Human connection remains an elusive puzzle in a world increasingly dominated by technology. Jennifer K. Hill, Founder/CEO of OptiMatch and author of Stop Hoping… Start Hunting!, cracks the code of human connection with the People Strategy Forum. She delves into the transformative power of deep self-connection and its impact on building resilience, identifying purpose, and nurturing relationships. Drawing on her extensive career, Jennifer reflects on the importance of deep self-connection as the cornerstone of meaningful relationships and personal growth. She also shares valuable insights from her own story of resilience, highlighting the value of ‘eustress’—positive stress that fosters growth and strength.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Jennifer K. Hill – Cracking The Code Of Human Connection

Introduction

Welcome to the show. We’re a show that guides leaders on how to elevate the workplace. We believe that people are at the heart of successful organizations. A team member’s well-being, rewards, and career development are all essential to a happy, healthy, and highly productive workforce. This show discusses the practical and effective leadership strategies for top executives, senior professionals, and talent managers overall.

First of all, I’d like to introduce you to our expert contributor. We’re going to be talking about cracking the code of human connection with a truly inspirational leader, one that has a huge impact across the globe. I’m very envious of all of her travels. Jennifer K. Hill is the Founder and CEO of OptiMatch. Jennifer leverages her vast media experiences such as appearing on the BBC News and the NBC Network.

She helps guide professionals towards having those meaningful connections and helping them strive and have career success. She has established her own staffing company in the past. She’s authored a guide or a book called Stop Hopping… Start Hunting: A Job Seeker’s Guide to Finding A Dream Job. She’s also had a lot of philanthropic experiences, helping build schools overseas and so forth. As you can tell, Jennifer embodies a commitment to transforming lives overall. Let’s jump into this discussion and learn how to have those impactful human connections with Jennifer K. Hill. Welcome, Jennifer.

Thank you so much, Sam. It’s a pleasure to be here with you and your audience. I’m happy to share this with the rest of your team. We have one of your other team members on here.

Let me go ahead and bring them on in. It looks like we have Sumit Singla joining us.

Sumit, it’s great to have you here with us.

Jennifer, it’s nice to meet you.

Jennifer’s Book And Podcast

Jennifer, as we get into the topic here, first, I want to dive into some of your other accomplishments as you had. I know that you authored a book. Can you tell us a little bit about that, how you came about that, what drove you to write that book, and who you’re trying to help?

Over the years, I had spent about 15 or 20 years of my career, beginning in my early 20s, in the legal recruiting space. I noticed that the same questions kept coming up over and over. I used to host a popular show called Get Yourself the Job. That show, the blog, the book, and everything is aimed to support job seekers. If I had it all my way, I would gift everyone in the world their dream job. I’d be like, “You look under your chair and you get a dream job.” I like to think of myself as the Oprah of Dream Jobs when I was in that industry.

I started with a blog called Get Yourself the Job and wrote over 200 articles. People said, “It’d be much better if you put this in a book format so we could have the resume section, the interview section, and the consciousness of the job hunting section.” It got published. I did a book tour for it. I accidentally wound up on Conan O’Brien. That’s a story for another day.

One of my staff members was like, “Jen, bring a copy of your book to Conan.” I was going as an audience member. I was like, “Scott, I’m not going as a guest.” I was doing a media tour, but I was certainly not being featured on Conan. Life goals and accidentally, it’s a whole funny bit. You’d have to google my name and Conan’s name to see the whole story.

That’s so fun. I have to hear about that at some other time. You also have your podcast. Tell us about your podcast.

We sold JHill’s Staffing, which was my first company, in 2018 to a subsidiary of one of the largest accounting firms in the world. After selling that, we ran Get Yourself the Job, which was the old podcast for a little bit longer, and then I did a 180-degree pivot around that time. It was late 2019. I was offered a TV hosting gig with a group called Awake TV and the opportunity to co-moderate a panel with Deepak Chopra and one of my favorite professors in college, Don Hoffman.

That throttled me into the space of consciousness, which I had been dabbling in as a hobby. The next thing you know, I was so honored and grateful to get to make friends with Deepak, Bruce Lipton, Gregg Braden, and the folks at HeartMath, Dr. Rollin McCraty. Out of the joy of it, I love engaging in the consciousness. If you’re a job seeker and you’re tuning into the show or if you’re an employer, everything has consciousness.

