Do NOT Seek Success: What I Wrote to Emory University

I was asked by Emory University to write about where I am, currently, with my business.

My first inclination was to write: Being an Entrepreneur sucks, is too hard, and I ain't doing it no more... but that would be a lie.

First off, I am a not /really/ an Entrepreneur, I am a Healer. You can call me whatever else you want based on my degrees, experience, and skin in the game (and my own kids would probably laugh for days and tell you all about the times I have been "mean Mom" and totally missed the boat on healing words and sometimes actions) - but when the rubber meets the road, there it is. I went through my own hot mess of a childhood and young adulthood, found some things I know through experience and research work to get people to a better place of wholeness, and do my best to pay all that forward, despite ever being a flawed and imperfect human being who is sometimes in need of healing as well.
Secondly, I am stubborn. I crave challenges and have been known to create them even when there was nothing in my way. This is both a strength and an obvious weakness, but it means that I see adversity as something to be faced and not given in to. Sometimes this has not served me well, but most of the time things tend to work out ok - and, sometimes, they work out better than I even imagined.
Third, every time I have tried to give up on this path I am on, I have somehow been brought right back to it. Sometimes, painfully dragged, and other times surprisingly just reunited with the old road. And, I suspect, I am not alone in this phenomenon, though I deeply believe it has less to do with Divine Intervention from without - and more to do with the Divine Intervention from within. We do tend to manifest what we bring to ourselves. Not in some sort of cliched magical way, but in a very real way in which we are not only a part of the Universe, but we are microcosms of the energy that ties us all together. Ok - enough of that, for now.
This brings me back to what I DID write:
After I am done with the post grad classes I am taking, I know I need to dig deeper into understanding the financial side of my business ventures, but for now getting a solid foundation of a book and product price lists for my coaching services [has to be] enough.
My struggle has been sort of frustrating to me in the sense that I am trying to create something sort of unique in 3 very "different" markets: even though most people see the connection between education, mental health, and physical wellness, the established systems for providing these services to people are entrenched in bureaucracy, politics, and money. My audience is also split between my own cultures of women's rights, access to holistic education for adolescents, and my connection with helping military and first-responders and their families get adequate mental health care. The current paradigm says to narrow your audience, break each of the services I want to provide into scale-able (and traditional) concepts, but the traditional constructs aren't working in the way I want them to. While you can one size fit all certain programs for certain demographics, the nature of the systems themselves (mental health, education, fitness, women's health, veteran and first responder care) are broken and don't truly serve the majority of people in an individualized manner.
Now, I've been told that my scope is too large and that I am naive to think that I can solve one, let alone more than one, of these issues. I guess my connecting with Seed Spot was an attempt to get some clarity to my actual goals and to have more concrete steps I can take to scale these massive issues down to bite sized chunks. I know that taking on entire Industries sounds ridiculous to some, but we have to change the way we provide education and health services so we can decrease the growing numbers of children, in particular, who are depressed, suicidal, and homicidal. To provide a better quality of life to those who are otherwise marginalized, and to help those who have been victimized find hope and clarity - these are some of my deepest goals. I just need to find out how that's going to look outside my head.

#micdrop?

In my mind, the mic didn't drop. I actually sat there for a little bit and waited for some lightening bolt of awareness to wake me up from this sense of feeling I have of not being where I want to be and being stuck being tired, broke, and feeling farther away from my dreams than ever before. Yet, I know those are untrue and all constructs of an ego that is forever working against me when it isn't being fed with constant accolades and immediate feelings of success.

I also look at the ridiculously small tasks I have placed for myself and think, "How can you create an empire when all you are building is a room?" Yet, I know from my own experience which I used to create my own coaching programs, that you build a room so you can build a house, expand to a mansion, and eventually create your palatial, world encompassing, masterpiece of architectural glory.

You see, we see success as being this massive set of enormous goals we set for ourselves: we strive to lose 50+lbs, run marathons, land the dream job, create a perfect home life, get the luxury car, live in a mansion, walk the red carpet... because that's what we're inundated with in media, and that's what we're TOLD success *looks* like. Can you attain those things? Sure! If that's what you really want, there are ways to attain it. You just have to be willing to do the things that will get you there. Doing those things quickly also comes with more sacrifice - health, love, morals, and sometimes spiritual grace. This is not a truism, but the more we strive for an ideal of success that is not truly part of our own personal paradigms, the more we deviate from real success.

