Self-awareness is a game-changer in leadership, and Jennifer Leslie is proof of that. In this episode, Jennifer, a human resources executive, author, and meditation teacher, shares her inspiring journey and groundbreaking work in creating conscious leadership programs. Her message is simple but powerful: to lead others effectively, you must first understand and lead yourself.

Jennifer’s unique perspective on leadership, rooted in her early career in catering and event management, is truly enlightening. Managing teams of up to 250 individuals, she developed a fascination with understanding people’s strengths and creating environments where everyone could thrive. Transitioning into HR, Jennifer combined her operational expertise with a deep passion for empowering individuals to excel.

Check out Jennifer’s video podcast here: 

Five years ago, Jennifer’s leadership approach underwent a pivotal transformation when she enrolled in the Inner MBA program. This collaborative initiative by Sounds True, NYU, and Wisdom 2.0 emphasizes conscious business practices, encouraging leaders to prioritize self-care as a foundation for better leadership. Jennifer took this mindset back to her organization, where she developed a 12-workshop leadership program designed to foster listening, tough conversations, and feedback skills—cornerstones of effective leadership in today’s fast-paced workplace.

Jennifer’s workshops play a crucial role in empowering leaders to navigate the pressures of modern work environments. She observes that leaders are often afraid to confront tough situations, but Jennifer’s workshops equip them to face challenges with courage and authenticity. By teaching leaders to embrace discomfort, Jennifer ensures they can have honest, impactful conversations that drive growth and build trust.

Jennifer’s work is a testament to the power of collaboration. In addition to her workshops, Jennifer contributed to the book Leading with Self-Awareness, a collaborative effort by the Changing Work Collective. In her chapter, Jennifer shares a transformative moment that occurred while listening to a sermon from her father, an Episcopal priest. Inspired by the phrase “Be bold,” she reexamined her career and committed to stepping outside her comfort zone. Her chapter provides practical tools to help others do the same, making the book a powerful resource for anyone seeking personal and professional growth.

Jennifer’s story reminds us that leadership is not just about commanding teams but about creating connections, fostering inclusion, and empowering others to succeed. Her approach aligns with modern leadership principles emphasizing humility, transparency, and collaboration over command-and-control methods.

For Jennifer, being bold means rethinking her leadership style and helping others reimagine theirs. She encourages leaders to ask themselves, “What are you giving up if you don’t take a step forward today?” Her message resonates in a world where work and leadership are rapidly evolving.

Jennifer’s work demonstrates that conscious leadership is about more than just achieving business goals—it’s about transforming workplaces into environments where individuals can truly thrive. Her innovative leadership programs and insights from Leading with Self-Awareness provide a roadmap for anyone ready to embrace change, take bold steps, and lead with intention.

Key Takeaways:

• Self-awareness is the foundation of effective leadership.
• Listening and tough conversations are essential skills for creating inclusive and successful teams.
• Being bold means stepping out of your comfort zone and embracing change with courage.
• Leadership is about creating environments where everyone feels valued and can contribute their best.

You can connect with Jennifer Leslie on LinkedIn to learn more about her work and the Changing Work Collective.

Join the Conversation: Listen to this episode and let Jennifer’s journey inspire you to think differently about leadership and self-awareness.

Other Podcasts you will enjoy include:

411: TaRita Johnson Tackling the Challenges of DEI and Belonging

406: The Greatest Journey of a Woman Entrepreneur in Mental Health: Dr. Barbara Brown’s Story

414: Ilene Rosenthal: Inspiring a Revolution in Children’s Education

Additional resources for you

Reach out and contact us if you want to become a woman entrepreneur with a business that has both great profits and significance.  Let’s Talk!