I was giving a keynote earlier this 2024 in Los Angeles to all of the people who run law firms in Southern California. I began the talk by sharing that a lot of people don’t realize that our perception is everything. May I start and share a little story? This is the story I opened the talk with about our perception and resilience and how it all ties together.

In the late 1980s, there was something called the biosphere that was created. The reason the biosphere was created was because they wanted to test whether we could sustain life on another planet. Could we grow plants, animals, and trees and sustain life?” They were wildly successful except for one minor glitch. Would you like to know what that was?

What is it?

The trees, Sam. They grew faster and taller than ever before, but before they hit maturity, they fell over. Any guesses as to why?

Why?

The one thing they had not considered in cultivating a perfect environment was wind. In nature, wind causes the trees to sway and to build what’s called stress wood and to cause their roots to penetrate deeply. In humans, there’s an equivalent called eustress. Unfortunately, what’s happened as we’ve evolved as a society is we’ve come to treat all stress as bad stress when in reality, stress is what allows us to be resilient.

An analogy I use around this is like having an infinite pitch-black warehouse. All you have in this pitch-black is a little pinlight to direct your attention. That’s the equivalent of our perspective. Leading neuroscience tells us that we are bombarded with eleven million bits of information at a subconscious level per second. That means you just processed 100 hundred million bits. At a conscious level, any guess as to how many of those bits we’re paying attention to?

I can only imagine a small fraction.

Less than 50 to 120 bits. That’s how many we’re processing out of eleven million per second. Our perspective is everything. Long before I got into the consciousness space, which I realize permeates everything I do, this is not some fun woo-woo thing out there. It is scientifically proven. There was a great research paper I read about this, where somebody went out and told their participants that if they did X, Y, and Z, they would be luckier. Six months later down the road, they were still performing and had luckier things happening to them. Life occurs to us as we perceive it. If we see a thing as good, it becomes good. If we see a thing as bad, it becomes bad.

Life occurs to us as we perceive it. If we see a thing as good, it becomes good. If we see it as bad, it becomes bad. Share on X

One of my old team members, I was so grateful for the business coach I brought on. If any of you out there are considering getting a coach or a mentor, even if it’s somebody for free and you’re mentoring each other, do it. It makes all the difference in the world. I have an accountability buddy I talk to every day Monday through Friday for fifteen minutes.

When my business coach came in, I was terrible. I had been a horrible person to be coached. A little secret about me I tell people is I’m like, “I’m Jennifer K. Hill, and I’m a bit of a recovering jerk.” The story will illustrate that. Back in the day, I had a team member who I was frustrated with because she wasn’t doing things the way I wanted her to. She wasn’t returning calls, so I was considering taking action on it.

My business coach, Julien, at the time who is now the co-founder of our new company, OptiMatch said to me, “What if the reason she is failing is because you are looking for her to be a disappointment?” I was like, “Excuse me. Go screw yourself, Mister. I’m going to fire you. That’s not possible. I have a list here.” He gave me an exercise that changed my life. He said, “For one week, I want you to write down one good thing she does every day. That’s it. I’m not asking for rocket science here. You don’t even have to tell her. I want you to do it for your own self.”

I did it every day. At first, I did it begrudgingly, and then all of a sudden, it became easier because I was focusing those 50 to 120 bits of conscious information on what she was doing well instead of where I was frustrated. By the end of that week, she was kicking butt and taking names. I’m proud to say that she’s the EVP who took over the company for me after I sold it. She’s doing even better than I did with running the company. It’s still profitable six years post-acquisition.

Staying In The Negative

You’re talking about the importance of reflecting, understanding, having a positive outlook on life, and thinking about appreciation, and thinking about how people are impacting in a positive way, not only focusing on the negative. There is one thing I want to point out, and this is one of the biggest problems that I see in organizations. For some reason, there’s something in the human equation where we have a hard time saying thank you. We are always looking for the negative. Why is that?

Unfortunately, part of it is societal. It depends on different cultures. I remember when I was building the first school I ever built in 2017 in Nepal, the people were so happy. They were delighted. They had so little. They had no running water, no toilets, and no electricity. As we’ve evolved as a capitalistic culture, we take a lot of things for granted. Appreciation is something we don’t cultivate.

