Corporate Supermom to Freedom Coach: How Jo Stone Beat Burnout

Brad Minus: Welcome back to another episode of Life-Changing Challengers. Really excited today, folks. Scott Jo Stone with us today. She is a burnout and life coach for women. She has gone through Fortune 500, she's blazed her trails, and now she's blazing a new trail as a burnout and life coach. And we're gonna find out why she became this coach, how she was burnt out herself and what happened.

So, but first, Jo, how's it going? 

Jo Stone: Good. Thank you for having me. Lovely to be here. 

Brad Minus: Oh, I appreciate you coming on board. So, Jo, can you tell us a little bit about your childhood? Where'd you grow up, and what was it like to be Jo as a kid? 

Jo Stone: Yeah, so if you couldn't tell from the accent, I'm an Aussie, so live in Sydney, Australia.

Currently, winter down here at the moment, I grew up as largely an only child, and so my childhood was. An interesting one, which now I can see has shaped so much of who I was. My dad was quite a senior executive in sales and did a lot of traveling. This was the eighties and it wasn't that common to go overseas very much, but because of his work, we also came with him.

My mom and I. So I spent my childhood, and I have family, a lot of family overseas, my dad's English, so I spent my childhood going to Paris and New York and London and flew unaccompanied at the age of nine from Sydney to Hawaii by myself to go and meet my parents at the end of their week long kind of extras sales extravaganza at that my dad used to host back in the days when corporates had big budgets and used to fly everybody around the world all the time.

So that I think being an only child and very much being around adults a lot, I was the one kid at the gala dinner talking to adults and it, yeah, had a really big impact because. I still remember when I first went into corporate, a lot of my friends would say, oh my gosh, it's the CEO, or it's the chairman, and they would start shaking in their boots.

But I grew up around the CEO and the chairman and the head of sales and the head of this, and I just knew that that was Phil who wore stupid jumpers with his kids and did a good cookie monster impersonation. So therefore, I've always had this really interesting relationship with authority because I saw the other side 

And I say. He's just dad. He's an idiot. What are you afraid of him for? So that was very much a tenant of my childhood, lots of traveling, which was wonderful to be able to see lots of the world and it planted seeds for later on in life. And yeah, lots of hanging out with adults, lots of. Being very responsible, but also very high expectations of myself and others.

Always having, you know, never being able to be silly, always having to be sensible. And, being that sort of good girl conditioning and programming, which I and many other women have, which became a big feature later on in life. 

Brad Minus: I am an only child as well. my dad didn't fly all over the place, but he was a business person.

He was an entrepreneur, he was a real estate agent. He did a lot of different things. And of course in my life I ended up doing a lot of different things as well. I was given that public persona. Brad, you're in public now. We know what we do when we're in public, right?

When you go home and you throw a fit, they're like, okay, fine. You throw a fit because you're at home. It's not the public persona, it's the private one. but when you're in, yeah, I was in restaurants at the age of three. I was ordering mm-hmm. I was ordering, steak and lobster at the age of six, and people were like, he's eating steak and lobster.

And I'm like, they're like, yeah, he loves it. Meanwhile their kids are ordering chicken McNuggets. so, so, yeah. And then I couldn't understand it. What, what you want, those little fried little things when you've got a fricking thick, juicy steak. I don't understand.

So obviously you followed, kind of followed in dad's footsteps. 

Jo Stone: I did. So I went from school to university. And then went into the corporate world. I did actually do a stint overseas. I went overseas for three years. Did lots of traveling.

Enjoyed living out of a backpack for six months, and then I'd go to London and work for six months until I had enough money and I'd quit my job and then I'd go traveling for six months until the money ran out and then I'd go back to London and get another job. So that was a beautiful period of freedom and doing all kinds of crazy things, meeting all kinds of wonderful people and just really living large with a travel, traveling being a huge component of that.

Brad Minus: Wow. I like, I've never heard anybody do that before. I mean, I've heard it the first time, like they'll go work, get enough, go travel, and then they start their life. You know what I mean? yes, I've heard nomads that are doing it, that are kind of doing it that way, but that's interesting that you did it.

And you, how long were you back and forth for? 

Jo Stone: it was three years I was gone from Australia. And it's funny, my husband and, well he's was now my husband, he was my boyfriend at the time. We, often it's very common for Australians to go to England. Used to be a rite of passage. And I have a British passport because I have an English father.