From Observation to Innovation,

CEO | Corporate Anthropologist | Author
Simonassociates.net
Info@simonassociates.net
@simonandi
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Jennifer Leslie: Time to Transform your Business with Self Awareness

Andi Simon: 00:00:02  Welcome to On the Brink with Andi Simon. I’m so glad you’re joining us. Whether you’re watching or listening to our podcast, it’s an opportunity for us to help you do what we love to do: see, feel and think in new ways to adapt to these fast-changing times. People come to us, or we go find people who are going to help you do just that. Remember, the more ideas you have, the more likely you will have big ones, and they come at the intersections and your mind is open for learning in all kinds of ways, particularly from the stories that people share with you about their own story. So when you listen, listen to the story they’re telling you about their own journeys, as well as the ideas that they have to help you see, feel and think in new ways. Remember, we decide what the heart and the eyes, and then it goes to the brain. It’s the eyes and the heart that make the decisions how we feel. And so whether you’re in a company, an entrepreneur, or a solopreneur,  everything is around. How do we create the right environment for us to feel like we belong, and this is the right person or place for us to be? Today I have a wonderful woman with us, Jennifer Leslie. Now I’ll tell you about Jennifer, but  she also  got a great chapter in a new book called Leading with Self-Awareness. And there’s all kinds of stuff here about leading and self-awareness. And I think you’re going to enjoy our time together in a very amazing fashion. Let me tell you about Jennifer, and I thank her for being here with us. But you will too. Jennifer Leslie is a human resources executive, author, and meditation teacher. She loves to empower others to thrive. She’s an alumna of the Inner MBA program that she’ll tell you a little bit about, and a neuro linguistic programming coach practitioner. Neuro linguistic, remember, the words we choose create the world’s we live in, and so the words are not inconsequential. The neuro linguistic programming coach is an important set of words for you to hear.  Her success is grounded in balancing business needs with human needs. It’s sort of interesting because businesses are usually run by humans with humans for humans, but sometimes we forget about those humans. She likes to build cultures of belonging purpose in alignment with company goals. Remember, humans are herd animals. If we don’t belong, we’re not safe. And if we feel like outsiders, we run. And we do that because we’re frightened. And our early brain, the amygdala, protects us from unfamiliar things. So belonging is not inconsequential as long as it’s a good group to belong to. She creates conscious leadership development programs and leads change for dynamic and entrepreneurial companies. Her colleagues and business partners value her ability to problem solve, deliver value, navigate sticky situations, and fuel company growth from the inside out. She’s shaking her head. We’re going to tell you about a bunch of stuff in a moment. I’d like her to tell you her journey, but the book is interesting. What if self-awareness, she asks, was seen as a foundation of conscious leadership.  What if we embraced it as vital to a meaningful life? Self-awareness? Jennifer, thanks for joining me today. Who are you and what’s your journey been like? And then we’ll get to the book and the work that you’re doing. So help me help them see, feel and think in new ways so they can change. Who are you?

Jennifer Leslie: 00:03:36  Thank you. Andi, I’m so happy to be here with you. Let’s see, I in my previous career, earlier in my career, I spent about 18 years working for a different catering and event companies in Washington, D.C., and we were doing things as small as dinners for seven and a senator’s home, or graduation dinners, or big events for large associations for thousands of people. and so on. Any given day, I was managing, overseeing about 250 waiters, chefs, people who would go out into the world and put on these big magical events. And I learned, you know, I spent all that time not just sort of operationally getting excited  with like the engineering operations side of my brain or just how are we going to pull this off, but really thinking about who works well together, who’s going, who can I put together, who’s, who’s going to lead? Who’s going to follow? How many people do I need in each category? And I’ve always been so fascinated by people and learning and getting to the heart of their strengths and sort of what makes them tick and what makes them feel good because, you know, life is not always easy. And if you can,  work with people where they are and figure out what they’re best at and put them in places where they’re going to shine and do their best. Everybody wins. So I took that sort of years of experience doing that and working with people,  I’ve moved into a different company. I’ve been there for about 13 years, and I think more recently, so in the past five years or so, I’ve noticed that people are sort of expected to work at the pace of machines, and we are not machines. And we also sort of are working with other people who are also expected to be working at the pace of machines. And so sort of they’re just sort of this like chaos going on in the workplace with everybody trying to work harder and keep up with things. And so about five years ago, I found my way into the Inner MBA program, which was sponsored by Sounds True and NYU and an organization called Wisdom 2.0.  They’re out of Silicon Valley, and their purpose is about getting more leaders, thinking about conscious business. And how do we do a better job of taking care of ourselves and in return, others. And it sort of runs along the lines of what you hear when you get on an airplane. If you know you put your own oxygen mask on first. We say this a lot. I say this a lot in the training that I do too, right? And if you’re not okay, nobody else around you is going to be okay. So how do you get better at managing your own nervous system, your own response system, as you were talking earlier about the amygdala and how, you know, we have evolved a certain degree, but our amygdala  are still active and we’re still on alert for what’s going on next to us and beside us. So how do we get more, better control over that, better understanding of that, and in a way that helps us show up for work, in a more resourced way and in a better way to help us work with others and find better success.