A wonderful guest I would recommend having on the show is one of my favorite guests that I interviewed 2 or 3 times for the old Get Yourself The Job show, Dr. Paul White. He is the author of The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace. Dr. White, when he first came on the show, taught me something very profound. He collaborated with Dr. Gary Chapman, the author of The 5 Love Languages. It did the same thing in The 5 Love Languages, but for appreciating one another at work.

Fast forward, I’ve been applying what I learned from Dr. White. I am building our new team as we’ve gone through the acquisition and we’re growing. I always ask every employee this as soon as Dr. White teaches it to me. Day one when somebody starts working with me, I say, “How do you prefer to be appreciated? Would you like public acknowledgment in front of the team? Do you want more one-on-one time? Do you like Starbucks gift cards? What makes you happy and feel appreciated, seen, and heard?”

This gentleman up in our Bay Area office said to me, “Please don’t ever acknowledge me publicly. That would mortify me. I would be so offended by that and I would probably quit. If you sent me a little private note to tell me what a great job I did, that would mean the world to me.” Imagine how many bosses might mistakenly say, “Great job,” and then he’s mortified and quits a week later or quietly quits. How many of us have seen that happen?

It’s important to know your people and what drives them. What have you seen about that, Sumit? I know that you’re dealing with a lot of different cultures in organizations. Your clients, are they learning about their people?

Yes and no. Jennifer, when you were talking about appreciation, I was thinking in the Indian context. Although we are supposed to be a relatively polite society, simple things like doing your own job, you’re unlikely to hear a thank you for that. A lot of people would question you. It could be something as simple as somebody who’s a doorman holding the door open and you say, “Thank you,” and the person might turn back to you and say, “I’m just doing my job. What’s there to thank me for it?” We are evolving there, learning from a lot of US multinationals who are here.

On the recognition side, I can relate to that story because I had a team member who was terrified of being called onto the stage and appreciated. When I told her, “You’re doing a fantastic job,” she would threaten me and say, “Don’t you dare nominate me for anything that involves going up on a stage and receiving something. I cannot stand up and say how I feel. If that’s what’s going to happen, I’d rather be crap at whatever I’m doing than do a good job.” That was funny. We don’t recognize or appreciate enough.

It’s something that happens to all of us. I’m going to add a little extra one here. There’s something I want to talk about. I know we’re going to be talking about cracking the code of human connection. I share this. People ask me all the time, “How did you create OptiMatch, Om.app, your company? How did you do all of this?” It was out of survival. I used to struggle with depression, anxiety, and a whole myriad of other things because I could not figure out people.

When I was a little girl, we got a book on how to be a human being, and when I opened mine, it was blank inside. People were like this logic puzzle for me to solve. I studied them and I was like, “What makes them tick?” It caused me then to be able to better understand how to connect with others. Now, decades later, would you guys like to know the number one secret to human connection?

What is that?

Connection to self is the key. It’s the cornerstone. It’s what I call the golden triangle of connection. Our connection to ourselves and with ourselves allows us to connect to our purpose and our connection to others. If that piece of the puzzle is broken and I’m trying to connect to others or I’m going after materialistic goals, purpose, or whatever meaning in my life, if I don’t first have that important connection to myself, it’s all going to fall and crumble like a house of cards. I only speak about that from a place of experience or of having seen that. I spent the first half of my life or more than that, probably two-thirds, trying to people-please.

The number one secret to human connection is the connection to self. Share on X

When I turned 38, I sold my first company, got diagnosed as being on the spectrum, and went through a divorce all in the same year. It was like, “Thank you for that little gift, Universe.” One of my best friends said to me that year, “You deserve to find someone who will cherish you. First, you need to cherish yourself.” It was the most profound wisdom I ever got. I spent the last six years since that divorce going through a process internally and externally, learning how to fall in love with myself and accept myself so that way, I could be in meaningful and authentic relationships with others, and teach others how to do the same.

Self-Love

Let’s dive in there a little bit. I know that any meaningful relationship with another starts with that strong foundation in making sure that you know yourself, you love yourself, and so forth. How does one go about strengthening that foundation? What have you found?

Quiet the noise. The loneliness epidemic is at 24% according to a Gallup poll study across 142 different countries. I’m not talking about just America or Europe, 142 countries were surveyed and expressed feeling very or fairly lonely. It’s because there’s so much noise. We’re so disconnected. I’m so grateful to be able to be on a call like this and to be able to speak to whomever, wherever, and whenever you’re tuning in. Yet, if this is our only interface, then we’re going to feel disconnected. We’re going to feel lonely.

