Jenna Griffith, Purpose and Prosperity Expert is a renowned certified compassion coach, founder of the Service and Soul Group, and an accomplished author.
As a former military spouse and current first responder wife, Jenna empowers other military and first responder spouses to find their purpose and embrace their individual skills and passions while still serving alongside their spouse.
Connect with Jenna on Instagram.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
- Purpose and Prosperity for military and first responder wives
- Resilience
- The Power of Connection
This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix
TRANSCRIPT
Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.
Stone Payton: [00:00:14] Welcome to the High Velocity radio show where we celebrate top performers producing better results in less time. Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast speaker, author, purpose and Prosperity expert, Ms.Jenna Griffith. How are you?
Jenna Griffith: [00:00:35] I am great. Better than I deserve for sure.
Stone Payton: [00:00:38] Well, it is a delight to have you on the show. I got a ton of questions. I’m sure we won’t get to them all, but. But I’m thinking a good place maybe to start would be if you could articulate for me and our listeners mission. Purpose. What are you and your team really out there trying to do for folks?
Jenna Griffith: [00:00:57] Our main focus is on military and first responder wives. So I was a military wife for ten years. I’m a current first responder wife, and a lot of us really struggle with finding our place in this world, finding our purpose outside of that sort of community. And we are creating a community, a space for them to come to learn, to grow and to just support each other, whether it’s entrepreneurialship or just having a place to hang out with other women that are like minded, it’s really open to whatever they’re needing that for.
Stone Payton: [00:01:31] So I got to believe that’s must be incredibly rewarding work Now, now that you’ve been at it a little while, what are you enjoying the most? What’s the most rewarding for you?
Jenna Griffith: [00:01:43] My love language is connection. So I just love seeing women who feel relieved and excited and, like I said, just part of a community that they can be themselves. You know, there are so many times in my past and in my experience where I really struggled to communicate what I was feeling emotionally because there’s this unspoken mindset around things could always be worse. There’s people suffering worse than we are, so we need to kind of make sure that we keep that at bay and just move on because we have so many things to be grateful for. And although that’s true, it makes having any sort of desire or dream of your own. Almost seem impossible.
Stone Payton: [00:02:32] So speaking of on your own, seems to me like quite a leap from jumping into this business. Tell us a little bit about the origin story. What compelled you to to to take that leap and maybe some of what you feel like you’ve learned in the early days?
Jenna Griffith: [00:02:49] Yeah. So I was, like I said, Army wife for ten years. Unfortunately, that ended in divorce and I got remarried four years later to a home builder, aka a normal guy who had a 9 to 5 and gave me that structure that I wanted and had always dreamed of. And he’s actually a 22 year Air Force veteran. So obviously I have a type. It is what it is. But he was retired. So again, I was excited to have that stability and consistency. And he actually got approached by an organization, an organization called Aerial Recovery, and it is a profit disaster response group that also combats human trafficking. And because of his experience and all of his training, they knew he would be the perfect guy to really get it off the ground and grow it to a place where they could impact the most people. And when he told me about that, I very quickly said, absolutely not. I do not want to live that lifestyle again. I was in real estate. I was thriving. I felt like I was finally having my own life and my own experiences. And a lot of the the stuff that I experienced as a military spouse made me very apprehensive to enter another world of that of that caliber. And once I sat down with the owners of the company, I heard their hearts and really saw why they were so passionate about not only helping humanity and doing these disaster relief efforts and of course, saving our children, but they also repurpose veterans and give them a purpose again.
Jenna Griffith: [00:04:38] So they have this entire program called Heal a Hero’s, where they take veterans through a healing course and then they coach them in entrepreneurship for a year and when I saw really the root of the scale that this company could help not only veterans, but, like I said, help humanity, I knew we had to be a part of that. And when we decided as a couple to go ahead and move forward with that, I said to him, Well, if this company is going to repurpose veterans, I will not be the only wife who is going to say absolutely no way. We need something for the spouses. We need a community for them. We need them to still know that they’re going to be supported, that they’re going to be heard, that they’re going to have someone who is going to be there for them, stand up for them, and make sure that they’re connected as a whole, because that’s what’s so great about what he does Now. We call each other purpose partners because we both have the same vision on how we want to impact the world and when we can help the veteran and the spouse, It really makes the relationship a lot stronger and they can do a lot more together.