So getting work wasn't a problem for me and we were very strategic in calculating with our roles over there. My friends are working in pubs earning three pounds an hour, and I went and worked in banking. And did all kinds of boring jobs, but I was getting 12 pounds an hour, so I was earning four times what my friends were earning, which really shortened the amount of time that we had to actually work before we then went traveling.

But. We traveled all over Europe. We spent five months in Africa. We spent a lot of time in Asia, spent some time in the US and Canada. So really saw the world and got to live it up. I mean, we roughed it a dollar a night in some places in Asia. This a US dollar. Going back 20, 30 years now. but, you know, we'd splurge sometimes and spend $2 and get hot water for a night to have a shower.

Brad Minus: we really 

Jo Stone: stretched the money as far as we could, because the longer the money lasted, the less we had to worry about going back to work. So there was this real incentive, you know, we had time and not a lot of money. So there was a two hour speedboat. Going from the Thai border into Central Laos in Asia.

And rather than take the two hour speedboat that cost four times as much, we took the two day slow boat that got the goats on it and then dropped off the rice at the village and had hardwood and benches. But we had the time. So we spent $2 instead of $8 and spent two days hanging out with locals eating rice on this tiny slow boat going between remote villages.

So that was. A different way of living, right? Where you, where it's all about the experience. It's all about being present in the moment, not really having any plans, not knowing where you're going in three days. You just go to a place when you're bored of it, you move on. So it was a beautiful way as someone who had always been very organized and project planned and was when I came back to reality, it was lovely to leave in a completely different way.

Brad Minus: Wow, man. I. I don't know what PE people would, they would kill to, to have experiences like that. But you, you know, here in America, it's just, you know, to get that kind of money to hold onto it, and to be able to put it away is, it's rough. It's tough. It's tough out here, you know what I mean? Unless you're really making money and then, then you don't know, don't have the confidence to.

Hey, I'm gonna put all this money away for six months and then I'm gonna go travel for six months. that when they come back that they'll actually get another job, you know? real quick question is, what did you study in university? 

Jo Stone: I did a business degree majoring in marketing and international business, and then later on I went back and did a master's as well.

Brad Minus: In MBA 

Jo Stone: a master's of business. 

Brad Minus: Okay. Yep. I'm in marketing. I don't have the first one, but I do have the second one. so I do have a master's of business, administration with an emphasis in IT management. So, yeah, so I did the same thing in, but, that's amazing. 

what was the turning point where it was, all right, now it's time to like, all right, now I'm gonna dig in, get into the Fortune 500 and make a name for myself. Or maybe that wasn't your plan. What was your plan? 

Jo Stone: Well, my plan was I was gone for three years It was probably time to come home and start more of a career because I was just getting any job that I could while I was overseas, I was working in banking or doing very boring jobs that were beneath me, and I was always very ambitious.

So it was time for me now to come back and actually use my degree and use my brain in a different way. So I decided to come home. And then I ended up getting a marketing job in travel. It was my way of keeping a foot in. I like the world of travel that I'd been in for a few years, but it was doing marketing and so it was this beautiful opportunity to blend both worlds and soften the reentry.

Back into normal life. So my boyfriend and I then moved out of home. We got an apartment and then I guess I started the ascent and jumped pretty quickly. I went from, it was pretty much 18 months to two years in jobs, and then I moved up and moved up. Went very quickly. By 30 I was a head of marketing.

that was sort of seven years from entry level to managing a team. and then I got trans Tasman roles. And then my goal was to always become a chief, to get a chief in my title, to be in the C-suite, as we say. And so I was 32 with two young children and got my first chief marketing officer role.

And that was in a listed company and it was Asia Pacific. 

I ticked the boxes. I was like, I'm in a listed company, U us listed global company. I have an Asia Pacific role, which is regional staff in five countries. Big team, big budget. and then I also had a three-year-old and a six month old at that point time.

Brad Minus: C-M-O-C-M-O. You were the, you were the, oh, well you were better than that, but, the, the, I think it was, It was a working girl. Melanie Griffith was the one that kind of like worked her way up, but she was faking it. But the Sigourney Weavers. Yeah, Sigourney Weaver. The, you know, she was top, she's young, she's had a kid, blah, blah, blah.

