The Work of You

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 What if the key to your growth isn't fixing what you've been told is a weakness or an area that you need to improve; instead, it's about doubling down on your strengths?

Today's focus is on strengths and why they matter more than your weaknesses. Strengths are a foundation for self-leadership and growth. This is an invitation for you to, instead of obsessing over where you need to improve or what might be some of your weaknesses, to actually think even more than you ever have before about your strengths. The the work of you is about leading from your core, your authentic core, and your strengths are a huge part of that.

Episode topics: 

• What is a strength - considering when you are your most energized and most engaged (vs what you're good at vs bad at)  
• When you're in "flow" you are using your strengths 
• Per Gallup, your strengths are talents that come more naturally to you and the more you use them in different ways the stronger they become
• Strengths can also be over-used, and like patterns, are things we need to know how to manage in certain situations or for specific desired outcomes.
  • Jen shares one story of a client (Enneagram 7 + WOO strength) who needed to manage his strengths in order to help his team grow and develop further.
• Strengths as doorways to growth - how attaching a strength to another area where you'd like to improve can help you get there. 

Coaching Prompts: 

1. What are you doing during the times when you feel your most energized or engaged?
2. Journal or spend some time thinking about when you feel like you are in flow - what's that like for you when you're working on something and time just flies by. 
3. Are there areas of strengths that you feel you're under leveraging? Particularly if you do take one of these assessments, look at what's in your top five, and ask yourself, am I  leveraging each of these strengths on a daily basis? 
   1. And if not, where / how could I leverage one of them more?

Resources | Links: 

Test | Gallup | CliftonStrengths Assessment Link

Test | VIA | Character Strengths Assessment Link

Book | StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath

Book | Feedback Reimagined by Jen Ostrich + Peter Berridge 

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The Enneagram is powerful, but also widely under leveraged and often misunderstood. Let's get into why it's your leadership superpower! 

This episode is an introduction to clarify what is the Enneagram (and all of its layers), what it's not AND how to use it in practice. ENNEA (greek word for nine) and GRAM (greek word for diagram) makes the 9 point symbol or diagram that is the Enneagram model. This episode is to ground you in the ways you can use the Enneagram in people and team development and all the aspects that help you to understand yourself. In future episodes we'll dive into the nine types in addition to going deeper in each of the layers of data that are available to do the work of you. 

Episode topics: 

• The Enneagram looks at a core fear which drives a core motivation, your personality, and defense mechanisms -- all in your subconscious -- and then how all of this shows up in your behaviors (what you do consciously)  
• Think of the Enneagram as a developmental map 
• Enneagram shows you your habitual patterns – by connecting the dots from your underlying beliefs centered around that core motivation and how that drives your behaviors. 
• Explains the WHY (motivation) behind WHAT (behaviors) you do
• Based on we are 3-brain beings with 3 primary intelligences: IQ, our intellect (Head Center), EQ, our emotional intelligence reading our own feelings or emotions of others (Heart Center), and BQ, our body awareness using our five senses and inner knowing/gut instinct (Body/Gut Center) 
• 3 centers of intelligence: how you take in and experience the world
  • The Body/Gut Center = Types 8,9,1; primary need for autonomy and agency
  • The Heart Center = 2,3,4; primary need for attention and connection
  • The Head Center = 5,6,7; primary need for information/certainty for safety
• Inside each of the 9 types live 3 Instincts: Self Preservation, Social, and Sexual or One-on-One - we have all 3 instincts yet one is our dominant one that colors how we move through the world, then we have a secondary and a repressed instinct
• Taking an Enneagram assessment (see below) can provide this data and more to understand your belief system and how your motivation is driving your behaviors. 

Coaching Prompts:

1. When you consider how you experience the world and take in information, what feels most important to you: having certainty and safety, being in connection and feeling seen/valued, or being in control of your environment? 

2. What might your go-to strategy be to ensure this in your life today? Feeling safe, seen or in control?

3. What patterns, ways of being or acting does this bring out in you – at home? At work? With your team? 

Resources: 

Website | The Enneagram 9 Types 

GET YOUR ENNEAGRAM TYPE -- includes the Instinct data; most ideal for professional use: leaders and teams

ALT OPTION FOR TYPING - also includes the Instincts 

Book | The Enneagram Guide to Waking Up: Find Your Path, Face your Shadow, Discover Your True Self By, Beatrice Chestnut, PhD and Uranio Peas, MM

The Grow Effect Coaching Model 

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Book Enneagram Coaching Session with Jen

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What if your patterns — even the ones that trip you up — are actually trying to protect you?