Stone Payton: [00:05:50] All right. So let’s talk a little bit more about the work. What does it look like when when a spouse begins to get engaged with you and your community? Just paint that picture for us, if you will.
Jenna Griffith: [00:06:02] Well, we have an online community in Facebook. Apparently, Facebook groups have not died. So we do have an online community on Facebook called Service and Soul, which is also the name of my book that will be released this November, all about helping coach these amazing women to their own purpose and prosperity. And so we created that community. It gives them a safe place. It’s super private. It’s it’s not hard to find, but you can’t see anything on it unless you’re part of the community and we have communicated with you. So it really created a safe space for them to come if they want to vent, if they need advice, if they want to start something and they want to be connected with someone else, it really is an open forum for whatever type of support that they need. And we have virtual live hangouts where we come together. We get to communicate with maybe something that we’re struggling with that week. We talk about our wins for the week, we talk about prayer requests that we have and ways that we can encourage and support each other.
Stone Payton: [00:07:04] So when it comes to building a community, this is a little bit of a selfish question, I guess, because I’m trying to build a community partner program here in my local market in little old Woodstock, Georgia, but I feel like there’s this chicken and egg thing. Like I feel like I could be more compelling and attract more people and they want to know who all is in the group. But then you’ve got to have people in the group. What was that like in the early days, getting that built up?
Jenna Griffith: [00:07:29] Well, fortunately, with my military experience, I already had a nice group of women that I could call on and say, Hey, I’m getting ready to start this. I think you and I both can agree that it’s needed and I need your help. And even on some of our virtual hangouts I just talked about this we have on on Monday. I said I heard these women saying this was so good. This made me feel good. I loved being able to come on. And I said, Can you please post that in the community? Because there are women watching who are nervous and don’t know, should I? Is this going to be fun for me? I don’t know if I can be vulnerable in front of a group like that. So if you can have a core group of people that essentially partner with you in spreading the word, getting the news out there and sharing their own experience, it helps kick start the credibility for the community.
Stone Payton: [00:08:23] Well, that’s a well, I’m glad I asked. It’s a good lesson and it’s a good reminder to just ask for some help, like be willing to ask for help instead of always. I don’t know. Sometimes the trap I fall. You make it easy for people to open up. Sometimes the trap that I fall into is like I want to have a certain posture or position or frame around me. And sometimes we just got to ask for help, don’t we? And we’ll probably get it. Nothing will.
Jenna Griffith: [00:08:48] Nothing will attract people more to you than your vulnerability.
Stone Payton: [00:08:52] Well said.
Jenna Griffith: [00:08:54] The ten year, the ten years that I was married, I hid a lot of myself of what was going on in my marriage and my family. And to be honest, when we announced our divorce, I had a lot of people that were shocked. They just did not see it coming. And it’s because I hid so much. And I’ve noticed that when I’m more vulnerable and just say to someone, listen, this has been a really bad week, I get on my hangouts sometime and say, Girls, I am about to lose it. I am really struggling. I need your help. Here’s what I need. When they see that vulnerability in me, they’re more likely to speak up and say, Either I’ve been there, I know exactly what you’re feeling, or here’s how I can help you.
Stone Payton: [00:09:42] Well, it sounds like that is probably one of those patterns or one of those recurring themes that probably come up in your conversations. Are there others that you can almost predict when a new member comes in or when a group of people get together? You can almost predict we’re probably going to talk about this, this and this. Do you see some of the same things over and over?
Jenna Griffith: [00:10:05] I would say the most common theme is purpose. And next to that is raising your children who are confused that they have a parent that’s not consistently in the home because it’s way different than children who are in divorced families where you can just tell them point blank, you know, you’re going to go to your dad’s this weekend or you’re going to go to your mom’s this weekend in a military community or even first responder with police officers and and firefighters who do the 72 hours on 48 hours off. It’s really confusing for children. And I’ve noticed a lot of the women in our group are concerned for keeping that connection with their husbands and the children and teaching their children that. Daddy’s serving or Daddy’s doing this for our country or doing this for the community. And he loves you. And and that seems to be the top two themes that I see in our group.