But there you were all the way at the top. Yeah. No, I, I, I get it. Wow. That's, I mean, that's absolutely amazing. then the fact that you had two kids along with that, and you had staff in five countries, did you, were you traveling. For the job as well. 

Jo Stone: I was, so before that job, I had a job that was Australia, New Zealand, and I was in New Zealand every six weeks and that was when I had, so I was traveling internationally.

It's a three hour flight. and so, yeah, but I, I actually didn't mind that because I, my husband was working part-time at that point in time. we have quite generous parental leave here in Australia. So I had nine months off with my first, and then I had seven months off with my second.

My husband then took three to six months off. He actually got three months paid parental leave as the father. He could take that time off. And he then went back part-time and I went back full-time. So we've all, from the moment we had our kids, we've flipped traditional gender roles.

He's always been parent one on the call sheet for daycare or school. And I'm always parent two, nevermind the fact that they still call me, which bugs me no end. But that's another story. I was traveling every six weeks. To New Zealand then, and I actually used to love it because when I was home, I was a mom and I was up with the teething and the toddler and the screaming, and then I would, get the 6:00 AM flight outta Sydney.

So I'd be up at four. I would, you know, get to New Zealand. It would be two really hardcore days, and then I would fly home. Get home late the next night, but I only had to worry about myself. I would stay in a hotel room, I was running quite large events across New Zealand, so often traveling within New Zealand.

But I just got to worry about myself and wake up and not scrape rice bubbles off my suit jacket or you know, be out walking out the door and then get chucked on and have to change again. Actually really freeing, even just to be on a plane and be uncontactable for three hours. So yes, I would come back tired, but I really enjoyed that respite and it made me wanna then come home and actually be with my family as opposed to, I'm not necessarily, I'm not meant to be a stay at home mom.

I don't enjoy being around my family 24 7. I love them more than anything, but I also love leaving them and coming back to them. 

Right. 

I had someone share this beautiful law of diminishing returns when it comes to parenthood for some people. And a lot of women are ashamed for this. And that is, you know, my favorite hour of the day can be the first hour that I see my kids when they come home from school or whatever else.

And then the second hour is great, but a bit less awesome. By the time you get to the fourth hour, I'm like, oh my God, I don't just wanna sit here and watch you play Barbies, especially when they were younger. recognizing that I'm at my best when I see them for shorter periods of time as opposed to being home.

Permanently for, you know, 12 hours a day. That's not me at my best. And it took a lot for me to actually own. What makes me a better mother? What makes me a better wife? What makes me a better human is to do something different than perhaps what a lot of others do. And even what my. Mother thought I should do.

Brad Minus: Yeah. you're right. People are kind of shamed for Oh, you don't want to be around your kids. I have a friend. I had somebody that I trained with and, she had two, three kids and she says, life doesn't stop because you have kids and you can't stop your growth because you have kids.

You've gotta make concessions. And here's where it became a little controversial. Controversial is that she said they don't have to run your life. and I think that's where some people started to get a little bit, well wait a second. No, no, no. They're the first end all be all of how you live.

And she's like, yeah, absolutely. But it doesn't mean that my growth stops. And the interesting part was that for all the people that said, well, that's not the right attitude to have. Your kid should be your everything. And she's like, no, they don't. I have a life too.

All three kids, got scholarships to private high schools in the area. the one that just went to college, D one athlete straight a's honor roll, ap, 4.5 weighted GPA, and the whole bit. So you know what? They did something right. I imagine your kids probably became a little bit more independent.

Jo Stone: Yeah. Well, to me, the best thing for my kids is to have a healthy, happy, healthy mother. 

That looks different for everyone because I am now doing what I do. I've got lots of friends and I've worked with lots of clients who have done what they thought was the right thing to do and either stayed home or gone part-time because they feel that they should wanna be around their kids.

They are far less present. They are grumpy as anything. They're irritable, they're simmering with resentment and animosity. You're physically present, but you are emotionally absent, and I think that can be far more damaging when you're somewhere out of obligation or because you think it's something that everyone else expects of you and it's not what you truly want.

That, that's actually more damaging than perhaps having less quantity of time, but ensuring that the quantity of time that you do have actually matters. That you are present, that you're engaging. And to me that's always been by far the most important thing. 