Let's dive into personality patterns -- what they are, why they are essential to understand about ourselves and how to learn how to manage them. I share the single most profound developmental experience I've been through, the Hoffman Process (link below) where I came to terms with my patterns and learned how to manage them. We'll dive into how to identify yours and tools to learn how to recognize when and where they are showing up. Always remember -- you are NOT your patterns; they are a part of you...but not all of you. 

Episode topics: 

• What are patterns - essentially automatic ways of being/acting/believing/feeling
• How patterns come to be from early on as a child - what it looks like to adopt, rebel or react patterns
• You are NOT your patterns - they are a part of you but not all of you
• Patterns were created as a protective measure - as a means to feel safe, loved, etc. Why it's so helpful to understand what yours is and how it's trying to protect you 
• Example of 9 motivations and fears of the Enneagram - where your patterns live
• My experience in the Hoffman Process - where you learn how to face your patterns and learn how to manage them 
• Specific questions and prompts to recognize your own patterns and how to manage them 

Coaching Prompts: 

1. What’s one pattern you keep running that feels familiar and automatic?
2. When did this pattern first show up? What could it be protecting you from?
3. What would it feel like to thank that pattern for the role it’s played to date and  then try a different response and see how that feels. 

Resources | Links: 

Website | The Hoffman Process

The Hoffman Quadrinity™ (scroll to bottom of this page to see the symbol/description of my tattoo)

Website | The Enneagram 9 Types

GET YOUR ENNEAGRAM TYPE

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What if growth doesn’t start with fixing, but instead with understanding ourselves?

In this episode I reflect on how as a society it seems we're so focused on needing to fix ourselves. Or even thinking we are broken in some way aka in need of fixing. We look at the role fixed and growth mindset can play in this (and my own experience of falling off a bike at a young impressionable age) as well as negativity bias and other concepts brought to light via Positive Psychology. Ultimately I offer an invitation to rebrand the need or desire to fix yourself, and instead work to better understand yourself. This is far more valuable! 

Episode topics: 

• Growth vs Fixed mindset and how it can influence your belief system 
• How our brains are wired for negativity (negativity bias) and how this shows up everywhere we look, especially in feedback 
• Positive Psychology and the infamous talk that Marty Seligman gave back in the late 90s about psychology being half baked (described by Marcus Buckingham - see below link)
• The role of self compassion and self acceptance; once we have self compassion we can begin to ask different questions and see ourselves differently 
• A framework: the role our beliefs play in our behaviors: our beliefs generate our thoughts + emotions which drive our behaviors which in turn create our actions or outcomes 
• Starting to see your belief system as your own inner code - the keys to unlocking you. This is where the Enneagram can help quite a bit. 
• Try a Five Minute Reflection at the end of your day for 1-2 weeks. Consider how you showed up in different situations, times of day, various people

Coaching Prompts: 

1. Where in your life do you feel like you’re always trying to 'fix' yourself?
2. What if that behavior is protecting something deeper? Any ideas on what that could be? 
3. Can you meet that part of you with curiosity this week instead of criticism?

Resources | Links: 

Book | Mindset by Carol Dweck

Book | Self Compassion by Kristen Neff

Article | Positive Psychology

Book | Negativity Bias via Feedback Reimagined

Video | Marcus Buckingham / Positive Psychology

The Enneagram

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What if the part of leadership that needs the most attention isn’t on your resume? 

In this episode I talk about how professional development and personal development are not the same and it's critical to not assume one can accomplish the other. If/when professional development is a priority within an organization, aka there is budget, rarely does it focus on personal development – where the real work lies and where there is an ever greater impact for the leader and everyone around them. Professional development teaches strategy and execution, but not emotional regulation or inner clarity. Both are very important yet professional development most certainly cannot replace personal development. 

Episode topics: 

• The role of EQ, what it is, and why it's so critical 
• Through some client stories we'll look at how you can be great at your job and lack self awareness or some other type of EQ
•  Benjamin Zander says: "Its not the circumstances that are crucial, it’s what we say about the circumstances that matter – this is leadership, we have a choice in how we speak." 
• The first person who speaks up / reacts in a group influences how the rest of the group thinks and feels. 
• Ways to hone in on more self awareness of you to build your EQ
• Understanding the difference between transactional vs transformational coaching
• The role the Enneagram plays in EQ

Coaching Prompts: 

1. What’s one recurring emotional pattern you notice in your leadership?
2. What would it look like to invest in your self-awareness? To spend some time prioritizing personal development over professional development. 