My desire to change not just one - but a few - Industries, is indeed a massive goal. And yet, it aligns with who I am; not only my education, experience, and skin in that game of life - but also with what I believe my purpose is. It's not the size of the goals that is the problem, but how you fit in to the process of reaching them. Sure, society is going to tell me my vision of success is ridiculous, and will tap into my own "group think" ideas of why they are right, because that's how we keep each other from truly succeeding. When your friends are overweight, they don't want you losing weight. When your roommate smokes, they don't want you to quit. When your family are miserable, they don't want you beating your depression. When one person is ready to change, they don't need permission from the village.

So, I will continue to work with individuals and eventually corporations, write my book(s), develop more curriculum, and learn the business aspects of entrepreneurialship that I need to monetize and grow - so that I can help chip away at the old ways of our Industries that are broken. Personally, I will also continue to live as authentically to the life that I teach others to achieve, and build relationships that will foster success in each of us. Because, success is not something we should seek - success is something we build, inside - out.

<3 ~ Jonni Khat

Magic Change Goggles: It's not Them, it's YOU!

HOW do *You* 🤔 look back at the past, be in the now, and plan for the future?

Sooooo.... We often hear people say things like: "Looking at the past is depression", "Live in the NOW!", "Too much focus on the future is anxiety" - and we can fall into the trap of not only not looking at our past, present, and purpose with purpose - but not looking at all. TOTALLY OVERWHELMING, right?

Or... we look for, what I call, "Magic Change Goggles" we can beg, borrow, steal, or buy... to make our lives appear better, even when we're still feeling crappy behind the reflective lenses.

(That don't really do much more than make us "look" like we have our ish together - or, at the very least, make us feel like we're repping an 80's song).

Way back in 2008, at the age of 35, I hit a wall and made a promise to change EVERYTHING in my life that I was unhappy with - my weight, my relationships, my job, my nutrition, my health, my spirituality, my finances... you name it, I felt trapped in a life without satisfaction and grace. That was when I started to reach for just about EVERY pair of those (sometimes really expensive) "Magic Change Goggles" I could get my mitts on. I tried pills, programs, people, equipment, priests, mommy groups, MLMs, gym memberships, praying, starving, binging, purging, crying, therapists... and even though some of them "stuck", THEY weren't the answer. I was.

You see, not everything was broken like I thought it was. In fact, I had a lot of things that were going just fine for me in the moment, and that I needed to just give more time to allow to take seed and grow. I'd done something we like to call in the mental health biz, "catastrophizing", in which I attached everything that was happening in my life to each other, made it all "bad", and blamed it all on myself or others. Meanwhile, the "good" things in my life were all separate and random, never attributed to anything I had done directly, and transient (see the pattern?).

I also dismissed each bit of magical "help" I grabbed on to like a sinking woman in the middle of the ocean as broken if it didn't make me FEEL better, quickly. In fact, I ended up grabbing on to so many things at once that I could have drowned in the mess. It wasn't until I stopped blaming and shaming, and started naming and /doing/ that I started to see how it wasn't faulty glasses... it was how I was using them.

Honestly, I was trying to make the glasses show me progress like some horrible adaptation of Snow White's Magic Mirror has a baby with VR, when really, I just needed them to help me focus on myself.

Besides, would you really let something that looks like this tell you what you should think about yourself?

10 years later, I am pretty proud of what I have achieved: I changed my relationship with food, I learned not only how to exercise in a way that I love - but learned to teach others how to do the same, I mended fences with the relationships that are healthy and set boundaries with those that were not, we moved back to the Southwest, I founded and am growing my own business, I fostered new and old communities of professional and social friends who are amazing, we got together as a family about our financial health, and I reconnected with my spiritual self through all of it. I also intimately know each and every moment of the blood, sweat, and tears that took me to today.

Am I where I want to be after 10 years of hard work? Absolutely not! In fact, I fail EVERY DAY. I make poor food choices sometimes, I don't exercise every day I schedule it, I say and do things that hurt the people I love at times, I have TONS of doubts about my business (heck - I am doubting whether or not I should write this, whether or not people will read it, and what I am doing with my life in general - right now). Yet, I show up, every day.

