764 Jaime McFaden:

What does selfcare mean to you? Is it an occasional bubble bath or massage? Do you fit something special you guiltily squeeze into your busy schedule every now and again? Or is it your primary organizing principle? Most busy women entrepreneurs often sacrifice their health and wellbeing by putting everyone first, and Jaime McFaden is here today to tell you why that’s all upside down. Because when you prioritize yourself and your selfcare, your business is more likely to prosper.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur who has lived and breathed the ups and downs of starting and growing businesses, currently the game changing social podcast app Podopolo. Wherever you are listening to this, take a moment and join the Wings community over on Podopolo, where we can take the conversation further with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice for other female founders at whatever stage of the journey you’re at! Because together we’re stronger, and we soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur whose mission is to help busy working and entrepreneurial moms create time for themselves, overcome overwhelm and burnout, and lead by example.

Jaime McFaden is a Self-Care specialist and author of the bestselling book “Waves of Self-Care, It Takes a Village.”

As women it can feel like our work is never done. We can easily feel pulled in so many directions trying to be everything to everyone, so much so that it can feel like there is nothing left of ourselves. As someone who has built 5 businesses as I raised two kids – now older teenagers – as a single mom, I know this dilemma all too well. And if we think we have to “do it all” and do it all perfectly, we shortchange ourselves – our businesses, our kids, our relationships – because we can’t possibly show up as our best selves if our own self care is not the #1 priority.

Jaime McFaden has been working in the health and wellness industry for the past decade, alongside icons like Elaine Lalanne, Jillian Michaels, Richard Branson and her multiple celebrity clients. A selfcare coach to busy moms and host of the podcast “What’s the Word?”, Jaime is a busy mompreneur and she says she wasn’t always healthy, and the wakeup call came when her father passed away when she was 18 from chronic disease and addiction.

It was the moment she realized selfcare is about learning to love ourselves, and Jaime started working alongside TOP doctors, therapists, brain scientists, financial advisors, trainers, coaches and learned the importance of a having a team to support you in business and in your selfcare.

Jaime now helps those who feel like they need a vacation from life … design a life that feels like a vacation. Her WAVE method is about Wellbeing, Awareness, Vision and Energy, and she breaks selfcare down into six categories: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, financial, and social.

We dig deep into Jaime’s system so you can start living a fulfilling and prosperous life without burnout – so let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Jaime McFaden, and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Jaime, welcome to Wings.

Jaime McFaden:

Thank you so much, Melinda. It’s such an honor to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:

I’m so excited to talk to you about self-care for moms, especially entrepreneurial moms, because we juggle so much just as moms, let alone everything we juggle also as entrepreneurs. So how does one juggle all these things to have a full and fulfilling life?

Jaime McFaden:

Well, thank you so much and yes, such a profound question and one that I would hope to answer as thoroughly and deeply as possible with efficiency. So for all my busy moms out there that are on the verge of burnout, the best thing that I think we all need to de-stigmatize is the fact that we believe self-care is a solo mission. That it’s something we’re supposed to do on our own and we’re supposed to have this time and the luxury to just get all these things done for ourselves, but the reality is it takes a village. So we think about this for our children, but maybe we start thinking about that for ourselves. It’s about support. It’s about having people like mentors and coaches and teaming up with other like-minded individuals like you and I right now, and leaning on each other to be able to have the ability to take care of ourselves better.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, leaning on each other is difficult for women. I don’t know what is the root of it, but we think that we have to do everything and we put everyone else ahead of ourselves. So, there’s just kind of nothing left. Men don’t do that, so why do we do that in the first place?

Jaime McFaden:

So it’s definitely, I think a lot of conditioning. So I myself, I don’t know about you, but I grew up in a very people pleasing, women were people pleasing, household and the men were kind of just getting served too. I think that we, as a society need to change the conversation around that because women can take better care of others. We all can take better care of others when we actually put ourselves first. So, I think men are actually taught in the old school ways, which still is happening today, that someone will help come and take care of them and rescue, save, whatever you want to call it. Whereas women are taught usually to put themselves last in order to be a good mom, in order to be a good colleague or a good friend, to not consider their own feelings, which I think is a terrible thing that we teach to women.