Brad Minus: And I'm sure you felt the same way about your teams as well.

So, well, this was the, this was the job that you had prior to this travel. company that you're with, that you be, that you became the CMO for, right? 

Jo Stone: Well, I was in travel and then I moved into insurance, and that was when I moved very quickly up. I started off in the entry ranks and then I became, in insurance companies.

I was a head of marketing there, and then I moved to another role as a head of marketing, and then I moved into this global company as a CMO. So I jumped kind of, yeah, in the space of about 10 years, three or four roles, and just sort of went bang, bang, bang and just moved my way up. 

Brad Minus: So tell us what a, day in the life of A CMO is like in a global.

Insurance company, 

Jo Stone: That this one was a professional services company, so it was, you never know what you're gonna get. being in a global role, we were going through a rebrand at the time, and so my days would often start at 6:00 AM with a call with New York and London because that was the only time that we could do it.

So 6:00 AM call and then the family would start to emerge close to seven, and then I would. Be finishing my call while giving, a toddler breakfast or rice bubbles or making toast or whatever I was doing, and then getting myself ready for work while hubby then took over. at this point in time, he was a stay at home dad, so I was lucky in that I didn't have to, we were doing the daycare run for a while, but he had decided to take some time off at this point.

So then I would head out to work Before I burnt out, my days were the, the only way I could describe it was this internal sense of franticness and running. Mm-hmm. So I would be basically rushing to get ready and then I would say goodbye to the kids, and then I would feel guilty because I left the house later than I should her.

So I'd then almost run to the bus stop because I'd feel like I was now later from work than I should be. Spend the whole bus ride on my phone. I think this is a Blackberry at this point in time. punching out messages. getting into work. You never know, what was gonna hit you, whether you had events coming up.

You would have a PR crisis, you would have, internal pieces, client events. And so no two days were the same. You'd have a whole stack of meetings. My days were typically back to back. If I had the odd one hour gap, that was pretty rare at that point in time. So just meeting after meeting after meeting and then would leave the office about six come home again.

Have said that I'll try to get home early to see the kids, but then often I got stuck hanging back at work to get something done or to speak to someone. So I would basically run home, get changed and then do the. Evening routine, get the kids to bed, and then basically sit on the couch, pull out my laptop, and then try to catch up on the work that I hadn't been able to do at that point in time.

Sometimes then I'd have a 10 o'clock call with the uk so it was pretty full on and no surprise. Part of the other reason I burnt out is I was, running for half marathons. so I was just gonna run.

So I was also running three to four times a week on top of everything else. 

Brad Minus: Okay. You should have led with that. do you know who you're talking to? someone that coaches these people for a living? Yes. You should have called me back then. No, I'm just kidding. no, that's fantastic.

And because that was my next question actually. Well what were you doing for you? That was my next question. So that's what you were doing, half marathons and triathlons. That's great. 

Jo Stone: Exercise has always been a really important part of my life. I did a lot of sport as a kid and, dropped it when I was traveling and basically as a teen, some of that dropped off, particularly when I went to university.

The only sport I did was drinking. That was my number one sport. I really lent into the university lifestyle, let's say. forgot all that, but then, as I came back and had kids decided that it was time to. Better take care of my body and have always been into exercise and sports science and have all kinds of gadgets and things like that to support me, but have always been okay at taking care of myself.

But it's always been very goal-driven and achievement driven. So it was a half marathon. It was about beating my time. It was often about. Flogging myself and pushing myself. It was never really about recovery. It was never really about actually taking care of my nervous system properly.

It was just always more, more adrenaline, more pushing, more goals, more striving. 'cause that was very much the space that I lived in permanently. 

Brad Minus: That's what I was, I was about to say that. So that's super interesting that you kept that drive, through a sport that you were basically living in, you know what I mean?

So a lot of people, little exercise and stuff to step away and to clear their head and everything else. And it sounds like for you, you had such a drive in there that you kept that adrenaline, that constant, Manic, type of thing going on because that's your competitive nature, which is probably what made you so successful in business as well, 

But like I said, most people would step away from that, you know, like, the normal person in your case of having, 13 hour days would be thinking yoga. You know, and, but don't get me wrong, I can't do yoga either, and I'm kind of in the same situation. So, but I get it. 