I have also learned a lot about who I am and how I think about myself. I view work and time differently than I did when I was younger. I appreciate the value of my hard work more, and understand it will usually take more time than I anticipate to get the results I want. My "Magic Change Goggles" don't change me from outside in, but they change how I look at the world from inside out.

So, don't be afraid to slap on those shades... but remember that they won't "fix" you - they can only help you see yourself - and the world - in a new way.

<3, Jonni Khat

Hard Talks: Epigenetics, Unconscious Bias, Shame ... and, Healing Us

We had a micro "Hard Talk" in my home, today.

Anyone who knows (or has followed me) for long enough knows I am fiercely connected to my Armenian heritage and to teaching genocide awareness to just about anyone who will listen. I'm also Irish, Greek, French-Swiss, and a few other things along the way, but I have a special reason why my own experience with my family, my genetics, and ideological personality have directed me to align with my West Asian side. I also have friends from many ethnic cultures and diverse religious and personal beliefs who are family to me, and who have been family to my children - sometimes in ways our "biological" family were not, and my Husband (and our children) have African, Native American, and Iberian ancestry mixed in with their other bits. My family is literally about as mixed (up) as you can get.

As for my Armenian side, my Grandmother was born with the Armenian name of Haikanoush Najarian, but later changed her name to Helen Crowell. She and my great-Uncle were first abandoned by my great-Grandfather, Dikran (Richard) Najarian, and then abused by their step father, who (as confirmed by her half-sisters), felt embarrassed to have Armenian children in his household. She grew up with an externally instilled sense of self-loathing which she eventually acted upon by changing her name and attempting to erase all parts of herself that were brown. 

To dig a little deeper into this damage she'd felt since childhood, we trace my great-Grandfather's life back to 1904 - only a decade before the actual Armenian Genocide date of April, 24, 1915 - when his parents and a few other family members are known to have boarded a ship from Ankara, Turkey (formerly a part of Armenia) to travel to Providence, RI, USA, where they settled. He later met and married my great-Grandmother and they had two children, Haikanoush and Dikran Jr, before (according to the family) disappearing to the Midwest where he formed a new family, became a successful Executive with Sony, and died - estranged from his former family.

Though my Grandmother was prevented by the second family from speaking to her father on his death bed in the 1980's (we presume for financial reasons - and a family question of whether or not the first marriage officially divorced or not), we know from my great-Aunties and Najarian cousins that that side of the family left Armenia around 1900 as the final pogroms of the Young Ottomans against the Armenians and Greeks began. The initial pogroms called for the identification and arrest of influential and wealthy Armenian men in various villages across Armenia, which eventually led to confiscation of houses and property, separation of families, martial law; and over the next decade a de-volution into forced death marches of women, children, and the elderly who were left behind. Those who were lucky enough to flee with the diaspora of emigrants into the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and the Americas, took with them the trauma and fear of people who were being exterminated by those who were intolerant of their religion and genetics. Quite a hefty pot of human emotion topped with some personal and never-resolved issues of family ish.  

So, what does this history have to do with the relatively modern family life of many "dysfunctional" American families? Well, in order to understand, we need to turn to a branch of genetic and neuro-scientific research called epigenetics. Coined in the 1940's by Conrad H. Waddington, a scientist who was studying a cross between developmental biology and genetics (1), epigenetics had a resurgence in the 1990's with work in genetic assimilation and how genes can transmit not only physical and neurological characteristics from generation to generation, but how they can also transmit things like trauma and psychological factors that effect people's lives. What this means in layman's terms is that we're discovering that our genes can carry not only eye and hair color, height and weight markers, and our individual taste for things like blue cheese, pomegranates, or kimchee... but can also trigger traumatic triggers from events in our anscestors lives that we never experienced first hand. Sort of like second hand (or third... or fourth) PTSD, we believe that we actually carry with us the /experiences/ of our genetic ancestors. So, even though my great-Grandfather and Grandma had these terrible things happen in their own experiences - the trauma is passed down along with our mutual family love for baklava and desert sunshine.