Stone Payton: [00:11:07] I would think that maybe people who are in that line of work in the military or in the first responder arena, maybe it’s part of their personality to begin with, or maybe it’s something that is cultivated by being a part of that of those groups. But I would think what’s the like resiliency, the ability to to bounce back? And I bet that’s that’s something you probably speak on, right, about all of that. Right.
Jenna Griffith: [00:11:36] Absolutely, because there’s different phases of resiliency. We’ve got the service member has a completely different experience with being resilient than the spouse does. I found myself so many times when my husband would come home. We have this like, here, take the kids. Finally, we can get help. We’ve been doing this all completely on our own. Thank God you’re here and not even thinking. Oh, he might need some time to zen and decompress and come down from what he just witnessed or experienced. And a lot of these services, they don’t talk about what happens to them, you know, during their tours or during their shifts because they don’t want to bring that home. It’s it’s painful. They’re taught to just laser focus, go in, get the job done and move out, move on. And it can be really hard for the women to, like I said, not be able to just hand that off to them and say, go take them. I’m going to the spa. And over time we build this belief that we’re not worth that self care because we’re not the ones physically putting our life on the line. And it can be a really sore subject for a lot of people, especially the wives, because there’s a guilt around needing to speak up, needing to ask for help, or just feel okay, having a bad day and venting about it and not being judged for it.
Stone Payton: [00:13:11] Yeah, I got to believe anyone who has a conversation with you over a cup of coffee or a beer or over a zoom call, I got to believe the result is, where do I sign up? I got to do this kind of thing. But. And in the same breath, I’m going to ask you, how does the whole sales and marketing thing work for an enterprise like yours? Do you still find yourself getting out there with some sort of sales and marketing system or something like that?
Jenna Griffith: [00:13:41] Yes. So my primary tool for marketing is my speaking engagements and interviews and Instagram. I can’t go wrong with Instagram and I make a lot of connections on there. It also builds a lot of credibility behind a brand. When people go and find you there and say, okay, she’s she’s got a following. She seems to be serving people and helping people. What I am doing to scale the business is partnering with other nonprofit organizations so that we can offer these services to these military spouses for free. Because I’ll also tell you, they’re not going to spend money on themselves and their self care and their growing and their healing. They’re not. And so that was something I really had to. Plan for everything that I offer them is free to them. I do not get paid by any of the spouses. I have the occasional coaching client who wants a one on one experience, but I would say 98% is completely free to them. I wanted to give them tools and resources to be able to, like I said, have the community and not feel guilty for. Well, I don’t know if I should budget this because it is just for me. Now, don’t get me wrong, some wives would, but most who care about healing their trauma or being the partner that their service member needs, they’re not. They are the bottom of the totem pole. They don’t feel worthy or deserving to spend anything on themselves.
Stone Payton: [00:15:15] Interesting. So the speaking the public speaking. Was that new and different for you? Was that a tough road road for you or did you really just sort of take to it pretty easy?
Jenna Griffith: [00:15:27] If you asked anybody who’s known me, I was made for this. I love speaking. I love talking to people. I love seeing people’s faces change throughout the conversation. And I can tell because I’m an empath, too. I can tell they’re really connecting to me right now and that is a huge reward for me. Um, so I really enjoy speaking. I love being able to teach. I’m just natural in that environment.
Stone Payton: [00:15:58] All right. You got to tell me more about this book and I want to hear about the content of it, maybe some of the high spots, but I want to go all the way to the mechanics of writing the book. A lot of our listeners are entrepreneurs. Some of them are in the professional services arena, some are authors. Others feel like they have a book in them. So my first couple of questions are more around, like, what was it like to to to get the commit your ideas to to paper like did some some parts of the book come together a lot easier than others?