Andi Simon: 00:07:06  Interesting. And through this program, this Inner MBA, some things have developed for you. Are you still working in the same company or if you changed companies, what kind of business are you doing? And then we’ll talk about what kind of work you’re doing in those businesses. But give us a sort of a context.

Jennifer Leslie: 00:07:25  Sure. So, I am still working with the same company and have been. I came out of the Inner MBA program and thought, wow, there really is a lot more I can do here. I thought, you know, maybe I wouldn’t say that I’d hit burnout. I certainly wasn’t burnt out, but I was really ready. I’m a life learner. I’d like to constantly be engaged and picking up new things, and I felt like there needed to be, there should be more and part of what I wrote in my chapter two was kind of going on at this sort of same period of time, like this period of self-awareness for myself. What more do I want out of my career and who I am and who I show up for, how I show up at work? What kind of a manager do I want to be? How can I help others within this company be their best at management as well? Because, you know, it’s very different to make a widget and to be very good at making a widget as opposed to managing people who are making widgets. It’s a completely different skill set. And companies often don’t really take that into consideration. And a lot of times we’re promoting people into positions of management and leadership, and they have no clue what they’re doing. So I saw this Inner MBA program as an opportunity to hone my own skill and sort of being a better mentor and coach for other leaders and managers and helping them find their way into that.

Andi Simon: 00:09:03  It’s interesting listening to you, because I’ve had a leadership academy at a 14-hospital system for six years. And they are really interesting emerging leaders. I’m hoping they’re good managers because everyone is focused on leadership, and I like to focus on followership also, because without good followership, leaders can’t get anything done. But the words are interesting to use as they’re trying to reflect on what their jobs are and in healthcare. You know, I spent seven years in a health care environment as an executive. We often promoted nurses because they were good nurses into nurse managers, but no management training. And so they made more money, had a nice title and just did the same thing they did before. And so your point is extremely important in this world. Where do we need managers? A previous podcast guest living in Stromberg said that the leadership of tomorrow is a whole different bag of tricks. It’s about humility. It’s about transparency, curiosity, and collaboration. not command and control, but creative problem solving. As I’m listening to you, my hunches that you two are watching that transformation. And so my question is, really, how are you changing and how do you see others responding to both your changes and to the needs that they have? Can you give us some case studies or illustrations in some fashion?

