We recently connected with Danielle Hernandez and have shared our conversation below.
Danielle , first a big thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and insights with us today. I’m sure many of our readers will benefit from your wisdom, and one of the areas where we think your insight might be most helpful is related to imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is holding so many people back from reaching their true and highest potential and so we’d love to hear about your journey and how you overcame imposter syndrome.
So, I have my hands in quit a few areas. I am a full time health coach, we own a global intelligence firm that I support on the back end, I manage some social media marketing on the side, and a mother of 2 boys and maintaining a 50 acre growing farm and home, and some times I even get to have a personal life! I should mention my husband travels about 60% of the time for work, so I’m usually running a lot of this solo! When it comes to wearing all of these different hats it can easily start to feel like I am not doing enough or that I’m not proficient/productive enough at what I am doing.
For me the result is a struggle with restless anxiety and sometimes depression. My first reaction is to procrastinate, which will leave me completely overwhelmed.
I have learned over the years that what you say about you matters greatly. Your brain cannot differentiate between reality and imagination, meaning, your brain produces the same stress hormones when you feel stressed in a situation as it does when you imagine a stressful situation. Your thoughts and words are what your brain uses to stimulate psychological processes that effect your emotions and motivations, so to put it simply, your thoughts and words quite literally determine your reality and ultimately how difficult it is to navigate life.
So I’ve really learned to focus on adding value to everything I do even if it feels like just a small amount. For example on a small scale, if I walk into a room, did I leave it better or cleaner than I found it?
This week I had 3 clients struggling to stay the course with their health and fall off the bandwagon, but I had 2 clients that I was able to celebrate their 45 and 32 lbs lost with a significant positive change in bloodwork. I could have focused feeling like I didn’t do enough to make those clients stick to my program, but instead I focus on the fact that the other 2 clients lives have been significantly impacted! My house may not have gotten cleaned the way I wanted today but the horses are fed and worked and my kids got to spend time with me after school before heading off to gymnastics and football!
Invoicing is done.
A week of posts have been scheduled.
Even as simple as listening to someone complain about life without responding with one negative comment or commiserating, but instead trying to be a light.
Truly focusing on what I’ve added value to in a day inherently changes my mindset, mood, motivation, and more importantly how I feel about myself. It is definitely not always an easy task, but having that positive mindset is truly a superpower!
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 absolutely adore being a health coach. Outside of my husband and kids, helping to impact peoples lives and health has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life! I have had clients who just needed to shed a few lbs to clients who were told they wouldn’t live to see their grandchildren because of their weight and have tried everything. I never get used to the impact it has on me emotionally when I help those individuals successfully navigate that journey and then hand them the tools and habits they need to carry on maintaining that health independently! I never turn down someone looking to better their health and have recently launched a line of amino acids and protein within my program!
Managing social media is another exciting aspect of what I do. I love finding creative ways to capture peoples passions and work to share with the world, whether it’s health and wellness, baby blankets, or kitchens and home designs! Not everyone has the time or energy to share their passion, but fortunately, mine is to share it for you!
And then there is The North Group, our global security consulting and intelligence firm. We go from this happy and positive professional life to a more serious one very quickly. A lot of what we do is essentially risk management, and that can mean so many different things outside of physical security. Red teaming, kidnap and ransom, executive protection, managing security for major hospital networks and family offices… I plug myself in wherever I am needed and sometimes that could just look like holding down the fort and being ok with bowing down to my husbands crazy travel schedule as the CEO. I have found the theme of our life is that we focus on impacting and changing the lives of those around us. I will never forget Steven leaving for Africa because we had been hired by a missionary to pull 2 kids out of a school she had built in the slums, who were being trafficked by the community and law enforcement, and get them to safety. The stories were heart wrenching, he and his team fought for 3 weeks and we were devastated when our hopes of rescuing these kids were hindered at every turn. We thought he would end up leaving without being able to save these kids. I still remember the emotional and fatigued sound of his voice, 13 hours before he was supposed to fly back home, when he called me in the middle of the night and said, “I got ‘em!” We cried together as he not only pulled those 2 kids from such a horrific situation, but ended up with 13 children who had only known a life of sexual abuse and drove them hours away to a place that would give them therapy and teach them skills for success in life. I may have had a hard time alone for those few weeks, but those children’s lives will be forever impacted. And that is just the theme of our life: Impacting lives.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
The absolute most important qualities that have impacted my journey are skills that literally ANYONE attain. The first of which is adding value to others. I believe there are very few things in life that are more important than loving and building up the people around you. Cultivating positive relationships with people has put me in rooms I never would have even dreamed I’d be in and making some incredible connections and mentors! If you don’t know what this looks like, it is simply this: start with positive comments, be intentional about this! And then you learn to call out the potential in others, highlight their qualities that are unique to them, and add value to their character or situations.