Jenna Griffith: [00:16:32] Absolutely. So this I’ve had a book in my heart for eight years. I really thought that I was going to be writing about my experience as a micro-preemie mother. My youngest son was born at 23 weeks and we went through a ton of medical issues with him and I kind of put that off as I worked through healing with him and helping him grow and all the things. But earlier this year, I was at a divine relationship retreat with my husband, and a book publisher was there and I just blurted out to her, I’ve been wanting to write a book for so long, and she said, Let’s do it. What are you waiting for? I ended up going out to see her in California and I spent six days sun up to sun down with her, mapping everything out. And I wrote the entire book in six days. Wow. There’s a common misconception that you’ve got to take all this time. And when I get to it and put it on your schedule and that was what was so refreshing when I met her, she she said, We don’t have time for that. We need to get this book out. Every every person that she has told me about, who has had a book in their heart and hasn’t just done it. They procrastinate their message and their when she. When you look at in a place of I need to help people as soon as possible in the most effective way as well. It made sense to me. And so we mapped everything out for the first two days and I’m talking the biggest pieces of those rip apart brown paper, you know what I mean? And, and didn’t label and I didn’t know that you don’t write books.
Jenna Griffith: [00:18:16] Most people don’t write books in chronological order. That’s what trips people up as well. You think you have to start from point A and go to Z, but it’s kind of like the entrepreneurial experience where you’re highs, lows, highs low, low, high, low, high. And it takes the shape of that as well. So what we did is we mapped out 12 main points that I wanted to teach about, and then we had the explanation of it, the solution for it, and the call to action. And I don’t mean extra, extra. Read all about it. Call to action more. So how can you take this book, this chapter and grow from that outside of it? And we mapped all that out and then I picked up my phone, I turned on my notes and I started talking. That’s how I was able to do it fast. So I did the voice dictation, voice to text on my phone. I will warn you, Siri is not as smart as a lot of people make it out to be. So anytime I would go on a rant and really feel like I nailed that, I would look at the punctuation and some of them, I would even say I have no idea what I was saying right there. And I’d have to think back to what I was trying to say so I could correct the grammar, but it allowed me to effectively write it without the writer’s block or the typing and taking up time that is just not necessary.
Stone Payton: [00:19:57] Did you find by going through that exercise, aside from genuinely serving these constituencies that you’re trying to help, that it also helped you sort of solidify, crystallize your own thinking and get you better and better at articulating all of these key ideas that you want to espouse?
Jenna Griffith: [00:20:18] Absolutely. And I’ve done several interviews before where I will rewrite, rewrite them, and I’m like, Oh.
Speaker1: [00:20:25] What was I thinking?
Jenna Griffith: [00:20:26] And the more I talk to women, the more I do get one on 1 or 1 on three. Yeah. I notice it becoming easier to not only share the story, but share the message. And the more women that resonate with it, the more fired up I get to tell as many more as I possibly can. So it does get easier. And you may or may not have experienced this yourself, but when you’re niching to something specific, it’s kind of like musicians who go on tour and they sing the same song every day for six months. It’s the same with speaking about a specific topic. You master your speech every single time you say it, and then it just flows naturally and you can add and and take away whatever kind of vavoom you want to put in there.
Stone Payton: [00:21:21] Well, I don’t know where you would find the time, but I’m going to ask anyway. What passions, pursuits outside the scope of your work? Well, like for me, our listeners, my listeners know that I like to hunt fish and travel, right? Like they know that’s my thing outside of it. Is there something like that that you have a tendency to nerd out about and dive into outside the scope of the of the work we’re talking about?
Jenna Griffith: [00:21:45] Yes, I absolutely love traveling. I spend my money on travel, not on things. And I also say that music is my love language. I play guitar, I sing, and I’m teaching my kid how to play guitar. And it’s nice to just sit on the porch and strum it and be away from the world.
Stone Payton: [00:22:05] So but it’s probably true of anyone, but certainly I would say for people in an entrepreneurial arena, I think we need that that white space, right, to to kind of escape a little bit and then come back refreshed. It’s important, isn’t it?