Melinda Wittstock:

When we’re raising kids as moms, kids tend to learn from what we’re doing more than what we’re saying. So, if we’re being that person that’s putting everyone ahead of ourselves, our sons and our daughters imprint that, and so it carries on. So we’re actually a better example in empowering daughters and teaching men to be a little more self-sufficient in doing this, and I just think it makes us better moms. I think it makes us better leaders in business as well.

Jaime McFaden:

100%. So my biggest motto … well, two mottoes is leading by example. So I think number one, without a doubt, everything that we become as adults is a trickle effect from things that we lived and experienced in our childhood, be that for better or worse. Then, the way that we react and deal with those experiences ultimately determines our behaviors and our behaviors are what we’re going to be teaching our children. Just like you said, it’s not about us telling them to do something. If we’re telling them, get off your cell phone or you’re not watching TV and then, here we are as the parent doing that nonstop, what are we really teaching them? So I think when it comes to self-care, first of all, debunking the idea that we’re supposed to do it alone, that’s the biggest lie.

Then, the second biggest lie is believing that basically, we don’t have the time or that it’s some surface level, getting your nails or hair done. It’s about taking responsibility for your wellness.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, yeah, because this whole idea of self-care, I was like, “Oh, wow, I get to have a bubble bath or I got to get my nails done or whatever.” That’s just sort of maintenance, right? So let’s define self-care. What does self-care really mean in practice when you’re working with all these busy moms and coaching them through this transformation?

Jaime McFaden:

Thank you for asking. Self-care is literally about taking responsibility for your wellbeing. It means living a life or you’re practicing every single day, day in and day out, how to be well, and it is a subjective thing. So what might be well for you when you were 20 might not be the same self-care that you would want at 30, 40, 70. So it’s something really important to be reflective upon and check in on regularly.

Melinda Wittstock:

So I love what you say, Jaime, about taking responsibility for your health, for your mental health, for your emotional health, really kind of being in the arena, it seems to me to involve boundaries and actually, knowing what you want. So rather than just running on autopilot, like our subconscious minds dictate about 80% of our actions, it sort of means stepping into, first of all, a self-awareness of what you actually want and not being afraid to actually want something. It’s not bad to actually want something. Do you find that there’s a barrier there for women to just get over that sense of awareness? I know that a lot of women that I’ve coached in an entrepreneurial context often don’t actually know what they want. I mean not-

Jaime McFaden:

100%. I think that you just hit the nail on the head. I created an entire system for self-care called the WAVE System, and literally, it’s a four part acronym. It stands for wellbeing, awareness, vision and energy, because I believe the biggest key components I’ve seen through the years and thousands of clients that I’ve worked with is they are defining wellness based on what society or their parents or their teachers or somebody else basically told them, this is what it means for self-care, here’s what you need to do, but they never really sat with it and actually asked themselves, does this resonate with me? So first of all, defining what it means to be well is key. Then, the second step is awareness.

Nine times out of 10, clients I work with who come to me, think they’re coming to me to lose weight or to get in better shape or to condition their body or start breath work or meditation, and within the first 10 minutes they’re typically in my office crying, saying, “Oh my gosh, I don’t even know myself anymore.” So bringing that awareness is key. I think another huge thing is we have … as moms, we have a ton of shame and guilt constantly surrounding us where we feel this immense amount of guilt that if we take time to prioritize ourselves, it takes away from how we are giving to our kids or our spouse or our other family members. In reality, if we could just change that narrative to know that when we take good care of ourselves, we absolutely have an abundance more to give to others. So I think that’s the biggest myth.

Melinda Wittstock:

It really is. I think there’s also pressure from other women as well. I remember just the juggling of motherhood with entrepreneurship, Jaime, launching one of my five businesses when I was pregnant, and I didn’t even know I was pregnant and I was raising money for it and getting it going and all the planning, found out I was pregnant, it launched when Sydney was six weeks old. I didn’t plan that, but having that happen meant that I had to ruthlessly prioritize, and I came to the conclusion that if I could be 100% present when I was with my daughter and 100% present when I was in my business, I could serve both well and not lose myself. It was about that guilt, thinking like, “Oh, I’m with my daughter, I should be working on my business. I’m working on my business, I should be with my daughter.”

