Melissa Albers  0:01  
Hey everyone. Welcome to the self awareness Journey podcast. I'm Melissa Albers.

JJ Parker  0:06  
And I'm JJ Parker. This podcast is for seekers, seekers of happiness and joy seekers of a centered approach to success in life. Seekers of their true authentic selves.

Melissa Albers  0:17  
Get ready for some real talk on everything from anxiety, emotions and habits to love, compassion and forgiveness. We know you'll be challenged and enlightened by this conversation. We're so glad you're here. Let's dive in.

JJ Parker  0:34  
Alright, Melissa, we've got two exciting things happening right now.

Unknown Speaker  0:38  
Yes to Well, I know of one. Yeah, well, okay.

JJ Parker  0:42  
We're doing our podcast together in the room right now. It's

Unknown Speaker  0:46  
so fun. We

JJ Parker  0:47  
tried once. It didn't work out too bad. We have new microphones. I think it's gonna sound way better.

Melissa Albers  0:52  
Well, let's hope so I feel like you know, like, we're in a real live like radio studio. We kind of are

JJ Parker  0:57  
totally awesome. The second thing that's exciting is that last week, we launched our art of self awareness course. Yes.

Unknown Speaker  1:07  
I'm so excited.

JJ Parker  1:09  
So let's talk about the course a little bit. Yeah. Let's talk about how kind of came into being. Yeah. And what you hope people will get out of it.

Melissa Albers  1:19  
Well, you call us self awareness nerds. Right. Yeah. And I think in the beginning of this process, which has now been a couple of years, we just decided we were going to start a podcast. Like we had no idea. And we said, we're not going to release it until we have at least five. Yep. Right. Because we all heard of you start a podcast. Everybody quits after the third one.

JJ Parker  1:39  
Now this is like almost 80. Yeah. Yeah, it's actually

Melissa Albers  1:43  
I think it is number 70. Yeah. And, and so we started with that. And the real intention was, okay, Melissa, you have this coaching model. You're not making a whole lot of progress and kicking it out to the world as a model. JJ, I really like self awareness. And we're always riffing on ideas together. And maybe it would be fun. If we want to create anything without any expectation. Maybe it should just be a podcast. So that's how it started.

JJ Parker  2:10  
Yep. Actually, I really vividly remember that day, because we were like ads by House coffee. We were like engaged in some, like, deep conversation about self awareness. Yeah. And I was just like, You know what? This should be the podcast. Yeah. Just me and you talking about this stuff? Maybe some people find it interesting. Yeah. And now we have turns out hundreds

Unknown Speaker  2:28  
of downloads a week. Yeah. Yeah. Do you remember that day, that woman that came in with that huge dog? Oh, yeah.

Melissa Albers  2:35  
Side note. So we started this podcast. And then as we started to get in our flow of meeting regularly to do the podcast, which is what we'd always done in our other business. We started thinking like, Well, what else could we do? Since we're already meeting? Right?

JJ Parker  2:52  
Yep, start making videos start like our videos. It's like our past our time. It's our go to.

Melissa Albers  2:59  
I love it. We're working with a promo marketing person. And I love how she's like, Oh, my gosh, you guys have so much content. And usually when people come to me, they have like six things. Yeah, we have to try to make it look big for you guys. Like we're sifting through all this trying to find what awesome thing we should use. There's so many options.

JJ Parker  3:15  
Yeah, we like in the course of a year made something like 200 videos. Yeah, it is. That's crazy.

Melissa Albers  3:21  
And they can all be found on our website, if anyone's interested. The self awareness journey.com videos.

JJ Parker  3:28  
So so we started making the podcast. We started making the videos. Yeah. Then we took your coaching model. Yep. And we turned it into seven lessons.

Melissa Albers  3:40  
Right. Mm. Using a visual that we call the roadmap. Yep. Yep.

JJ Parker  3:45  
And so we created that a few months ago, or a year ago. Yeah, no, while

Unknown Speaker  3:51  
you're Yeah, it's almost a year and a half ago for sure.

