November 14, 2019
We are so excited to bring you the very first guest to this podcast, Jordan Lee Dooley. Jordan is the author of the national bestselling book, Own Your Everyday, which has also been named a “Best Book to Read to be a Better Person in 2019” by Inc Magazine.
She’s a fellow podcaster and hosts the top rated SHE Podcast. Her mission is to equip women with the tools they need to live purposefully and reach their greatest potential. Jordan has also been featured in Thrive Global, 30 under 30 Success Magazine, Forbes, and the Hallmark Channel.
Jordan made up her own job title by referring to herself as a “multi-passionate authorpreneur.” She’s a 3 on the enneagram, and is happily married to her college sweetheart, Matt. The two are now business partners who work side by side from their farmhouse in the Indiana countryside — with their dog, Hoosier.
In this episode Jordan dives into what it looks like to navigate your career as someone with multiple passions, how to even know where to start, and how to navigate the business and financial world as a Christian.
We can’t wait for you to hear her truth bombs and take away tangible tips on turning a passion into a profitable business, and how to handle that profit from a Biblical mindset.
Jordan says her career path is less like a straight line from Point A to Point B and more like a tangled ball of yarn.
In college, Jordan studied healthcare administration but wasn’t necessarily thrilled with it. After expressing to her mom that she wasn’t quite sure that she wanted to pursue a career in that field, her mom replied, “Okay, then don’t.” Her mom encouraged her to use her time left at school to find the things that interested her and figure out what she liked.
Jordan knew she loved creativity and writing and used these interested to open a hand lettering Etsy shop. Jordan’s shop quickly went from a small side hustle to a full blown production. She eventually added a blog to the shop, and because of this was able to step into the blogging sphere while scaling down her shop.
With everything on her plate from getting married to product creation, returns, and customer service, it became clear that Jordan needed to rethink things. She knew she wanted a job that could be flexible wherever she moved with her husband, which was when she picked up a camera. In addition to working on her blog and shop she began to work at a wedding venue and offered social media and web marketing services. This is when she really learned the ropes of social media marketing and even did the photography for their website and social media. This stumbled Jordan into a career as a wedding photographer.
Throughout her career as a wedding photographer, Jordan continued to blog and began to share about her faith and relationships. A few of these posts went viral which opened the doors to opportunities to speak on college campuses, which led to her writing devotions. Eventually, Jordan decided to put photography down, while continuing to grow in her creative, entrepreneurial, faith-focused, but multifaceted career.
Jordan continued to pick up what fit for each season, learn the skill, develop the expertise, and use her social media marketing skills to apply to whatever she was doing. She eventually reopened her shop with a sweatshirt line that exploded leading to publishing books and the opening of an online education center. Jordan now teaches others how to have success in a variety of these areas.
For Jordan, it has been a multifaceted journey.
As a self proclaimed master pivoter, it was natural for Jordan to add and subtract things as each season allowed. It’s important to understand your season of life. Sometimes pivoting is just your life forcing you into doing something more sustainable. Own that. Sometimes it’s a calling or desire in your heart that says it’s time to grow into this next step.
There is an art to pivoting. Jordan has learned there is freedom to allow yourself to grow in your career and not be confined. Don’t stick to the status quo. You don’t have to stay in the box of what everyone is comfortable with you being. You weren’t born for a box. Your life is a path to walk on and not a box to sit in. (14:10) So many people are sitting in boxes and miserable with their lives because they are not allowing themselves to open the door and take the next step.
Give yourself the freedom to pivot, and figure out how to do it well. This often means doing it over time and through subtle transitions.
Think of it like this: if your community and client base are in the back of a pick-up truck, if you take a hard right 90 degree turn suddenly, they are all going to fly out of the back. But if you can take a wide, slow turn they will be able to experience the transition with you. Maybe one or two will get out because they don’t want to go that direction, but overall they are not going to be flying out of the back.
There comes a point where you have to have the courage to rip off bandaid. At the same time, try to do it in the best way and as slowly, steadily, and as honestly as you possibly can, knowing that not everyone is going to understand. Your job is not to make everyone happy. It’s a careful balance of owning what you need to do next, but doing it in the best way you can and understanding you are probably not going to do it perfectly because you are a human. Giving yourself a little bit of grace is really, really important.
Each phase prepared Jordan for the next. Everywhere online constantly tells us to pursue our passion. While that’s a great message, sometimes it misses the point.
Jordan often talks about a “Genius Zone”. This is not limiting because it’s not called a “genius point”. If you think of a strike zone in baseball, there are multiple points at which the baseball could land and the batter can still hit it. There may be one or two spots that are a real sweet spot for the batter where they can hit a home run every time. We can think of our lives and pivots in the same way. You can operate within your genius zone and hone it in to find your sweet spot. It is not necessarily the topic, but the underlying skills where we can see a lot of overlap. Find the underlying skills you have and apply them appropriately. Focus on where you are overlapping and that’s where you will find your sweet spot.
First things first. You don’t have to monetize every single passion.