Jennifer Leslie: 00:10:33  Sure. I couldn’t agree more 100% with all of that. I’ve created this program within our company that runs through, I think there are 12 workshops that build on top of one another. And we start at the very beginning with just listening skills. How do you get better at listening and how do you start there? And what are sort of like, why is listening so important? And then we run through a lot of exercises that sort of catch you out a little bit, because kind of realize that listening is harder than we think.  Once you can listen, then we move into how to have a tough conversation with somebody because that’s a really important skill too. And I would say that one of the biggest things that I see leaders lacking in this day and age is courage. I think there’s a real lack of people feeling brave enough to have tough conversations and bring things out into the open. And so I do a lot of coaching and work around how do you share some bad news? How do you do it with clients? How do you do it with colleagues? How do you carry that on into home? How do you get the elephant out of the room? Because you can’t rearrange furniture if the elephant is still in there. So get to the bad stuff first and then we can deal with the rest. So I find that that’s one of the most important sections of sort of what I’ve been doing and working with people is teaching them how to get more comfortable with being uncomfortable at work. Then after we get that out of the way, you can move more into feedback. And how do you support somebody and provide advice? I know Dan Pink said something not that long ago that I really liked about people who rarely want feedback, but they always are happy to have some advice and talk about. The NLP, neuro linguistic programming and how our words really do shape how we interpret things that really can make a big difference. People are happy to have some advice. So once you know that you can have a conversation, and you can survive a conversation. What do you want to be in what needs to be in the content of that conversation and that that sort of comes next. So, that’s like the core that I’ve been working on and working with teams here and working with people outside of this company as well on, on working on those skills for sure.

Andi Simon: 00:13:14  It’s so interesting listening to you. You’ve got a completely different approach to developing their leadership skills. But I like it because at the end of the day, everything all day long is a conversation and the next session we’re going to be doing is on conversational intelligence. It’s Judith Glaser and wrote her books on it and I love her. We institute but it is all about the listening. But listening means hearing. You know, it isn’t just listening. What they really mean is that wonderful quote by the Pentagon spokesperson, “You know what you think I said? It’s really what you heard, but it really had nothing to do with what I meant. I mean something to that effect”. And we hear what we want to because it fits into our story. So that’s pretty interesting. And feedback is so marvelous because I really do want to improve. I don’t really want to know what happened yesterday. So advising me, feed forward me, and helping me do better is much more important than telling me what happened yesterday, because it’s irrelevant.   I can’t fix yesterday, but boy, can I work on tomorrow. Really interesting pieces to the tough conversations as you’re thinking about this, what led you to this book and what did you write about in this book? Because it’s an interesting chapter. And as I glance through it, I must confess I just took a look and didn’t really read it, but I will. I’m one of all the authors here who are really talking about leading with self-awareness. It’s your consciousness in business and explain it to the listener or the viewer and let’s get deeper into it and tell us about it.

Jennifer Leslie: 00:14:58  Sure, sure. So I partnered up with or joined an organization, a collective, last year. It’s called the Changing Work Collective, and the Changing Work Collective was founded by Scott Shute, who was the former chief mindfulness officer at LinkedIn. And, he and Nicholas Whitaker, who partnered up and created this organization. And there are about, I think, seven over little over 700 members at this point on the practitioner side. It’s a group of like-minded individuals, who in different capacities are looking to take this movement forward, this changing work from the inside out. How can we get more of these conversations happening inside companies? And at the beginning of the year, they decided to write a book as a collective. It’s actually going to be a series of three. So this is the first book of three, and this book is starting with the individual, either practitioner or employee or person and talking more about their story and sharing something personal about what sort of flipped on a light switch for them and got them to this part, this point in their career. And what do they have to teach people coming up in the ranks as it might be. So I wrote about my experience I had sitting in church. My dad is an Episcopal priest, and I was home visiting California, and he gave a sermon, and he was telling a story about when he was in the army. And he was in a training exercise of firing off fake weapons to try to catch the target. And he continually was calling an order of fire 100 and it was falling short. And he would say, fire another hundred, and it fell short. And his lieutenant or the man in charge said, be bold, Lieutenant. Why are you just doing it in little increments, like, go get it. And it really struck me at the moment. I thought, wow, where am I? Am I being bold? I don’t think I’m being bold. I think I’m going in one hundred. I think I’m just dipping my toes in a little bit at a time. What am I, why am I, what’s holding me back? Why am I doing this? I have a lot to share, and I need to start opening my mouth more so that kind of launched me into taking this, going into this Inner MBA program, and sort of set a lot of things in motion since then. And so this story is sort of intertwined with like, how do we get stuck with where we come from? How does where we grow up inform our mindsets and how do we get out of our own way? And what do you need to do to be bold, to make a move and to get out of your own way?

