committed to myself, I am more interested in being comfortable with myself versus worrying about what somebody else might think of me. It did not change me all the time, but it did change my frequency. I would be worried around certain people because I knew they did not like me, did not approve of something, or did not do other things.

Jenna 2.0, now after the stroke, lives in a place where I like to say, “I am not going to dim my light for you. If it makes you uncomfortable, I understand. You are free to go to the other room or put on sunglasses, but you being uncomfortable with my frequency or my light does not require me to dim it for you. I am not going to force you to take me. That is okay. If you do not like this, go ahead and tune out. Do not listen. I hope you do.”

I am not going to dim my light for you if it makes you uncomfortable. You’re free to go in the other room or put on sunglasses.

It is really important to understand that you have to unlearn behaviors and the way the brain works. The cue, routine, reward loop, the brain will do more of what it is rewarded for. The dopamine hit, essentially, is the chemical in your brain that signals reward. Remember, we are trying to bypass the amygdala, the alarm system, and get to the logical brain. How many of us have had that day where we look back and go, “Yesterday, something crazy happened.” The logical side of you goes, "Why did I even do that? Why did I act like that? That is so out of character."

Not really. It was your amygdala that said, "Alarms," and you reacted rather than responding. Later, as you have calmed down and given some space, the prefrontal cortex, that logic brain, comes back in and says, "Logically, this is how I would respond." Remember, we are going to reward good behavior, not reward the bad behaviors.

What You Aren't Changing, You Are Choosing

We might have to unlearn some habits, but we are going to understand that that dopamine loop is going to help completely bypass the alarm system. How are we going to do that? Shrink the task for small rewards. There is a choice. What you are not changing, you are choosing. Think about that for a second. How many of us said, “I am going to do this, I am going to do that.” Remember the story of the New Year's resolution.

What you are not sustaining, you are choosing. What you are not changing, you are choosing. Every single one of us has this idea of what we are going to do to improve our lives. We know what it is. Just like when I was out there looking for other people's opinions to matter, I was not aware that that is what I was doing, but that is clearly what I was doing. I am human, forgive me. I forgive myself. I think understanding that you have the choice.

How many times have we heard parents say, "Make good choices," as their kids ran out the door? I did not always make the best choice. I am human. I still do not always make the best choice. More often than not, I am choosing the important things. I am choosing not to stay stuck. I am choosing to move towards Jenna 3.0. I am choosing to let people misunderstand me, and allowing myself that does not matter.

Think about that for a second, that one of my biggest fears is other people judging me or misunderstanding me. Here I am talking on camera to you about how to make your life better. If you want to talk about what I am changing, remember, karma is real, energy is contagious. Watch your vibes.

Important Links

• Jenna Williams

• Jenna Williams on LinkedIn

• Jenna Williams on YouTube