The second is simply saying YES to things that cause you to grow! If you sit in your comfort zone you will never grow, in fact, you might even do the opposite. I’ve become addicted to stepping outside my comfort zone when it comes to things that add value to my life. This is almost like the other side of adding value to others, what value are you adding to yourself? What new people are you meeting? What new skills are you learning? Download Duolingo for free and start learning a new language! Read a new book every week! Sign up for a conference and go by yourself with the intention of meeting people! Take a Dale Carnegie course! Take a certification course for literally anything! There is rarely an invite that I turn down. Again, this has put me in rooms and with people I never would’ve dreamed of and greatly impacted my journey.
Lastly, I don’t care how many times your are disappointed, do not quit. Fear of failure, not failure, is what holds you back. What’s the saying? “The master has failed more times than the beginner has ever tried.”? Talk about the story of my life! We have failed at businesses and relationships, we have failed at times as parents and as friends, failure is a NORMAL part of life. Expect it. You will fail at things whether you like it or not, so you can either fail with the RIGHT perspective or you can fail with the wrong perspective, it is 100% your choice! Get excited that your failures will cause more growth than your success ever will. But if your expectation of failure is a perspective of defeat and disappointment then your brain will trigger those stress hormones before you ever even start. Learn from it, grow from it, and get excited about the directions that it pushes you!
To me, being a successful person doesn’t mean you make a lot of money or are at the highest level in your career, although that can say a lot about someone’s work ethic! But success is developing and standing by your integrity, morals, and work ethic even in the face of adversity. I tell my kids all the time, “I don’t care how much money you ever make, my hope and mission for you is to be a successful individual. That means to stand for truth and what is right, to be genuinely kind to others, to work hard when it’s time to work, and be present with those around you.” To me that is the definition of a “successful” person.
We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
So I find this question to be humorously controversial! My entire life, I have heard the opposite advice from extremely respectable people! My view is this, it depends on what you’re passionate about and what you want out of life. My husband Steven goes all-in on his strengths and it is what has set us apart in our industry!
But I couldn’t be more opposite! I have so many passions: a passion for travel and fascination with languages, I grew up playing sports and piano and guitar and singing and living on the water. I love riding my horses and playing with my dogs! I am exhilarated by design, art, and architecture. We actually bought an orphanage that went out of business (that is now our farm) and we just finished renovating the entire main living area, and I poured my heart and soul into the design and I’m already chomping at the bit to do another area of the house!
As a result, at MINIMUM, I am at least moderately good at anything that I do. Don’t get me wrong, I do have extreme strengths, and I do have weaknesses, but I do tend to make myself decently proficient in anything that I choose to pursue. My goal being this: I want to be ready for anything at a moments notice! We travel a lot and I have to go to a lot of conferences and networking events with Steven where I need to be able to have a conversation with anybody. I have perused and grown in so many areas that I find this to be fairly easy to do. We have an extremely diverse social network of friends and colleagues that I can connect with because of a broad spectrum of interests. With what we’ve built at such a young age, I find that most people that we professionally sit in a room with are twice our age, with a lot more life experience.
And I truly owe it to both going all-in on strengths AND investing in having a more well-rounded life experience to success. I don’t believe you have to choose one or the other, both journeys can lead to success.
To sum that up, I think I would’ve been miserable if I only focused on my strengths. I am literally fueled by trying and becoming proficient at new things. But on the other hand, I think Steven would be miserable if he didn’t pursue his strengths fully. It really comes down to what you want out of life, what your goals are, and what your passions are.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://form.jotform.com/wheland07/health-assessment-form-Danielle
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unofficial_cowgirl/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/teamdaniellehernandez?mibextid=LQQJ4d
Image Credits
Jeff Garland *kitchen photo*
