We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jayne Nakata a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Jayne , thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?
My resilience comes from the challenges that I have put myself through – for example taking on the challenge to move to Japan more than 20 years ago before we had iPhones and Google translate. Or from those challenges that have absolutely rocked my world and made me wonder, why me universe? Those kinds of challenges we do not overcome with some toxic positivity. We actually have to experience them, feel them and then release them as best we can. Eventually they become part of the steel that looks like resilience. Whatever has happened in my life, coming through those challenges has taught me that things will get better. This too shall pass. It sounds glib but it happened even when I thought the world as we know it might end in 2011 when the Fukushima nuclear disaster happened in my back yard and I was 7 months pregnant with my first child. 12 years later I can recount this story with calm and poise that does not do justice to the terror that we experienced at the time. However I feel it’s important to tell this story so that it might be of help to someone else in their life. Even if it’s to say, well that gives me some perspective on my own situation.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I help people who want to create their own podcasts to start their own show. I started podcasting myself in 2018 before podcasts were “hot”, and learned all the aspects of hosting, producing and marketing a podcast. My own motivation was to overcome the loneliness of being a mother of small children but also a mother of small children in a more rural area of Japan where I struggled to find people in real life to connect with. I thought there must be others out there who had the same thoughts and struggles and so after searching for and not finding a podcast for me, I started one myself. This podcast became an example to others around me and now we have a vibrant podcasting community in Japan of international women in particular sharing their voices and stories. Now the majority of my work is to help other women to do what I did 6 years ago. And the best thing about it is that it is completely location independent so that I can work from home office here in Fukushima or take my work with me when I travel to events in Japan or home to my own country New Zealand.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Using your own journey to help others: Going deep into podcasting on my own journey to learn this system and how to apply it to the project I was working on for myself became my calling card for others who noticed this and wanted to emmulate what I was doing. For some of us, following that trail of interest and then getting experience this way is the perfect way to find a new job or way to stand out.
Just not quitting: Particularly in social media and even in the podcasting world we are told to always keep cranking out the content, be consistent! I always think about who is telling us this and why it might benefit them that we do this. For women, particularly women with children, it can be difficult to maintain this high level of “consistency”. But just not giving up is also valid. Perhaps you need to take a break from your project to focus on something else for a bit, but if you just don’t give up you can always come back to it when you are ready. Perhaps “consistency” for you looks like once a month, that is valid too.
Just focus on what you can do, what happens next is not your business – yet: A lot of us try to control the outcomes of our actions. That is really hard to do and a lot of wasted effort and energy. It’s where perfectionism comes in and often stops us from even getting started. Focusing on what you are doing, releasing it into the world and then wait and see what wonderful ripples it creates in the world and what comes back to you. You will be amazed and it will probably be better than what you had planned anyway.
Before we go, any advice you can share with people who are feeling overwhelmed?
I’ve noticed that my overwhelm comes from trying to focus on too many things at once or from looking at a whole project when I am at the start line and wondering how on earth I will ever achieve it. When I notice that I am getting into overwhelm the first thing I do is brain dump all of those thoughts onto paper or into my task management software. When I see them all there it clears out bandwidth in my brain for more important thoughts! Once I can see the things, I focus on what’s next and do that ONE thing. Then I do the next thing. Once I have ticked off a couple of things, this helps with turning that overwhelm into motivation and satisfaction. Often overwhelm will pop up for me if I am using my mind as a task reminder system. That’s not what it’s for! And the big pillar that supports us in every way is that we have enough sleep, without that even simple tasks can seem overwhelming so making sure we are getting good quality sleep and enough of it can really help too. When something new and exciting comes into your life it can be overwhelming as well. But just give yourself one or two nights sleep and you will find that you start to adjust to this new and exciting reality.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.jaynenakata.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/transformationswithjayne/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaynenakata/