There are entire organizations trying to combat the loneliness epidemic. Somebody was sharing with me about one today. My personal experience has been when we quiet that noise, you can do that in many ways. I’m a huge fan of heart-focused breathing by HeartMath. I’m a HeartMath certified trainer. I do it every day with myself, and I teach the CEOs I work with how to do it. Heart-focused breathing quiets the amygdala. I should probably explain a little bit more about why this is this way.

There’s something I like to call the three-brain system. Those are the three parts of the brain that operate day-to-day for us. There is a part of the brain called our amygdala or reptilian brain. That is the flight or flight side of our brain. We have the mammalian brain, the brain that says, “Am I safe? Are you like me? Can I trust you?”

You have the neocortex, the executive function, that allows us to have deep and meaningful conversations, create new ideas, and engage with one another. What most people don’t know is if the lower brains don’t feel safe, the higher brain can’t function. For me, that is the essence of why we’re seeing the loneliness epidemic and so much disconnection in the world.

I use HeartMath all the time. I was doing it right before this call. Busy business people say to me all the time, “I don’t have time to meditate. Who has time for this? I’m on back-to-back Zoom calls sixteen hours a day.” You have one minute. When you go to pee, do heart-focused breathing while you pee. While you go to walk your dog, do heart-focused breathing while you walk your dog. Do heart-focused breathing while you go to cook dinner, prepare breakfast for the kids, or whatever it is.

We can live our lives at the effect of the excuses we make for ourselves and others or we can be accountable for our own greatness and how extraordinary we are in our happiness. We don’t get access to those higher levels until we first quiet and be sure that that lower brain feels safe. That’s the whole premise that we built our new company OptiMatch around. Are you guys familiar with Google’s Aristotle project?

We can live our lives at the effect of the excuses we make for ourselves and others, or we can be accountable for our greatness. Share on X

Maybe. Let’s see what you have to say about it.

I’ll share it with you. It blew my mind when I studied this. In 2012, Google set out to find what leads teams to be successful. What is that secret sauce? They studied 38,000 people and 170 different teams. They had theories. They thought, “It’s the people who go out for drinks. It’s the people who are the same age or live in the same area.” Wrong. The number one factor of successful teams is psychological safety. That’s what we measure.

I’ll tell you a funny story about this that just happened the other day. We have a lot of service providers that we work with at our company OptiMatch. There was a service provider that I was finding myself to be a little bit irked by. I was like, “Gosh.” I was getting a little annoyed by something and how it was done. In OptiMatch, what we’ve discovered after studying this for three years is that we have four main motivators. You could argue that this is our theory. One motivator is fun. Some people are motivated by fun. Some people are motivated by facts. Some people are motivated by accomplishing and getting shit done or being a type A. Some people are motivated by other people’s needs.

If my motivators and your motivators misalign with one another, if you’re 0 to 5 points above or below mine, it’s an OptiMatch. It’s ideal. There’s very little friction most of the time. In most cases though, if you get to 10 or 20 points variability, I might feel frustrated by you or angry with you and not even know why. I’ve seen this with teams that we’ve consulted with and applied this algorithm with.

I had this person we were working with and I was feeling so triggered and activated. The person happened to answer the matching questions. The moment I saw their numbers, they were significantly a high facts person or what we call Apple. I dropped into deep compassion because I realized they were not being obstinate or misbehaving. They’re just motivated differently.

That is the gift I wish I could give to the world. I wish that I could give it to romantic partners, friends, colleagues, bosses, and those they supervise. I wish that we could all learn that what if we’re not misbehaving? It was like I was treating that client of mine a couple of decades ago. What if we’re all motivated differently? What if we could cultivate compassion, empathy, and sympathy for the differences in our motivations rather than making one another wrong?

Quiet The Noise

That brings us back to knowing thyself. You mentioned one of the key aspects that you think is important, and it is to quiet the noise. Is the purpose around that to think about certain things that are important to you? We are bombarded with so much information nowadays that we don’t have time to think through issues or what-if scenarios. What if this happened? How would I react? What if my girlfriend breaks up with me? How will I react to that? Is part of it not thinking about things like that?