Jenna Griffith: [00:22:21] It is, but so many people struggle with it. My husband is one of them, and I watch him grow and grow and grow and grow in the overwhelm. And I’m like, Babe, you’ve got to do something. And his is football. He’s a huge football fanatic. And even last year I said, You haven’t been watching football as much. That tells me something is going on. But he has gotten to a place where if he’s not rescuing, then someone’s being hurt or someone’s in need. And it backfired a little bit where we have to know that that’s why we build these connections and these partnerships with other amazing organizations that are allowing him that space to take a step back. Watch football. He loves to do those float tanks, too.
Speaker4: [00:23:13] Oh, I’ve heard of those.
Stone Payton: [00:23:14] I’ve never done that.
Speaker4: [00:23:16] You have.
Jenna Griffith: [00:23:16] To try. It’s it’s I will tell you, the first time a little strange because it takes all of your senses and and takes them away because you are in a tank. So you don’t hear anything, can’t really smell anything. And once you’re still enough to feel the weightlessness of it, you can’t feel anything either. Wow. It’s incredible.
Stone Payton: [00:23:39] All right. I think I’ll give that a shot. Okay. Before we wrap, I would love to leave our listeners if we could. Maybe a couple of I call them pro tips from the book, from your work, just a couple of actionable items, something that they could and we could begin to work on on our own. The number one pro tip gang is reach out to Jenna and her team, have a conversation, look into this community. But short of that or previous to that, maybe there’s something we could be doing or not doing or thinking about or reading to try to get us on this path to purpose and prosperity.
Jenna Griffith: [00:24:17] Well, there is something that I teach and it is not something that I came up with my I came up with on my own, I’ll be very honest with. But a mentor of mine taught it to me and her mentor taught it to her. And I teach about this on my free website. It’s called Jenny’s Free gifts.com. And I have free resources on there for anybody to come and start that journey like you’re talking about. And the number one most impactful exercise is writing out your eulogy.
Speaker4: [00:24:51] Wow.
Jenna Griffith: [00:24:51] Because if you know how you want to be remembered in the world, how on earth are you going to create a life leaving the legacy that you’re wanting to leave? And when I did this exercise, she had us completely write it out. And you cannot think. You just have to do you just have to start writing. Go for it and think about things like your health, your wealth, how you want to impact the community, the type of husband or wife or parent that you want to be. Be as detailed as possible and then you can categorize your eulogy into different categories to focus on, okay, if this is going to be true when I die and I’m just going to put it out there, I’m going to be 100. Okay. So I’m only 20. No, I’m kidding. So that tells me I’ve got 60 years to do these things so that people remember me for what I want to be remembered for. So what needs to happen in the next five years? And then what needs to happen in the next year to be on track with that? And then quarter and then month and then week. And it helps you organize all the chaos of the dream of the purpose you’re wanting to have so that you can not sit in limbo wondering, well, one day I’ll get to that. One day I’ll start that business or one day I’ll volunteer for that nonprofit or whatever the case may be. It just gives you that amazing view of what do I need to do now?
Stone Payton: [00:26:25] What a marvelous exercise. I am so glad that I asked. All right. What’s the best way for our listeners to begin to tap into your work, connect with you? Clearly, as you mentioned at the very top of the conversation, you’re all about connection. Whatever you feel like is appropriate, I just want to make sure that folks can get connected with you and yours.
Jenna Griffith: [00:26:46] Yeah. So on Instagram, I’m Ms.. Jenna Griffith. Miss Jenna. Jenna Griffith. Griffith, H. And like I just mentioned, you can go and get your freebies on my website. Jenna’s free Gifs.com. I’ve got some amazing resources on there. Videos, PDFs, all to kickstart the momentum towards your own purpose.
Stone Payton: [00:27:12] Well, Jenna, it has been an absolute delight having you on the show this afternoon. Thanks for your insight, for your perspective, and keep up the good work. What you’re doing is so important and I want to stay connected with you. Maybe after the book’s out a little bit, we’ll we’ll circle back around and maybe get some feedback on how that’s going.
Jenna Griffith: [00:27:34] I would love that. Thank you so much for having me. And I look forward to talking again.
Stone Payton: [00:27:38] Well, it is my pleasure. All right. Until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guest today, Jenna Griffith. And everyone here at the Business RadioX family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.
Dr. Pamela Williamson, President & CEO of 
Anna Kawar, National Director of Quality Improvement and Impact, 