JJ Parker  3:55  
And that was our first attempt at taking the self awareness journey coaching model. Yeah. and turning it into kind of like a curriculum. Yeah, to guide people through because obviously, like, your podcast is like us riffing off ideas. Right? Yeah. isn't really you know, and well, it I think is helpful for getting you know, different perspective on things and kind of exploring different tributaries. It the purpose isn't to get someone from like, where they are now to, right, like, kind of a destination. Yeah. Or at least a new model of thinking. I think the coaching model is designed for that

Melissa Albers  4:31  
specifically, right and based off of my coaching that I do with all of my clients and have been for years. I agree with you. I think the podcast is a wonderful tool because it helps bring people together it brings like spirited, like minded like hearted people together, to think about things that they don't normally think about to have awareness about things that they aren't normally aware of, or they've been aware of it, but not in the same way. Right. Yeah. So I think the podcast has just done a beautiful job of that and keeping it for And people's hearts and minds. Yeah. So I think the the podcast has been a wonderful thing for that. And I'm, I'm so grateful we do it. I love it. I just It's like my favorite part of the week, right? Yeah. And but you're right. So we started to create this curriculum. But But if you'll recall, like even back in the earlier months of are creating this, we never had a real plan. Like we weren't saying we're going to do this and people are going to go through this process. Like, we were pretty loosey goosey about that.

JJ Parker  5:31  
Yeah, well, it goes back to our fundamental not have a plan about our project. Right.

Unknown Speaker  5:37  
So we're really good at Yeah, we're so good at our plan we're on all day long,

JJ Parker  5:42  
which you can tune into in previous podcasts where we go on and on about how we don't have a plan. Well, so we made we made like, a first pass. Yeah, the sort of like the curriculum or love the chorus, right. And we just put it on the website as seven, like, fairly long lessons, either 40 minutes long or something. Yeah. And, but they didn't have much context around it, right. Is this like, again, like our silent buy? Here's some videos, maybe some people, right, give them but it wasn't super. It wasn't structured at all.

Melissa Albers  6:18  
Yeah, right. Or whatever it was structured on, we didn't really communicate that that's the intention behind these lessons is it's a structured approach, right? We there was something in us that we just felt like that was not we weren't ready yet. Maybe? I don't know. Maybe? I don't know. We just didn't have much intention by about that.

JJ Parker  6:37  
Yeah. Yeah. Looking back at those are just funny that we just made them and put them out there and never put any context around it.

Melissa Albers  6:44  
And you know what, though? When I watch those videos, they are so good. Like, they are so good. I'm so proud of that. Yeah, it's amazing. Um, so yeah, you're right. So we got all these lessons together.

JJ Parker  6:58  
Those those a lot of that video stuff. For me. When I watch it, yeah. It's like, all I think, what is that? I was like, like, wow, I'm, I was out of my mind. While we were doing those. Yes. Then not liking it. Like I was a crazy person or something. But like, I was, like, yeah, I was like, like, Wow, I can't believe that. We did those lessons. Yeah. Yeah. And they they came out so effortlessly. Yes, they did. And there was like, wow, we were just in a completely different. I know, mental state.

Unknown Speaker  7:34  
I know. I know. Well, we weren't. So that's the fault.

JJ Parker  7:36  
Like that's us being in the zone. Yeah, in Florida. Put it that's our

Melissa Albers  7:41  
authentic self. You look at the roadmap, and you know, the experience of being in your authentic self. Everything's easy creations easy. And what you create is, like otherworldly, like it's it's amazing content. And it's in the course too, by the way, obviously, well, not obviously, junk cars. You know what I just realized, after we created those seven lessons, and we put them, we put them online, the only advertising or marketing or promotional stuff that we did was we reached out to our individual networks. And we said, oh, hey, by the way, we did this, if you know anybody that could benefit? Let please let them know. But that's all we did. And I think we did it maybe once or two times. Yeah, that's it right or so about a promotion. What's really funny, though, not funny, but interesting is right behind that. And people that I hadn't sent anything to, to clients reached out and said, Will you curate some of the content that you've made for us in a corporate plan? And so that sent us down a huge hill, right? But isn't it interesting, we built this and all of a sudden, there were people there that wanted to go through it. And it was like our beta testing of this, you know, of this. The art of self awareness. It was the beta testing, although I don't even really know if we thought that, like, I think we thought, oh, maybe we're making this big corporate product. Yeah. And we tried to dumb down some of those amazing lessons into bite sized chunks because we were informed that well, if you're looking at it from a corporate per sec perspective, it can't be this

JJ Parker  9:15  
long, because no one's gonna watch it. No one's gonna want to share six hours of video.