It’s less of that for me. I don’t want to call it a problem. I try to be very thoughtful of the words I use. The opportunity we have, even that is a slippery slope. It’s like, “What if my girlfriend breaks up with me?” What if you could sit quietly, regulating your nervous system and breathing? You’re not going to come from a reactive place. You’re going to be able to come from a proactive place.

Even if your girlfriend breaks up with you, even if you get fired, or even if your kid comes screaming or the dog is barking, you can still be in your higher brain function and present and consciously aware, as my friend Arthur would call it. When we do that, we quiet the noise. Start with one minute a day. Set an alarm for one minute a day to be in silence.

We have so much. We have podcasts. We have news. We have the media. We have all these things, people, cell phones, and texting. What if we could sit in silence? I spend two hours a day in prayer and meditation. People say, “Why do you do that?” It’s because that’s what allows me to connect to deeper knowing. We all have the answers within us. It’s that old adage like, “We all have the answers within us.”

I remember I was in the back of an Uber on my way to a sacred site in Ireland. I was going as a tourist and listening to a meditation. I recommend this. If you’re on a subway or a bus, listen to a meditation maybe sometimes. Sit down and quiet the mind. I’m listening to this meditation, and they’re going through some chakras and some simple stuff. All of a sudden, the formula for consciousness was downloaded. I was like, “What?”

I called my friend, Don Hoffman, who he, Deepak Chopra, and I do shows together. I was like, “I got this formula for consciousness. I know you’re writing this scientifically. Does this sound accurate?” He’s like, “Of course. In all the mathematical formulas I’ve been studying, you have to have a probability space square filled with nothing to multiply it to get to consciousness.” I was like, “You can’t get that without the silence.” That’s a very esoteric example.

I could go down a whole rabbit hole with you of something called human design as well where I coach CEOs. One of the first things I do when I coach them is to ask them if they’re willing, and I do this with anybody I work with, which is not required, to get their human design. That requires a birthday and where you were born at a time.

When you get that, 70% of the world are what’s called generators or manifesting generators who feel clear yeses and noes in their body. What if you had this radar that you could feel, “Yes, it’s a good idea to take this job,” or “No, it’s not a good idea.” I had one of my coaching clients who got an offer on Shark Tank and decided to turn it down using this exact methodology.

We have the capacity internally to know whether to go right or left, straight or backward, to accept the job offer, or to quit. Yet, it’s so muddied by all the noise. The more we drop into that silence and learn to listen to ourselves and our inner knowing rather than all of the noise, whether the noise is from friends, loved ones, colleagues, the news, or the media, none of it is good or bad or right or wrong, but the power does lie within us.

The more we listen to ourselves and our inner knowing rather than the outside noise, the more we realize that nothing is inherently good or bad. The power lives within us. Share on X

In quieting the noise, spending time in meditation, and thinking about ourselves develop that intuition that we can learn to listen to that helps guide us through making those critical decisions in life.

You could look up a dear friend of mine, Dr. Rollin McCraty, who’s the lead scientist at HeartMath. This is not some woo-woo out there thing I’m telling you about. This has been studied for 40 years. I didn’t know this before I met Rollin a few years ago. Did you know the heart has its own brain and that the heart sends more information to the brain than vice versa?

One of my favorite studies is the heart method. If you want to know more about the heart’s intuition, they scientifically studied it where they had a group of people and randomly flashed images. Some of the images were very jarring images like death, war, horrible things, or snakes. Some of the images were placid lakes. A few seconds or milliseconds before the image was even put on the screen, the participant’s heart would respond and would know whether it was going to be an activating or a calming image.

That’s incredible. There are so many things that we don’t know. We have to be open to these connections. Especially as we’re dipping our toe into quantum physics, looking at quantum computers, and dealing with the reality that we see on a regular basis, we’re finding that there’s a little bit of an overlap between the metaphysical things in life that are hard to explain in pure science. This is something that we need to keep our minds open to.

It’s all something to play with. It’s not to get too stuck or entrenched. Be like the tree that I gave the example of. It’s to be able to sway with the winds and to be able to be resilient and develop that eustress so that when the hurricanes of life come hurling at us literally or metaphorically, we’re able to bend with the winds of challenges and tests that we’re faced with. That requires a certain level of mental and emotional flexibility. I remember my husband told me years ago a brilliant piece of business advice. He said, “Before any important meeting, stretch your body. Flexible body, flexible mind.” I always try to do that before any important business meeting.