Jo Stone: It's all changed now. But I mean, I used to love running because it would actually clear my head. it was almost meditative. Yes. Because I was only ever thinking about my steps or how my foot was landing. Or the scenery. it became quite meditative and I think that was the one thing that kept me sane throughout all of that time.

Brad Minus: Excellent. Okay. Much better. I feel better about it now because it's like the way you were talking, I was like, oh my God. So this girl's in this frantic manic like thing going crazy at work and she's driven and she's going, and then all of a sudden she's gotta hit her times. But No, I'm glad to hear that.

that's what I tell my people. I'm like, yeah, those aerobic runs. Yeah. You think about anything but running or the opposite. Stay in the moment. Completely in the moment. Listen to your breath. Listen to your footfall. look where your knees are. is your body hurting?

Where is it hurting? What do you need to adjust? so that this discomfort goes away. Excellent. Love that. and I feel much better now. so how long did this last? Because this is, I mean, I hear people doing this for years. Decades even. How long did this kind of like, this schedule last?

Jo Stone: So it was probably, when I. Checked myself into hospital thinking that I was having an autoimmune attack, that I went, Hmm, something has to change. So thinking that I had an incurable autoimmune disease, Suddenly started having all kinds of pins and needles down my right arm. Had a friend who had ms.

I was like, oh my God, I'm having an MS attack. I had had some lesions in my brain and a few other things, and I think it was just everything caught up with me in terms of the cortisol. And because I can push my body, I'm sort of hypermobile, so I don't feel a lot of pain. I can cope on four hours sleep.

I used to tell myself a story. I could cope on four hours sleep, so I can push my physicality a really long way before I break. I have, I've been blessed with a good immune system and a good capacity that way. But eventually it always catches up with you. And so it was in hospital that I've gone, 

Brad Minus: Hmm, 

Jo Stone: And part of the unraveling of that was also the decision shortly after that to sell our house. So this was 2017, so I was 37. I'd been going full pelt from, you know, 23, let's say in the corporate world up until that point. See, that's a good decade or more. And that was when the wake up call hit.

I'd been having little niggles of, hang a second. There has to be more than this. I've got everything that I ever wanted. And by this point in time when I had the CMO role, I also had the two kids. I just built a house from scratch, which was part of my dream. So I'd bought the dream block, I'd built the house, so I had the house, I had the job.

I was on a not-for-profit board, which was one of my other career goals was to start my non-executive director career. I was on the daycare committee. I was doing all of these things. I still wasn't happy. There was something missing. There was this emptiness inside, and it was only when I got to this point of going, oh my God, I've got everything I ever wanted.

And the irony was around this time before my husband and I had got married, we sat down and wrote a, we've called a life plan on Excel spreadsheet. We sat down one time I'd heard this thing about manifesting and I went, I wonder what would happen if we just wrote down what we think we are gonna do in our life.

And we had this spreadsheet from, I think we were engaged at this point in time. So this was 2007 before we got married and put everything down and said, okay, we know we're gonna get married next year. We'll probably have a kid maybe around here.

And I knew I wanted two as an only child. I'm not just gonna have one. So I had to have two kids. So the second one probably around there. Maybe we'll buy a house here, we'll get a second car here. The crazy thing was I then forgot about this spreadsheet, and 10 years later when I was about to throw out an old laptop, booted it up and went, what's in here?

I found the spreadsheet that we wrote once and never looked at again. Every single thing on that spreadsheet happened within three months. 

Brad Minus: wow 

Jo Stone: kid, second kid buying a new car, building a house, which were literally just nu like dates plucked out of thin air with no logic to them.

And they all happened within three months. That is insane. 

Brad Minus: Perfect case study for manifestation. Yeah. That's amazing. And well, the power of a couple manifestation, maybe you had, you know, you guys were feeding each other, you know? I do have friends that have podcasts on that are on manifestation, so I do have listened to some episodes.

that, that's amazing. So you checked yourself into the hospital 'cause you were feeling tingling. You thought you were having, you said you autoimmune. Yeah. That tingling. Usually people start to thinking of a heart attack. 

Jo Stone: it was consistent. It was almost like a numb tingling.

Like you've had your hand in ice for too long. That was going on for days and days and didn't go away and had done a bit of research and spoke to some friends and good old Dr. Google and just went, Hey, This could be something quite serious and couldn't get in to see a doctor and thought, you know what?