Andi Simon: 00:18:07  You know, in the neurosciences or the cognitive sciences and a little anthropology, we know that we have a story in our mind, and that wonderful story does a bunch of stuff that limits what you can see. It’s a bit of a hallucination and a bit of outside forces on it, but it creates a reality that’s not real, but it’s an illusion of reality. It goes to things that give you pleasure, not pain. And it really is habit driven and very hard to change. So that moment you had about am I being bold was really a catalytic moment for you to rethink who am I? What am I doing? What do I want to do that is very bold? Just thinking about it and then thinking about what am I going to do about it? Because for the listener or the viewer, think about your own story.

It isn’t exactly helping you get somewhere necessarily unless you can begin to challenge it or change the story. Marisa Pearce, a great psychiatrist, says, if you want to change your story, you can change your life. But if you don’t want to change your story, it will never change. So as you did this moment, that epiphany, it sounds like all of a sudden you began to see I can be bold and brave and not simply shoot in the same place, but I can begin to explore things. And that led to giving me some idea of how your story is changing because it sounds bold, brave, and exciting, and the Inner MBA ties into it so beautifully. Share with us.

Jennifer Leslie: 00:19:49  Yeah it does. And you know, I think maybe me from a year before would not have enrolled in the Inner MBA. I probably would have looked at who this is for and thought, oh, that’s too much or that’s a big commitment coming out of it, or what do I have to share there? I don’t know, you know, I would have second guessed myself much more.  And so it was my first big bold moment. I did jump in with two feet. And it wasn’t easy at first to take that learning and then integrate it in other places. That was another round of being bold was how do I bring this into an organization where companies don’t always want touchy feely stuff and they don’t want me talking about people’s nervous systems and what is all that companies are there to drive profits and sell things and be successful and climb the charts. And so, that was sort of round two of be bold was how do I make this corporate friendly and how do I straddle both sides of it and change work from the inside out in a way where you sort of have to start by putting vegetables in the spaghetti sauce, kind of like problems, like companies, not all companies are ready to have their veggies on the plate. Sometimes you have to be a little sneaky. That was part of it.

Andi Simon: 00:21:14  An interesting metaphor. But, you know,  it’s interesting because you had the epiphany that the problem inside companies requires a different approach. You’re going to be a bit of a Blue Ocean thinker, add value, innovatively create a different way of providing methodologies to grow the business. We’re doing a series of articles for Enterprising Women Magazine on entrepreneurial women who are creating companies with purpose and listening to you, and they sound like you. You may not be in your own business, but you can see how you can change other businesses so that they can have profit and purpose and have success and significance. You can at the same time, because you bring a perspective that their amygdala is going to hijack you. and it’s going to wonder about that lion around the bend that’s going to come and eat them. but if you find ways of introducing it, they can begin to listen and hear you and not flee it, or fear it, or appease it, or fight it, but begin to see why it’s so valuable.  I think this is so exciting. The book is just coming out, right? It’s a little bit of a how to or is it a what is and a why are there tools in there that we can use as well?

Jennifer Leslie: 00:22:38  Yes, absolutely. So every chapter has a story, anyone you know, everyone’s moment. So this was my moment that I shared with each chapter structured with a moment of personal storytelling, a tool where the learning what came out of it, what did I learn? And then a tool for what can you use to put into practice? So each chapter has a tool in it. And it’s not quite the binge reading type book because I feel like you kind of have to sit with each of them because they’re pretty dense chapters with a lot of good food for thought. So I think it’s more like a slow, slowly digestible book.