I had to lay that to rest because circumstance forced me to, and I think over the years, Sydney is now 19 and there been lots of different businesses along the way, and I think motherhood has made me a better entrepreneur, being an entrepreneur has made me a better mother. At the same time, you still … you’ve got way more plates in the air than you would have if you were just doing one of the things.

Jaime McFaden:

100%.

Melinda Wittstock:

it’s not easy. So take me through the steps that you go through in your WAVE program and other things to help women just actually put this knowledge into practice in their lives.

Jaime McFaden:

100%, and thank you for saying that, and I do want to acknowledge you. You are someone who is very inspirational to women and moms like myself. Look at you and all that you’ve accomplished, and I know that there have been obstacles along the way, and I think when we can remind ourselves as women, as entrepreneurs, as moms, that instead of feeling like we have to go at it alone, we can put the guard down a little bit and reach out for support and reach out for accountability. I think that can be a huge game changer. So for anyone listening right now, Melinda and I are here as people who are walking the walk and doing it and it’s not always easy. So now, getting into the WAVE system, I had spent years trying to develop a system because I wanted to keep it simple.

Any time that I interact with somebody, I want them to walk away thinking about something.

Jaime McFaden:

I wanted to share with busy working near burnt out moms a simple tool that they could have on their tool belt for literally any area of wellness. So I have defined this as the WAVE system. So it stands for wellbeing, awareness, vision and energy and I believe with those four key components, we can utilize it in any area of our life. So for example, we have six different areas of wellness. The physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social and financial. I believe that all of those six areas are equally as important. I think that sometimes because life isn’t always balanced, sometimes we might have to spend a little more time on one area of self-care than another.

We kind of teeter-totter throughout our lives doing this. So the WAVE system is pretty simple. It’s literally about taking one area. So for example, let’s just say our social self-care, we’ve all been isolated for the last couple years, as busy entrepreneurs, we’re working alone often. It can be tough to reach out and all those things, but let’s say we want to work on our social self-care today. So we would say, “Okay, let’s use the WAVE system.” The W is wellbeing, so in my social self-care, what does it mean to be well? Take some time to define it, think about it, ask yourself the question, what does it mean to be well in my social life? Do I want to see more friends? Do I need to say no to things? What do you need? When you ask yourself that question, be honest.

Then, you go to the A, which is the awareness, bring awareness to what you’re currently doing and do it with love and compassion because we are all works in progress. So it’s not about being perfect, it’s just about showing up for yourself. So thinking about, “Okay, what does it mean to be well.” Bring the awareness to what you’re doing or what you want to start doing and then, with clarity, you create a vision that’s the V in the WAVE system. So you can start to visualize, “Okay, it means that maybe I need to pick up the phone a little more and outreach, or maybe it means I need to start saying no to all these social activities because I’m going out every night and I’m not sleeping well.” Whatever it is, you define that, make it with clarity.

Then, the E, which is my favorite, is the energy, right? We’re all sources of energy, it’s consistently transferring energy. So that’s about our action. What are we going to commit to, to actually take that step? Whether it’s … like I said, maybe it’s the boundary of saying no, so that you can start to say yes to yourself or maybe it’s calling up a friend and saying, “Hey, I really miss you and I want to spend some time with you.” So that’s kind of how the WAVE system works.

Melinda Wittstock:

That is so important, and it means learning actually to ask for help, but also, don’t you find we have to recover from perfectionism? I think part of the thing that makes it so difficult for women is this idea that everything we do, not only do we have to do it all, but we have to do it all perfectly. So we put these impossible standards on ourselves.

Jaime McFaden:

100%, and so almost every woman I work with is a very type A, living in their masculine energy, and this is not male/female stuff. It’s just more about, they’re action takers, they’re doers. They’re the busy badass moms, but the reality is, if they could slow down and just take a couple breaths and have a little bit more compassion for themselves where they’re at, knowing all that they’re doing, I think many of us are in this kind of race to get somewhere. To all of … Anyone that’s listening, if this is resonating with you, I encourage you and invite you to think about what are you in a race for and why does it need to be a certain way. We are conditioned? I think a lot of it is just deconditioning ourselves from a lot of things that we’ve learned.