The only way I'm gonna get answers, it just got worse and worse and worse was, okay, I'm just gonna check myself into hospital and I'm just gonna lie here until someone comes and sees me. So I lay in hospital for two and a half days until I finally got the neurologist rather than waiting eight weeks. 

And yet spent a couple of days in hospital and then essentially got told I was about two millimeters away from a lesion size perspective from a diagnosis. So I was very much in a watch and wait, we're not gonna put you on medication yet, but you're gonna come back in three months and you're gonna have these scans because you, my brain, looked like an 8-year-old brain.

In terms of all the lesions that I had in a particular area, and they're like, this is not conducive of an otherwise healthy 30 something year old. This, this is very, very abnormal. so I went on kind of high alert to, oh God, I need to start doing something different and I need to better manage my stress.

And the thing is, I didn. I knew I was stressed, but I had normalized it so much that I didn't realize just how stressed my body was. I didn't realize how much I was clenching my jaw or my shoulders were up, or I was holding my breath because it had become my entire normal. 

Franticness of being behind and running was just coded into my nervous system. So it took a lot for me to go, all right, I need to do something different. I need to learn about something else. I need to. And that's when I started diving a little more into self-help and what are other ways to become unstressed and found meditation and, and then I guess that began what is now a lifelong journey of self-awareness and an exploration of what do I want, what do I need, and how do I construct my life in a way that gets me that instead of what I think I should have or what society tells me I should have.

Brad Minus: So that's a journey that you went on before you went back. 

Jo Stone: So this was all after I'd had my two kids and I was in the house that I'd built and I was the CMO. 

Brad Minus: you had mentioned that you went to the hospital. They said they found the lesions and then they said, you need to go home.

We already need to see you back here in three months. 

Jo Stone: Three months. So then I dove into self-help and what else do I need to do for myself? And that sort of started my journey. And then I went back after three months and I said, okay, things look like they're shrinking. Ah, okay. It looks like we're going in the right direction.

All right. Again, come back in three months. Come back in three months. And over the course of two years, I had a. Lesion, which is sort of a, a spot in your brain. That was, I think it was 20, 20 millimeters. So 22 centimeters. And they said that I would have it for life. And when I went back, about two and a half years later, it was gone.

Brad Minus: Nice. 

Jo Stone: said, what, what did you do? And I was like, well, a whole stack of self-help staff and visualization and taking better care of myself and managing my stress, and made a whole heap of changes, sold my house, did all these things, blew up my life basically. And I'm like, okay, well that lesion's gone.

That doesn't normally happen. So what on earth? What on earth have you done? So, I, I confused a lot of the doctors who, yeah. Managed to do things that were supposedly impossible. That's, that seems to be what I'm good at. 

Brad Minus: Yeah. So that's incredible that you were able to, like, those legions don't go away and you were through holistic means, you were able to 

Calm your central nervous system down to, to probably release, some more oxytocin and serotonin that you were missing before. So that's, that's amazing. what did you do about your job at this point? You know, you were, you're this big high power Doug executive. What did you do after the first incident?

Jo Stone: So this really set me on a path of reestablishing what actually do I want in life? And I've, I've achieved everything that I thought I wanted at the ripe old age of mid thirties. I dunno if I wanna do this for another 30 years, this is not what I want. And the Australian housing market at that time was going a little bit crazy.

my husband and I had been in our dream house for 18 months. This was a forever house. We weren't gonna, this was the house that the grandkids weren't gonna come in. You know, we'd made decisions about what we did based on it being a very long-term investment.

And my husband turned to me and he said, what if we sold the house? Prices around here are going nuts. And I said, but this is the forever house. But we were trapped in this cycle of I couldn't leave my job. He couldn't leave his job because we had such a big mortgage. Right? my husband was having all kinds of mental health problems.

He didn't wanna be at his job anymore. I was struggling to find a job that would pay me what I was paid with the conditions that I had. So I felt very, very trapped. one day he said, let's just sell the house, and it forced this whole huge stack of dominoes to fall because I realized that.

So much of my identity was based on being the one who was the CMO, who had the new house, who could invite people over and entertain and show off my nice water feature and my chickens and my pool. And so all of my sense of self was attached to external benchmarks of achievement and success, but it wasn't what made me happy.