Imagine you are in the end zone of a football field with ten medicine balls. Think of every one of those medicine balls as being a passion, interest, or idea that you have. The task is to carry every one of the medicine balls to the other end zone. There is no time limit, the goal is just to get them all there. What we often do is pick up one and carry it 20 yards and then go back to get another one. We carry that one 12 yards and return to carry another a few yards. We keep doing this and none of the medicine balls make it in the end zone. The task doesn’t get complete, the medicine balls are all over the field, and we are left overwhelmed. Instead, figure out what medicine ball you want to carry to the endzone first. The reality is that you can carry every single one of these things, but you can not carry them all at once.
Figure out which medicine ball (passion, interest, or idea) is the most marketable and where can you overlap that with what is most meaningful. Start with a marketable skill and crosswire that with something you are passionate about.
Ask yourself what is the best next step to take first? If you have a ton of ideas, break it down to figure out which one is going to get you the finances you need to get that medicine ball to the end of the field. Then you can move onto the next medicine ball.
Jordan wanted a space to bring all of her seemingly “random” things together.
She wrote a book that allowed her to dig into her own story from start to finish. She began to see the impact of this on so many women who didn’t understand their own journeys and how it allowed them to see their next best step. It was then she knew that it needed to go further than just pages in a book.
The Own It Academy is ultimately meant to be an education and mentorship platform for everyday women who are trying to clarify what it is that they want to do. It takes it a step forward in areas that Jordan has become an expert in such as podcasting, launching, e-commerce, and other areas. Through the Own It Academy, Jordan was able to bring on friends who are experts in other fields and provide new perspectives and teaching.
All of the things Jordan has done are now brought together in an education platform. The Own It Academy is an extension of her authorship and podcasting.
It all started because of an Etsy store, not because of her ministry work. Jordan went back to the basics and asked herself what principles was she applying to all of this. Like it or not, churches and nonprofits have to use business principles. Jordan realized that everything she did in both the Christian space and business space had a lot of crossover.
Often sacred and secular are so divided, but that is not necessarily healthy. We can easily forget that business is biblical. You can see this from the Proverbs 31 woman. She sold the work of her hands and made a profit. You can look at Lydia. She sold her gifts and abilities in the marketplace and made a contribution to society.
We need Christians in the business sphere. Business is one of the main influences of culture and by staying out of this sphere due to fear that it is not “churchy” enough, we are actually hurting ourselves. A lot of basic principles such as integrity with money, investing, being a good steward are all biblically based
Jordan found that in the business world there was never a space to talk about faith. In the church, women were looking to secular resources because of the lack of education provided. Jordan’s hope and prayer is to stand in that tension in the middle of business and faith in order to make the impact she was designed to have.
We are called to step into the public square and not stay in our bubble. If your faith is truly part of who you are it is going to infiltrate how you do consulting, how you sell your product, how you do photography, or how you teach others. If anything, your faith should propel you forward. We should be the most excellent at business, our systems, and our decisions. If not, how is that an example of Christ in the world?
In every season of your life, and in every place there are going to be certain callings and tasks that you are entrusted to do and to walk into. If you can own those with confidence that you are walking in obedience to the Lord, you have nothing to be afraid of and nothing to apologize for.
We can often have really damaged perspectives of money. We are often told that money is bad and the root of evil. The fact of the matter is, the accumulation, earning, and stewardship of money is not what is evil. It’s the love of money that is.
Money can be used as a vehicle to get you from point A to point B. It can be used to serve and give to someone else to get them from point A to point B and as a vehicle with a purpose. It becomes greed when we twist and distort the intended use of money into something that we use at the expense of others or something we become obsessed with. When we are building businesses, it is not just for the good of our family but for the good of society and the economy.
Remember this. The biggest antidote to the love of money is cheerful generosity.
If you are giving someone something, whether it be a product or service, at the right price point, then you making that money is a very amoral principle. We tend to think that making money, charging a higher price, and valuing our time is somehow evil. Rather, money is the representation of your contribution to society. It is an exchange of value. Seeing it in this way is such a powerful way to understand money and remove the emotional and fearful perspective and allows us to see it plainly for what it is and how it correlates and relates to what you do.
We are meant to be a pipe not a bucket. A healthy inflow and a health outflow.
Jordan’s biggest goal is to really zero in on The Own It Academy and work on her second book. She is constantly leaning into her community and reader. What is going to serve them best, move the needle in their lives, and how she can lean into that and work in that gap and serve in that space.
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Own Your Everyday: Overcome the Pressure to Prove and Show Up for What You Were Made to Do: https://amzn.to/2ph8nxY
Jordan’s Website: https://jordanleedooley.com/
SHE Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/she-with-jordan-lee-dooley/id1439101884?mt=2
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WASSUP FRIENDS. We’re Evie + Lindsey, co-founders of this wild partayyy called The Heart University. Our goal is to empower entrepreneurs to kick freaking BUTT in their businesses, dive down into the heart of their why and how, and serve you with all possible tools you’ll need to up-level your business game and CRUSH those goals of yours.
Whether you’re coming to an in-person workshop, joining our online course, or soaking up all the strategies via this blog or our podcast, we’re STOKED you’re here + can’t wait to see you out there kicking butt.
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