As women, we’re taught, “Be a good girl, do this and if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, you better be the best, and you’ve got to top everything and don’t ever tell anybody if you’re struggling because then they’re not going to admire you or all this.” I think a lot of that is baloney. I think that the more we can keep it real and the more we can be our authentic self and show up in the world, the more that we can create a better village.

Melinda Wittstock:

So you wrote a wonderful book about all of this. What prompted the book and tell us about it.

Jaime McFaden:

Yes. I wrote a book called WAVES of Self-care, It Takes a Village. It’s been in my mind and in my heart for many, many years, I was totally 100% a people pleaser. I was also people pleaser and type A where I wanted to achieve and be all the things all at once, and not only did I get myself to a burnout point, but I experienced really severe anxiety, depression, insomnia at a young age to the point where I ended up in a hospital for a couple weeks and that was really traumatic. Then, I lost my dad to a massive stroke when I was 18. So, really the book kind of stemmed from many years ago, and having now, 15 years being in the health and wellness industry, I thought, you know what, it’s not just about a look. It’s not just about the aesthetic. It’s so much deeper than that.

So I didn’t want to keep just working in an industry where it’s based on how shredded can my abs be or how do I look or this and that. I really wanted to take it deeper and share my story so that people understand I haven’t always just been healthy, I haven’t always been well, and that if I could do it, I believe that anyone else can.

Melinda Wittstock:

I love that. It’s so funny with entrepreneurship and people who are transformational leaders in any way, it’s always the lived experience that we’ve had or a problem or a challenge that we’ve lived through ourselves, and you look back on it and you think, “Oh, that didn’t happen to me. It happened for me.” As a result of walking through that, you’re able to lift so many other people’s lives.

Jaime McFaden:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s never fun while you’re walking through that, but I love this and your whole approach is so holistic because you talk a lot about play time. It’s really important to have fun in your life. So it’s not just how you look or how your house looks or how many zeros are in your bank account or any of these things, or ticking any of these things off a list. It’s like, are you having fun along the way?

Jaime McFaden:

100%. I think fun is one of the key elements we’re missing. As busy entrepreneurial moms, oftentimes, if I were to ask moms, what are you doing in your life that’s fun? Usually, they’ll list off a couple things they’re doing with their kids that of course, it’s fun to watch our kids at their dance class or playing a sport. Of course, that’s fun. At the same time, I would question to a mom that says is that fun for you? Are you having fun and play time in that? Oftentimes, we take ourselves so serious. So I think that if we can just start implementing more things … and it can be simple. Every morning, we do a daily dance party where we blast a song and we just dance our hearts out and giggle and it’s so great. It feels so freeing and refreshing.

Melinda Wittstock:

That is so wonderful. Taking little dance breaks. I don’t know anything like fun around the edges, fun in between meetings, fun wherever you can, but it’s almost like, if you’ve got the kind of schedule I have, building a business, going into fast scaling and all of that, it’s easy for my calendar just to fill up with things that seem very urgent and they are urgent from one lens and I’ve gotten to the point where I have to actually schedule in things like schedule a time for contemplation or meditation schedule a time for exercise. I think I could probably start scheduling fun time because that’s the sort of thing that we don’t actually put in our calendars. We don’t really prioritize necessarily, but it’s important to prioritize.

I think about that actually with my whole team. How can the team that I’m building, how can we embed that into our culture as a company? So we talked about moms leading by example to their children, but a CEO is sort of in the same position. You’re kind of mom to your company.

Jaime McFaden:

Absolutely, and I think that’s a big key cornerstone that continuously gets dropped because we are all busy, and reality is … like that’s why finances is part of the self-care system because at the end of the day, our finances touch onto everything. So if we’re managing a team, running a system, running a business, you have to, of course, think about how are you feeding everyone? How are you surviving, how are you doing all these things. At the same time, I’ve seen over and over and over again that when we take it all too serious, sometimes life, for lack of better words, could just slap us in the face at any moment with a big wave and crush us. So, if we’re not having fun, what’s the point?

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s so, so true. What is the point? It’s kind of getting to understand that really it’s the journey not a destination. I think we’re all acculturated to think that success is in the destination. Once we get to this particular milestone, we will be happy and we deserve then to be able to have fun, and that’s so backwards because if we just start having fun now and enjoy ourselves, the destination is going to probably come faster. It’s sort of like everything is backwards.