Resources | Links: 

Video | Benjamin Zander

Book |The Art of Possibility by Benjamin Zander

Book | Emotional Intelligence 2.0: by Travis Bradberry & Jean Greaves 

The Shift Positive 360

Book | Feedback Reimagined

The Grow Effect Coaching Model

The Enneagram

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Why are you the hardest person you'll ever lead? 

In this episode we reflect on how we move through life often being out of alignment with our most authentic self. This makes leading you much more complicated. I share a simple framework I created that challenges you to see where you are living in full alignment with who you are, and where are you not?  I share my crossroads moment and invite you to consider each and every aspect of your world and how it could be more aligned to you (vs the person you been hustling to be, feeling you should be, or trying to be to make others happy). This is when you're leading you. 

Episode topics: 

• Often through our 20s and 30s we are working/living/loving/trying to align to the various systems in our world (family, friends, community, job, career, partner/love) vs living a life that's aligned to you, and your most authentic desires.
• After I realized this i set out to change my world to align to me. My period of change from 2010 - 2015 where I rebuilt my entire life to be more aligned to me after experiencing the one thing I never saw coming -- losing my mom.
• Post Traumatic Growth - how we can soar to our greatest heights after traumatic events. 
• Where you can start - a few prompts to help you gain more awareness of where you are, and are not, living and leading authentically. 

Coaching Prompts: 

Draw and sit with this framework, the word YOU and the arrows each representing an area of your life. Note some feelings about each. Then ask yourself: 

1. If you could flip one of them, just one, to be more aligned to you and your deepest desires - what would it be? 

2. What’s one tiny step that you could take to move a bit closer to aligning that area of your world? 

Resources | Links: 

Website | The Hudson Institute of Coaching

Website | The Hoffman Process

Article | Post Traumatic Growth

The Enneagram

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What exactly does 'the work of you' mean and is this podcast for you?

Simply put -- it's the work of getting to know yourself and how to manage yourself so you are living and leading as your most authentic self. This show is for high achieving humans who are happy enough, maybe successful enough, probably high functioning enough, but also recognize there are areas that could be optimized. 

In this episode I share a little bit of who I am and why I feel called to produce this podcast -- to help as many humans as possible deeply understand themselves so you can enjoy spending the rest of your life with the one person you're guaranteed to never escape - you. 

In future episodes we'll talk about: 

• Coaching insights – from both my own development journey as well as many anonymous client examples 
• A deep dive into the Enneagram which is going to help you gather more insights about yourself than you knew was possible along with a map for how to grow and evolve. 
• Inner work, growth, and is it even possible to truly grow into a new version of yourself? 
• Concepts like strengthening your Emotional Intelligence, insights and research from the field of Positive Psychology, details from the book I co-authored: Feedback Reimagined 
• Relationship patterns -- many of my own as well as areas I've helped clients to manage

Episodes will be under 30 minutes, released each Wednesday AM, and for now feature me as your host. 

Does someone come to mind who you think would enjoy this - or who could benefit from doing the work of you? If so, please share and be sure to follow too so you don't miss an episode! 

Resources | Links:

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The Enneagram

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Welcome to The Work of You — a podcast about the leadership that matters most… the kind that starts from within.
 
 I’m your host -- Jen Ostrich — certified behavioral coach, Enneagram expert, and someone who’s been through my own personal inner overhaul. And let me tell you: real leadership isn’t about  climbing ladders or checking boxes. It’s about learning how to lead the one person who’s hardest to lead: yourself.
 
 If you’re a high-achieving human who's ready to get honest about the patterns holding you back or the stories you’ve been telling yourself— this show is for you.
 
 Each week, I’ll bring you insights from coaching, the Enneagram, and my own lived experience — with honesty, humor, and a sharp dose of emotional clarity. We’ll uncover what’s really going on underneath, dig into what’s no longer serving you, and start shifting things from the inside out.
 
 This isn’t about fixing yourself. It’s about finally understanding yourself — so your choices, relationships, and leadership actually align with who you really are.
 
 Subscribe now and get ready to do the work of you — one honest episode at a time.

Resources | Links:

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