Andi Simon: 00:23:20  But it also is one that’s very powerful and important, because if you can’t see it, you can’t believe it. And so you’re trying to visualize what the transformation was for Jennifer, so you can visualize her sitting in church and listening to her father talk about an experience that had nothing to do with her at all, but something with, oh, that’s so something. It’s an opportunity. And the timing was perfect because business needs you and they need you right now, so that self-awareness and consciousness and business can be a brand that you can bring to market in a very innovative way. This is so cool. I’m looking at our time. Okay, keep going. Because as you can tell, I’m fascinated by what you’ve got. Is there a case or an illustration you can share? And then a couple of things you want the listener or do or not to forget?

Jennifer Leslie: 00:24:10  I think, well, anybody is more than welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I know Andi will share my contact information and information about the book. Anybody who wants to talk further on this, I’m happy to. Happy to chat.  And especially if you’re interested in learning more about changing work. I think, maybe just to tie things up. I think my big key takeaways have to do with intentionality and taking a look at sort of, I don’t know, I read somewhere like, think about five years from now, will you wish you’d started today?

Andi Simon: 00:24:55  Yes.

Jennifer Leslie: 00:24:55  Thinking about what? What are you doing right now? What moments have you had? Was it a catalyst? Could it have been a catalyst? What held you back from letting it be a catalyst? Sort of. What are you giving up? If you do, nothing is something that I often say to people when they’re not sure if they should take a move or share some information thinking about what it is you’re giving up if you don’t do anything, and what could you be doing differently? And what kind of tools or skills might you need to be able to do that? And, finding ways to do that, reaching out to your network and reaching out to me if those things fall into my wheelhouse, certainly reach out.

Andi Simon: 00:25:40  Well, but I think just listening to you, your story becomes fascinating for others to think about for themselves and also have never ventured, never gained. You don’t really know what’s in store, although the unknown is uncomfortable. Why don’t you take a step or two in new directions? Things can happen that you never anticipated. The future is really not predictable. You can just prepare for it. And I love the quote, “The future’s already here. It’s just not widely distributed”. And the question is, are you going to play or not play? And so you are really onto something. That’s a very big thing, because I do think the future of work is different from yesterday’s work. Changing daily I know and even what is work and where is work and why? Why are the pressures to get people back in the office so fascinating? You know why but why do you need to see them, in order to see that they’re doing quote unquote work? You know, isn’t it, in the outcomes of the work done as opposed to the presence and the, I don’t know, but it’s an interesting time.  Jennifer, this has been delicious. We can talk a lot. I do that, and sometime soon you’ll come back and tell us how the book is doing. And some things that you’ve learned, it’s wonderful. Let me say thank you very much and let me tell our listeners and our viewers to please remember to take your observations and turn them into innovations. In a sense, Jennifer has done just that. She heard. She listened. Next thing you know, she had a great moment when the brain goes swish and it’s all very much what it looks like. Is it smart? Is it serendipity? You’re on a path to somewhere. My friend tells me that I said to him, I believe in serendipity. He said, now you just live your life, and it keeps moving in good directions cause you listen and learn. And I laughed. He said, besides, God’s watching over you. And I said, I don’t really believe in God. He said, but he believes in you. And I said, okay, I’ll take that.  And I share it occasionally because who knows? All I know is, like you, this is a great conversation, and somebody will hear it and change as a result and want to know, how do I do that and how do we go about it so I can innovate? My books are all available for you to hear or see. Amazon loves you. Rethink: Smashing the Myths of Women in Business is just a cool read of 11 women who smashed the myths like Jennifer is doing. On the Brink: A Fresh Lens To take your Business to New Heights is about anthropology and how it can help your business, and we do a lot of ethnographic work in case you’re interested. And Women Mean Business is 102 women with five wisdoms each, and they are happy to tell you all about their five wisdoms. So you have 500 different wisdoms of wonderful women to reflect on. And so I always enjoy sharing that, the book is just about a year old, and it is just fun to remember what we did to bring that all to market. On that note, it’s time to say goodbye, Jennifer. Thank you, thank you. It’s been a pleasure. I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

Jennifer Leslie: 00:28:56  Thank you too.

Andi Simon: 00:28:58  And on that note, have a great day. Stay well and enjoy the journey. Bye.