Melissa Albers  9:18  
Yeah, right. Right. Yeah. But in that course of time, within like two or three months, we had over 300 or 400 people on the platform going through our beta and we were blowing that off like it was just no big

JJ Parker  9:34  
deal. It's okay, work amnesia.

Melissa Albers  9:39  
Yeah, having like the fact that I just remembered that I'm now shaking my head going. Good Lord, keep

JJ Parker  9:44  
on saying we have to do an episode on work amnesia. We also do take suggestions. So if anyone out there has a topic for the podcast, yeah, we'd love shoot us a message on Facebook. We'd love it. So let's actually get back to the course. So So That's the history of the course. Right? Yeah. Like Mike podcast, made a bunch of videos doesn't cover stuff. Then here we go. Like, right. Why did we decide to package everything that we've created in the past year and a half into a course? Yeah. What changed?

Melissa Albers  10:16  
Yeah, I'd be interested to hear what you and how you asking the questions over Dang it, you, she's now that we're in one room, I can't even like look away or turn my screen off. You're right there literally right there. What change I think, for me was honestly more self confidence about what this was. And recognizing that, oh, I had this block that we couldn't help people in this manner. I wanted to believe we could. I knew we had all the resources. But there was something in the confidence that said, Maybe we shouldn't, maybe, who are we to? You know, and I think what changed is, the more we've worked on this, and then I have heard other people's feedback, like we've got hundreds of people that like I mentioned, we've got hundreds of people that are hopping on this podcast every week, which is super cool, right? Like, we never expected that. And I think we we've kind of fallen into a lot of this. Yeah. But here's the thing. If Doing this helps one person, it's worth it to me. And, and we weren't guided enough in the process prior. So to me, we needed to put some legs around it and help people understand, this is a self guided course for you. You log in to your own dashboard. It's beautiful. It's easy to use. You can watch videos on your own, there's reflection questions in between each stage. I mean, it's just such a nice way for people to not be preoccupied with Am I doing this? Right? Yes, this

JJ Parker  11:52  
right. Yeah. That's kind of like what, what I realized, like, right, as we're kind of the idea that like, maybe we should turn, everything we've made into something more structured, was just less idea. Like, when I looked at all the stuff we had made, we're like, oh, yeah, this is completely unapproachable. Like, yeah, like, who's gonna go to the website and sort and sift through all of this stuff? It doesn't even make sense. We didn't even know it. Even like, the lesson video page on the website, it didn't even have any like, like, explanation around, like, here's seven blog videos. Right? So the idea that we let we, you know, tee up, what a course on self awareness is what you're going to get out of it, right? How the process should work, and then guiding you through all that, right, step by step. I think it's gonna be really helpful.

Melissa Albers  12:48  
I do too. I'm really, really excited about it. And I also love how we've created more of a, a natural environment for learning. You know, we have a closed Facebook page for the users of this tool we have how when people sign up, they get 30 minutes of coaching from me to help them in any way that will help them in this process. You know, it's like, being able to do things like that, as long as we can do that. Now. I'm so excited about that.

JJ Parker  13:19  
Right? Sure. Everyone caught that. Subtlety you get a call from Alyssa. Not what JJ cuz Calvin.

Unknown Speaker  13:27  
You didn't put your name on there you go, you could, we can set your Oh, we'll just open your calendar to everyone here. Sorry about it.

JJ Parker  13:39  
I need to change these permissions on your calendar. So I can let people sign up to call you tonight,

Unknown Speaker  13:45  
even as you just said, bring your computer and do some stuff. Me trusting me. Trusting one. Okay.

JJ Parker  13:58  
So I, since I'm so some of the interview are here. Oh, what do you know? Okay, so I think everyone get like we get a sense of what the car says. Right? Yeah. Sign up, self guide through a whole bunch of videos. It goes through the core lessons, there's questions and yeah, no generic content. So what do you hope that people are going to get at the end? Yeah, after they go through it? Yep. How? What change is going to happen, or do you hope is going to happen? Yeah. In our students,

Melissa Albers  14:28  
you know, I was, I'm gonna answer that by having telling you about a conversation I had last night with a good friend and mentor and fellow coach. She's a powerhouse. She's a very strong Christian. And so everything in her coaching is very much around God and her belief in God. And so as she's talking to me, she said, Melissa, in this process, who are you leading these people to?