Resilience In Relationships

Good advice. As we revisit the concept of you saying that the tree, for instance, needs to have the wind, the stress, and the pressure test and to build resilience, what about our connections with others? Do we need to pressure test those from time to time as well?

Let me tap into that for a second. Let’s pause for a moment. Give me an example of how you would stress test it.

I often see that in society when pure strangers go through a common experience of a calamity or something like that. You often see people get together and work closely with one another to solve the issue in that emergency mode. That’s a wave where we can see some stress that brings people together and forms bonds that weren’t there originally.

Would I intentionally go out and cause people stress? No. Would I encourage people to do things that are outside their comfort zone to be able to cause them to create healthy stress and pressure? Yeah, absolutely. I built two schools, one in Nepal in 2017 and one in Senegal in 2019. It was not comfortable. It was not easy. There was no running water and no toilets. I was digging and working with rebar. If you had asked me in my twenties, “Will you be working with rebar in Africa with your dad?” Probably not would’ve been my bet. In that way, I like to challenge myself.

One of the things I like to talk about is there’s a concept that says if you want to create a miracle, you first have to have a miracle in your own character to do something hard. If we’re sitting all bundled up in our cozy little comfort zone, to your point, we might not experience that greater growth. I want to distinguish this. I’m not saying go out and poke the bear and challenge your husband, your child, or whatever. There’s a difference.

 

I challenge my husband all the time in a loving way. We have a commitment to how we speak to each other that we never say an unkind word to each other. If one of us says an unkind word to each other or if we hear another person who was being unkind to somebody on a phone call, then we challenge each other. I’ll say, “May I offer some feedback?” I ask if I can give them feedback. He’ll say, “Yeah, go ahead.”

I’ll be like, “Is that how you were committed to speaking to that person?” It’s not from a place of judgment but truly from curiosity. He’s like, “Probably not.” I’ll say, “How might you have talked to that person differently?” He’ll say, “I probably could have been more considerate of where they’re coming from.” In that way, we’re always challenging ourselves and one another to be the best version of ourselves in that way. Would I intentionally cause somebody harm? No, I wouldn’t want to do that.

We all have opportunities throughout every day in our lives to evolve. I have a practice every night. It’s a kabbalistic practice I learned where I write down every night, “How could I have lived today better? Was I a jerk?” I have had some moments, if I’m being transparent with you, Sumit, and your audience, where I have not been my best self. I’ve had probably 3 or 4 moments that if I had an eraser, I could go back and do it again. I didn’t handle it well.

I had a dog run up and attack me on the street while I was out walking. I had a few words. I did not yell or scream. I was in tears because I had been attacked by a dog as a little kid. I said, “Ma’am, you’re being selfish.” I probably wasn’t as bad as I could have been, but I also probably could have been more thoughtful and had it landed better than being somebody upset emotionally.

I reflect every day, “How could I have lived today better? What am I proud of myself for?” Going back to that appreciation, what if nobody else acknowledges you? What if nobody else acknowledges you for that extra hour of work you put in that nobody else knows about, that extra slice of cake you didn’t eat, or the fact that you had water instead of soda with lunch? Whatever it is, acknowledge yourself for it every night. That’s where it goes back to that self. When you provide yourself with everything you need, you become the sexiest person alive.

One of my favorite techniques to teach clients, job seekers, CEOs, etc. is inner child work. There was a popular talk I used to give a couple of years ago called How to Deal with an Office Jerk. One of the things I taught people is that when somebody is being a jerk or acting out, you are not dealing with an upset 40-year-old, 70-year-old, 35-year-old, or 20-year-old. You are dealing with an upset three-year-old.

It’s like me on the street when the dog came barreling down the street at us. I turned into that upset ten-year-old who was being attacked by a dog. I was not my 43-year-old Jennifer K. Hill self. We can cultivate that compassion and do the work to see, “How are we feeling?” I sometimes will sit and do my inner child work in the morning and be like, “Sweetheart, how are you feeling?” She’ll say, “Sad,” or, “Angry.” I’ll be like, “I didn’t know that. I didn’t know I was angry or upset.”

Digital Vs. Physical

I have a question about what you were saying earlier about quieting the noise. In the age of social media, that’s easier said than done when there’s this strong tendency to measure our worth in the number of likes, comments, or reactions we attract on various platforms where we are. That also brings the toddler in us where we react negatively to a lot of situations. How does one coach oneself to quiet this noise when others around us and we ourselves are saying, “What I said on LinkedIn got three likes. Nobody cares. Nobody loves me.”