Jaime McFaden:

Absolutely and I see it, I’ve seen very recently, two instances in my life, two separate people in their 30s, who busy working, doing the thing, have the kids nonstop and life flipped upside down, and both of them not to get more vivid, but at the end of the day, they’re not here. Their funerals were this last couple days ago and last week, and that was not by choice. That just happened and that’s part of life, and I think, I consciously think about that every day. I think about, as weird as it might sound, I think about the reality that I know I’m not here forever. So if I find myself stressing out too much about something, whether it’s my kids doing or my work or the money or whatever else it is, I have to check myself and look in the mirror and ask myself, why am I doing this? Where am I getting?

Melinda Wittstock:

So, you mentioned a little bit earlier in the interview when the moms come to you, they’re kind of burnt out and they don’t necessarily know what they want. What’s the kind of transformation that you start to see in people and the clients that you work with, sort of the before and after, if you will?

Jaime McFaden:

I love this question. Yes, and thank you for asking. Yeah, so typically clients will come to me and it’s usually for some sort of a physical self-care need, whether they want to change their diet, whether they want to get a workout plan going, lose some pounds, whatever else, something of that sort. Then typically, what happens is we start to dive a little deeper and find that they really actually also miss having relationships with their friends and maybe they don’t have sex with their husband anymore and that it started as they don’t feel good in their body. What it really is, is they just haven’t really been fulfilling any of their own priorities for themselves. So then, we create a program where it goes from someone who maybe thought they were just coming to, let’s say, get in shape or lose a couple pounds. All of a sudden within 60 to 90 days is I’d say pretty standard.

They’re calling me saying, “Oh my gosh, I went and got my blood work done and my A1C level was pre-diabetic and now, all of a sudden my levels are totally normal and I did lose the five pounds, but now I lost 15 pounds. What’s even better than that is I want to have sex all the time and my husband is thrilled. Now, we’re going on date nights and actually, I quit my job because I realized I wasn’t happy.” It’s like all these things that are getting uncovered that it’s great to see when somebody really starts to prioritize themselves again and moves them. I always joke with us moms, we’re like half the time have to cook while we’re cleaning, while we’re working. It’s like take ourselves off the back burner, move us to the front burner for a while and then, everything else around us will be affected in a really positive way, not just us.

Melinda Wittstock:

So very, very important. So I want to make sure people know how to find you, Jaime and work with you and get your book and all the things.

Jaime McFaden:

Well, thank you so much. People can find me at my website. It is jaimemcfaden.com and I’ll spell it J-A-I-M-E-M-C-F-A-D-E-N, and also that’s my Instagram and social handle and all that. So hopefully, pretty easy to find and I’m more than happy to help anyone that’s in your audience, in any way to support them on their self-care. So I can share with you some resources and some blogs I’ve written and I think there’s a lot of … although it’s profound and seems really difficult, my approach is much more gentle and it’s structured in a sense where we just take baby steps and give ourselves the grace like we would to our kids or to our colleagues or our spouse. I think it’s time that we as women start to be, the two words.

My two favorite words are kindness and discipline, and I believe that if we have kindness within our hearts to give ourselves the love, to acknowledge the fact that we are whole right here in this moment and we are deserving of the love and of all the things that we give to others, that’s number one, being kind to ourselves, and number two is the discipline. This stuff is not going to happen on its own. So we have to cultivate the discipline, taking little steps to make a bigger picture change, and I think with those two things, we could literally not just change ourselves but ultimately, change the world.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s so beautiful. Well, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Jaime McFaden:

Thank you so much, Melinda. It’s a pleasure and I look forward to us, getting back together soon. It was so wonderful hanging out with you, doing some interviews with Podopolo and I appreciate all that you do, so thank you so much for bringing me on the show today.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, fantastic and also, join us, everybody on Podopolo when this episode drops because we can keep the conversation going, if you have any questions for Jaime about your self-care, if you’re a busy mom like us with business as well and juggling it all, we can just keep the conversation going there over on Podopolo, so thank you again, Jaime.

Jaime McFaden:

Thank you, Melinda.