JJ Parker  14:56  
An interesting question, isn't it? Yeah,

Melissa Albers  14:59  
and And part of the question was around God, but part of the question was also around ego. She and I had been in a couple of large networking environments that were paid to play. And it was a bit of a brainwash, right? You buy this from us, and you're going to be so great, right? And so she's extra sensitive about that as EMI. And so she's like, I just want your ego to keep in mind that this process is to teach people on their own and not become dependent on you. And I was like, yes, that's exactly what we're doing. And so when she asked me the question, Who are you bringing it back to? Who are they leading? Who are they being led to? And in the moment, I didn't have an answer, because I was so flummoxed by your question. It was so specific. But I sat and rift on at all last night. And as of today, I love the question, because we're bringing you back to who you really are. We're bringing you back to your inner being

JJ Parker  15:57  
like, yeah, like bringing you back to yourself. You're bringing it back to yourself.

Melissa Albers  16:01  
That's right. And, and she could say we have some people already are there and I'm i Yes. And yes. And there's so much further to go.

JJ Parker  16:11  
Yeah, I would, I would actually argue that you're never there. Like you can be there. fleeting, temporarily. And some people can spend more of their time in that authentic space than less. But I don't, I don't think anyone's there 100%? No,

Melissa Albers  16:30  
not at all of the time, not at all. And my personal goal is, I believe, like, this is why I'm on the planet is to help people in this way. I really believe that's what why I'm on this planet. Like that is my purpose. So my purpose is to help educate people in a way that they don't feel judged. They can go through their own processes and learn how they think and feel about things and why they become better human beings. They're in better relationship with themselves. They're healthier, they're happier, they're more centered and stable. But then think about the impact of everyone else there around. You know, we forget what happens to one of us happens to all of us. And I always say that, but people don't realize the depth of that. And sometimes I shouldn't say people don't realize it, some people do realize it. So it is my goal to continue to just be very intentional about us being able to keep doing this and to provide content for people to provide people with a structure to provide people with the support and to provide people with a light hearted community and I didn't say like minded Yeah, like hearted community to grow more light on this planet.

JJ Parker  17:48  
That's an awesome mission. Like, I think we had like a episode about like, but your purpose or what Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  17:56  
yeah, yeah, we did. Yeah. That was such a good app. I forgot about that one. Yeah.

JJ Parker  18:00  
But yeah, your mission is, is amazing. Well, I'm happy to be part of it.

Melissa Albers  18:06  
Well, and you have a you have a similar mission, different wording, you know, but, and I don't need to be lauded about the mission. Like I actually don't like talking about it. I like to just quietly go around and do it without making a fanfare.

JJ Parker  18:18  
Yeah, totally. I get that that's part of your personality. But also, like, you're this toy, that's an awesome mission. And you should be proud of that.

Melissa Albers  18:28  
Yeah. Now I am proud of I am proud of it. And and yeah, I think there's so much further to go like, to me this art of self awareness is the core baseline course to teach people what their internal processes are and have a much different relationship with their inner being. And then inner being is attached to whoever is your source, whatever is your source, whether you say God, whether you say Buddha, whether you say whatever, but your inner being is, what is that direct connection? Yeah, and your inner being is never wrong. And we just have gotten away from having a good relationship with our inner being. So there's so many more courses that we are planning on building around this, right like there's so many fun opportunities for it. But yes, like right now, this

JJ Parker  19:11  
one out the door. Right now. Also, you and I get dissed, easily distracted. Like, get this thing done. 99% of the way and then we get distracted and release it. But it's out. Okay, it's out. The courses out. Yes. Everyone can check it out. Yes, the cell phone is turning calm. Click on Course on the top. Yep. tell you all about it. Yeah, can sign up? Yeah, that's, it's gonna be great.

Melissa Albers  19:35  
Yeah. And there will be a number of promotional things and marketing things that people start seeing on some of their standard social media platforms. LinkedIn and Facebook and maybe Instagram, who knows? So we're gonna for the next several weeks, we'll be talking a lot about this to be more intentional about making it available to everybody that wants it.

JJ Parker  19:55  
Awesome. Did you enjoy this episode? Please go to your favorite podcast platform. Are to subscribe rate and leave a review so others can discover it as well.

Melissa Albers  20:05  
Growing self awareness is a lifelong journey and there's always further to go. And it's better when we're all in it together. Please think of someone you know who could benefit from hearing today's conversation and share this episode with them. We can't thank you enough for listening. Until next time, happy exploring seekers.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

‍