So I went on this really quite brutal process of reestablishing. What actually makes me happy? What do I actually want? And through that journey of journaling lots of courses and programs I discovered that I actually valued freedom. More than I valued appearances. And so we made the very quite fast decision to sell the house and we didn't really tell anyone.

We just stuck it up online and everyone thought we were nuts. We had an intervention from parents who said, you can't do this. a lot of friends thought we were crazy because we essentially decided to tap out of the race with the Joneses. We just said, we are not gonna play this game anymore, and Sydney is a very, very expensive place to live.

House prices are insane. And we said, all right, well, what happens if we downsize? Everyone was upsizing at that point in time. We had two little kids, everyone was getting more space, but we said, all right, well let's move further out of the city and let's downsize. Let's reduce the mortgage and. From that point, then once we made that decision and we sold the house with nothing to go to, mind you, 

Where are you gonna buy? We'll make it work. We'll find somewhere. It'll all work out. We'll sort it out. We just had to have faith. But it was this journey of stepping into the mess and the unknown. One step at a time.

And as the color coded project manager who loved everything laid out, give me the steps, give me the timelines, or give you my traffic lighted risk register for one of my, we just had to say, all right, we're gonna see if we sell. And only once we sold did we then work out what the next step was. And so we had to lean into the mess, lean into the uncertainty, and basically then spent the next, the dominoes fell quite quickly, three months.

So we sold the house. We ended up moving in with my parents for a bit. Ended up buying another house further out of town that was much smaller. I then quit my job because we had a much lower mortgage, so I could then have the freedom to start my own business, which is something that I'd always wanted to do.

My husband could then quit his job and be a stay at home dad again, and work on his health. So all these dominoes then started to fall really quickly, which was, I guess the start of everything that. We have now, but it was quite a brutal ego death, and I had to reevaluate everything that I thought I wanted, everything that society said that I should and shouldn't have, it was a really confronting time.

Brad Minus: Interesting. So I'm thinking that you said that the housing market was going crazy so that when you, you got a decent. amount of equity out of your health because of the upswing in the market. 

Jo Stone: Yeah. Yeah. So we were able to, we got more after 18 months than we thought we would get after seven to 10 years.

Brad Minus: Beautiful. 

Jo Stone: So we just thought, all right, let's take the money. And then we downsized and bought a cheaper house. So the, the deal was, I want a mortgage small enough that I can drive an Uber. And then I'll be able to pay the mortgage. I just want, I mean, no mortgage would've been great, but you know, it was a smaller mortgage.

Much more easier to manage with. So much more freedom and flexibility. 

Brad Minus: Love it. Love it. So, you said that you've always wanted to start a business, mm-hmm. And is that how you created, here's the plug. The Balance Institute? 

Jo Stone: Well, it took a little while to get there 

Brad Minus: Mm-hmm. 

Jo Stone: And I had no intentions of becoming a life coach. At all. It was the universe just kept hitting me and hitting me and hitting me and saying, go this way. I'm like, no, no, no, no. I'm gonna do this. It's like, that's gonna fail. Go this way.

No, no, no, no, no. I'm not qualified to do that. Who am I to do that? Let me try this. That's gonna fail. It just kept smacking me in the face, so it took me 12 months. Of trying other things, of doing some consulting, of trying to get other scalable online programs up in other niches before eventually I went, okay, well maybe I am someone who can actually do this and be a coach, because I didn't see myself as a coach.

I was a consultant, I was corporate, I was used to, a navy suit and black paint and heels, give me a boardroom and post-it notes and a hundred people, and I'm in my element. The thought of talking to people about their lives and being an agony aunt, I thought life coaches wore floral dresses and lived in hippie communes and fued about in sunflower Fields.

I was a serious corporate person. I couldn't be one of those, so it took a lot for me to really decide on what my new identity was and who I wanted to become, and how I wanted to do things that broke the status quo at the time. 

Brad Minus: That's incredible. I mean, just the idea that you had no intention of being this coach.

No. And now you have a business that thrives on it. 

Jo Stone: Yeah, and it thrives on it because I had to decide that I was going to share my journey. That I was going to share what I'd overcome and how I used to live and how I used to feel because it was after we'd sold the house and moved and I was doing some consulting.