You are looking for external validation. When I go on a show or before I’m about to step onto a stage, I only want to receive energy from myself or from whatever you consider Source. One of my dear friends and vocal coaches who trained Tony Robbins and others how to speak taught me this. The minute we look out there for validation, you will 1000% be let down.

This is any one of us or me. If our happiness is tied to how many likes our LinkedIn post got or whatever that might be, then I would invite you to get off social media for 30 days. I do it often. I get off social media for 30 days. I have days where I turn off my cell phone. Deepak inspired me to do that. I still haven’t done what he does. He spends two weeks every year in complete silence with no cell phone. The most I’ve been able to manage is 48 hours. I do it because we’re addicted. We’re addicted to attention. We’re addicted to talking. We’re addicted to likes. We’re addicted to validation.

When we start providing that validation, it all starts with the self. That’s why I put my right hand on my heart and my left hand on my abdomen. I cultivate a relationship with myself the same way you’re going to date your significant other. Whether it’s he, she, they, or them, it doesn’t matter. You’re going to date them and get to know them. How many of us date ourselves? How many of us spend quiet time to ourselves and ask, “How are you feeling? What do you need?”

How many of us have asked ourselves, “What do I need at this moment?” Probably not a lot of us. We get angry at our loved ones for not providing it or we get angry at our boss for not providing it. It comes down to connection to self and to become resilient. Sometimes, you might feel that little, “I didn’t get the three likes.” Do you know who’s saying, “I didn’t get more than three likes?” It’s that amygdala. It’s that animalistic part of your brain that’s still worried that you’re going to be eaten by a tiger if you don’t get 300 likes. Newsflash. You will survive it. If you don’t get more than three likes on a post, the great news is you will survive it. There is no tiger that will eat you.

Summit brings up a good point in the modern era of long-distance relationships and connecting with others. I often think about a story my son was telling me or he is experiencing. He is playing video games. He has his headset on and he’s talking to friends and other family members that are playing the same game from afar. He’s spending a lot of time, but when he gets off of that game, he somewhat feels empty. There’s a difference between connecting online in a digital realm and then having that physical human connection with someone. What do you think about that, Jennifer?

It’s a very good point. I went through that firsthand during COVID. I’d sold my company in 2018. At the end of 2019 before COVID hit, I was planning to travel the world. I had a month planned in Bali and a month planned in South Africa. I found myself in COVID on March 15th or 14th of 2020 deathly ill in London for two months where I knew one person who couldn’t even see me there. I didn’t touch another human being for two months. It was challenging.

One of my spiritual teachers said, “You’re addicted to touch, so work on that. Could you soothe without touch, let alone having that human connection?” Another teacher of mine at that time said, “Could you connect with a human being like I’m connecting with you right now?” Do you feel heard, seen, and connected in this moment, Sam, with the way I’m connecting with you?

Absolutely.

That’s it. It’s that you can create intimacy anytime anywhere. I can have intimacy with a brick wall. I don’t mean that in a sexual way. I mean that literally, being present with somebody. To the point of your son and what his friends and others are going through, I don’t want to minimize this, but that’s why suicide rates have gone up. That’s why depression, anxiety, and loneliness have gone up. It’s because people are afraid and lonely. They don’t know how to connect. I’m going to reiterate this. It goes back to the connection to self. When we connect to ourselves, then being in the conversation on the video game is a cherry on top. It’s cool. It’s good to have it, but we don’t need it.

My husband knows this. My friends know this. They all tease me. They won’t miss them. I don’t need people. I love people. I cherish people. I have hundreds of deep, meaningful relationships that I would not trade the world for. I have my dream soulmate. I talk to my mom and my sister every day. I talk to my sister. Yet, I don’t need people. A few months ago, my dad died on February 25th. People are a little surprised, but I’m at peace. I love my dad. It wasn’t like he was there. He’s not there and I still love him. There’s no love loss, but it’s not that I’m incomplete because he’s gone. Does that make sense?

It does. I can relate, for sure. Sumit, do you have another question?

No, I’m good. Thank you.

Key Takeaways

Jennifer, I’ve learned so much in this conversation with you in such a short period of time. I thank you for sharing it all with us. Before we go here, what do you want our audience to walk away with in this conversation? What do you want them to remember?