Now, flash-forward-back to our familial kitchen this afternoon. Our oldest daughter, who is 22, and a fresh University graduate, is home for the summer. She and her 16 year old brother were discussing the current issues in America with U.S. history, asylum, and current immigration laws. What is interesting to side-note is that I have been doing a lot of research and work in the Depression Epidemic facing our society (and, perhaps the world), and am most interested in the effects of our current treatment of children and families in the U.S. - both in education as well as health systems. So, their conversation was getting emotionally heated as my son was espousing support of "illegal aliens knowing what they were getting into when they came here with their kids", and my daughter's counter was "they have no access to the media and education we have in our privileged lives - and they are fleeing from violence in other places in the world". 

That was where I jumped in (mind you, there was a lot more to the discussion - a lot of open ended questions, and a lot of listening and sharing - but this was my end summary). "Children, your own family fled genocide through diaspora they did NOT want, and were lucky enough they got out of Armenia and Turkey at a time that the U.S. was still fairly open to accepting immigrants. If they'd sought asylum into the 1930's and 40's, when many were being turned away and there was a sense of American Pride and Nationalism... that ended up not only denying Jews and other political and ethnic refugees from the beginning of World War II, but also influenced the Japanese Internment Camps, increased racial tensions that led to the Civil Rights Movements of the 1950s and 60s (which continues today), divided gender and sexual rights equity, and fizzled real Native American reparations... you might not be here, and you might be on the other side, looking in to the hope that comes with the idea of a Free Nation - and you'd likely be illegally doing it because we can't seem to reconcile what Free means, anymore."

Now, I love my son dearly - I love all my children with a fierceness that is primal and deeper than any DNA can ever show. However, he is a product of a society of privilege and unconscious bias. He is also a product of a generation who have inherited the results of sins of our fathers - but have also inherited the resilience and deeper empathy that is needed to change. Privilege and bias are tetchy subjects, but they exist - and they show themselves every time someone tries to apply their own life experiences of "everything is fine" ideology and "THEY are the reason we can't have nice things" memes. For my Generation X, they are a signature of what we were given and fought against with our angsty and revolutionary music, our argumentative attitudes with our extreme clothing and cultural icons, and our increasing irritation with older and younger generations who we blame for our inability to get ahead. They, however, are a Generation Z, who show less expressed bias towards colours, creeds, religion, sexuality, and other markers of our mixed heritage - but they are also a generation who have inherited a crap ton of psychological and physical problems and have a ton of inherited cultural unconscious biases they are not even aware of ... the worst of all: all of our SHAME. This is what I believe has created and fermented our desperate sense of depression and anger in our culture, but we need some hard talks to get through it.

Therefore, he is not wrong. Neither is my daughter, and neither am I... and neither is most of America. After the fact, I sat here writing in the semi-darkness of the kitchen the others left to go do their assorted things, and I really thought about how our talk went from a place of postures, real emotional history (our own, and that of our DNA), and political ideological rhetoric  - to a place of learning and growth. Shame is a product of guilt and causes us to shut down and retaliate - but it can also be a place of healing if we become open to learning through the pain. Dr. Brene Brown, Author and Lecturer, discusses the concept of shame as something we can move into and grow from, rather than letting it overwhelm and destroy us. (Watch her 2012 TED Talk on Listening to Shame, here)

We can also learn from the process of understanding more about ourselves. DNA testing, talking to our living relatives, delving into our family stories, and truly listening to our friends and family can turn up amazing wonders we never knew about them - and, maybe, about ourselves. Learning more about mental illness and physical health, practicing cooking and eating foods from places not familiar to us, reading authors from other cultures than our own, and watching and listening to music and videos by people who are unique to our own point of view, can open our minds to perspectives we might be closed to. Being curious about the world around us and (for God's sake!) TRAVEL! Meet people you would never meet in your neighborhood, and have conversations that don't end in defensive posturing. Likely, you WILL be challenged. Likely, you WILL be uncomfortable. Likely, you WILL feel strong emotions... but, in the end, you WILL likely live. I believe, in this way, through having Hard Talks, we can make changes in how our society works and pass on a new set of epigenetic markers to our future generations. 

<3, Jonni Khat