I had a bunch of coffees. I was networking and doing all the things that you do as a consultant. And it was one particular week that I had about six or seven coffees with different people in my network because I was, in the city and every single conversation went to. How are you doing this?

You've got two young kids. I know you sold your house. You are running. You are. You seem to be fit. Everyone else is stressed to the nines. Everyone else is crazy. How are you? Okay. And that was when I'd done, I was able to start sharing, well, I've learned this and I've learned this about part of my upbringing that gave me this, and I inherited this belief from my father that wasn't good.

So I had to ditch it. And, and I was starting to share everything I'd learned on my personal growth journey. And one day went, ah. I wonder if someone would pay for that and the rest is history. Turns out they would pay for my advice. Turns out I did have something to add. Turns out I can be a great coach and I was able to put.

Reality and a whole lot of heart and knowing into what I was teaching because people, there was a gap in the market. Women in corporate didn't wanna go to a life coach who had never worked in corporate, who would say things like, turn the laptop off at five. You just need to say no. Like, I can't say no.

My team in Hong Kong are waiting for an answer. I actually came with real life examples of what that world is like, what the politics is like, I went through. Some horrific mergers and acquisitions. I had baptism of fire in my time in corporate, so I was able to talk to a lot of situations, and that was what people wanted, was someone who could bridge the world of personal development, but also put it in language that a busy woman who's ambitious and is working in corporate can also understand.

Brad Minus: Perfect. So you have this program business, it's called the Balance Institute, where you are helping women with burnout, and where to go from there. And you have several programs. I love that. if you guys happen to check out her website, burn, balance institute.com.

and you have a podcast? 

Jo Stone: I do. 

Brad Minus: How long have you had this? 

Jo Stone: We're a hundred and six, seven, eight episodes in now, and, we're just about to cross, I think 60,000 downloads. 

Brad Minus: Beautiful. All right, so yeah, I see 1 0 6, by the way.

You're gonna be number one. 13. 

Jo Stone: thank you. 

Brad Minus: welcome. yeah, so you're gonna be number one 13? actually it's season five, episode 13. but it's number one 13. I do things in a 25 episode season. just to. Break things up a little bit, shake it up a little bit.

So it's, yeah. I don't know if it's working, but in the way I've been doing it. so yeah. that's great. we're about in the same year. this has only been a year, but it's, Pretty much about the same. It's been working out really, really well.

Nice. so you are Balanced and Beyond podcast, and she's on Apple and Spotify. and I imagine you're probably on some of the other directories too, We tend to be on iHeart and all the other stuff, but you're on the biggest ones. I am totally impressed and I love the fact that you were a success, realized that being a success in an industry could actually not be a success in your own life.

Mm-hmm. as far as your health goes, and then be able to turn that whole thing around. from brain lesions to. Success and happiness and the ability to help others, which is what I am all about. You know, and that's why you're on the show. That's why I have everybody else on the show is because your experiences help out everybody else.

So I definitely appreciate that. So, yes, so check her out@balanceinstitute.com and check out Balance and Beyond podcast. are you on socials? 

Jo Stone: Yes. So my handles are at Better Balance Institute on, Instagram, although also on LinkedIn under, Jo Stone, you'll find me there as well. 

Brad Minus: Okay. 

Jo Stone: given my audience, tend to do a lot more on LinkedIn these days than necessarily Instagram.

Brad Minus: I would imagine that's to big. So they use Instagram as their, step away. Yes. You know, lemme check my Instagram and kind of like, get away for a minute and then I'll go back to my LinkedIn and go back to work. Okay? Mm-hmm. LinkedIn, Instagram, we're gonna have all that linked in the show notes.

We're gonna have her podcast linked in the show notes. You can book a call with her and do a one-on-one and see which of her programs are right for you. so please, check out balance institute.com and Jo Stone. book a call, listen to the podcast and, see if she might be right for you.

If you are watching on YouTube, that's life-changing challengers. If you're watching life-Changing Challengers on YouTube, please go ahead and hit that, like, that, like button that subscribe and hit that notification bell so you always know when we're dropping a new episode. If you are, listen. Thing on Apple or Spotify, please leave us a review.

so Jo, thank you so much for sharing your expertise and your experiences with us. We really appreciate it.

Jo Stone: Thank you for having me. 

Brad Minus: It was a pleasure. thank you everyone for listening, and we will see you in the next one.