Be kind and compassionate to yourself. That will lead to your ability to be kind and compassionate to others. As somebody who is a recovering jerk, I used to be incredibly unkind. If you talk to the people I worked with when I was first building my first company or when I was a teenager, I did so many things that were unkind to other people. If you had lived a day in my head, you wouldn’t have made it. That’s how painful it was.

 

The more we can cultivate that internal kindness and that internal compassion even if everybody around you is being a jerk, you can still provide that to yourself. That’s the gift I wish I could give to every one of you. You don’t need to look externally. You can provide yourself with everything that you need. All the love you’ve ever desired, it’s right there. You have it. When you do that, you become the sexiest, most enticing, best job seeker or best boss alive because then, you’re not trying to take. You get to be with other people. You get to choose how you get to be every day. That would be my wish for everyone out there.

Episode Wrap-up

Jennifer, a lot of our audience are thinking, “This is transformational,” and would like to learn more. I know that you have a variety of resources. There are things that you do on a regular basis like talks and so forth. What is the next step a person can take to learn more about you, your practices, and your programs?

It’s pretty easy. If you Google Jennifer K. Hill, you’ll find all of my information. When I wrote the first book, I realized there’s another Jennifer Hill out there. I wanted to give her that name, so I added the K to my name to make it easy. If you google Jennifer K. Hill, you’ll find all my information. You can find me on the Regarding Consciousness podcast. It’s been out for about two years. We have new episodes that go live every Thursday.

If you go to Om.app, you’ll be able to find the Media page with a lot of other episodes. This episode will go up there along with others. If you want to learn more about yourself, go to Om.app/Survey. Try our matching survey. We can give you information about how you’re motivated. You can inform other people, “I’m very motivated by facts, so I might need a little bit more time than the next person.” If you’re like me, a lychee, which is what we call people who are drivers, I might be a little bit impatient. I try to tell people who I’m working with, “When I’m at my best, I’m great. I take quick action. When I’m not at my best, I might be a little impatient.” You can understand that more about yourself.

Thank you so much for being with us and sharing your knowledge.

Thank you, Sam. Thank you, Sumit. Thank you to everybody out there wherever and whenever you’re tuning in to this. Anytime I do a show like this or step on a stage, my intention is that maybe one person, I made a difference for. If this made a difference for one of you out there, then it was worth doing in my books.

It has made an impact on me. Thank you so much, Jennifer, for being with us. I enjoyed the discussion.

Thank you both. I’m wishing for continued conversations. Keep curious. Life is like an unopened present. We get to keep opening it over and over every day and discovering new things. I’ve been on this journey for twenty years and I still learn new things every day. We’re always evolving. Be kind to yourself.

Wise words.

Thank you.

Thank you, everyone, for joining the show. We’ll see you next time.

 

Important Links

• OptiMatch
• Stop Hopping… Start Hunting: A Job Seeker’s Guide to Finding the Dream Job
• The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace
• The 5 Love Languages
•  Regarding Consciousness
• Om.app/Survey

 

About Jennifer K. Hill

Jennifer K. Hill is a dynamic entrepreneur, speaker, author, and podcast host known for her impactful contributions across various domains. In 2018, she successfully sold her first company to a subsidiary of Marcum LLP, and it continues to thrive six years post-acquisition. Jennifer has captivated audiences on hundreds of stages worldwide, including an impressive audience of 100,000 people in India. She has shared platforms with influential figures such as Deepak Chopra, co-hosting 19 episodes of “Conversations at the Intersection of Cutting-Edge Science and Spirituality” with Chopra and Don Hoffman.

Jennifer’s podcasting journey includes hosting the popular “Get Yourself the Job” and her current venture, “Regarding Consciousness,” which features thought leaders like Bruce Lipton, Gregg Braden, and Deepak Chopra. Her media presence is complemented by her humanitarian efforts, having built two schools in Nepal and Senegal. Her achievements have earned her a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Visioneers, and she is a proud member of the Evolutionary Leaders and The Octopus Movement.

Currently, Jennifer is building her next venture, OptiMatch, a software platform that uses a proprietary algorithm to align individuals in businesses and communities, enhancing psychological safety. In addition to her entrepreneurial pursuits, she coaches CEOs, helping them grow their businesses with her extensive expertise and insights.