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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Stable Parenting Podcast. My name is Shane Jacob, your host, and I thank you for taking your time to be here with me today. Excited to have our guests that we have today.
Today I'm proud to present Jessie Torres. Hope I got that right, right?
That's right.
Cool. Okay. Just making sure.
Jesse's a performance coach, a life strategist. She's coached thousands of people from all walks of life in various parts of the world that achieve more success and fulfillment. Jessie is fueled by a love for humanity and a burning desire to end suffering. Her teachings help transform pain or trauma into purpose and passion to what she calls or refers to as âfierce grace.â
Jessie, thank you so much for being here with us today. We appreciate your time. It's a pleasure to meet you today.
Me too, I'm super excited to be here, Shane. Thank you for the opportunity. Always excited to speak to new audiences and I appreciate you.
Right on. Jesse, I've read a little bit about your past, your history, what brought you to the place to be a coach, where it all started, your life as a younger, where you began. And I'm just wondering, for those who haven't heard, if you can just kind of rewind back into your life, tell us about some of your experience, as much as you feel comfortable with, to what led you to be where you are today.
Absolutely, thank you so much. My purpose, as you've seen, is to alchemize pain into power. How do we take our life journeys, our adversity, our hurt, and actually utilize it as fuel to create the identity that we choose from a conscious state of being?
So how that was created was from my own journey of, you know, abuse. I had a history of abuse with my father, sexual abuse, and then right, my first 18 years. And then my next 18 years was in a marriage that just left me emotionally apathetic and not wanting to live. It was very brutal emotionally, mentally, verbally. And I got to that place where I was just wishing somebody would blow the red light. If this was life, then it wasn't worth living.
In the midst of that, I lost my brother to murder. Very shocking, very unexpected, thing that you think you read about in the papers and it happens to other people, but doesn't happen to you, you know? And then boom, it happened and it was so shocking.
So a lot of different moments of an uppercut in life, if you will. You know, wondering when, when is it going to stop? When am I going to experience joy in life?
And so getting to that place of apathy, it was an act of kindness that actually, I call it, short-circuited me. It created a difference in my mindset to believe that I didn't know even to call it kindness, but it was these people, this group of people that acted kind to me and I did not know to label it. I just knew that it made me feel something that I had not felt.
Whatever spark of life was left in me, it triggered that and it gave me the strength to end my marriage and begin my life journey. At that point, I was 38, and I didn't know who I was.
You know, and so now I've got three kids and I'm on a path in total survival. I made eight bucks an hour back then. You know, and I was like, I don't know how to even begin to not only create stability for me, but stability for my children.
And it opened an obsession, if you will, in my essence to understand. I wanted to know why my father did what he did, why my mother didn't listen to me when I tried to tell her at 16. Why my husband did what he did and why I allowed it.
I started to read, I started to go to therapy, I started to go to seminars, workshops, whatever I could get my hands on. I knew that if I was going to make it in this life, and if I had chosen to live it, that I was going to live it in a state of joy, abundance, and love. And I had no clue as to how to begin.
So I did that and I started researching. And from that, it's taken me to, you know, education, going to coaching certification. In my therapy sessions asking, I want to do what you do, but that's a whole lot of school and a whole lot of time. And this is back in like 2006.
And my therapist said, âWell, you should be a coach.â
And I was like, soccer coach? What are you talking about? Like, I didn't understand. But I started to research and I found a school. I got certified. Then I got hired on as a Tony Robbins coach. Then I went to India for meditation instructor. Then I became a trainer for Heart Math. And I did all these things. I can stack all the certifications, domestic violence counselor, but nothing taught me like my own journey.
And so my purpose now is to know and believe that if I can find light in the darkest moments, so can you.
And so two years ago in November, my little brother was murdered. So now I have another tragedy in my journey. At this point, I've done my work. And I prayed. And I'm like, OK God, if both my brothers are meant to be taken, what do you want with me? Why am I here? Why am I left to have this journey and they're not?
And the answer that I heard loud and clear was, âYou have to eat your own medicine, Jessie, that in your sorrow and your grief and your gut-wrenching pain right now, you need to find the light.â
And because of that, I was able to do it. Even when I was in a deep state of grief, I knew that the depth of my grief was equivalent to the depth of my love. I was able to see his daughter showing up in a way that, you know, the three oldest ones had not met before. They're different mothers and they acted like they grew up together. They connected at the loss of their father.
My family showing up in a way they never have. I saw people posting on his Instagram how he changed their lives. And so there's always light to be found. But in life, we need the contrast. We don't know light without dark.
And so if we can start to look at our journey as a pathway to our divinity, as a pathway to our expansion, then we can find light in every situation.
That is a lot. That's a tremendous amount of adversity that you've faced. And you know, a lot of times there's a couple of things in that. A lot of times we think, well, we found our solution and now we got it and everything's fine.
But I mean, this latest, most recent tragedy is another shocking example that just, I mean, to me, shows that this life is gonna be a difficult road sometimes. And I don't think that we just all of a sudden, it's over and we figured out all the solutions.
I mean, these are things that we need to practice ongoing. I wonder, Jessie, could you just go back a little bit to one of these times? You talked about just being, I guess the way I took it, was kind of feeling hopelessness and like how we feel in those moments and the choices that we have. And then maybe even go into a little bit more about what happened and how you actually felt that started, like those moments where you changed your thoughts?
Well, that's such a great question. And what I didn't realize is that we can change our thoughts, right? We grow up and we have these experiences in our journey and we develop meaning around them. And once we develop meaning around what happened, we start to create an identity around those meanings of who we think we are.
So I wasn't raised in personal development. I didn't even pick up a book to read. I'd read the first paragraph, I'd fall asleep. You know what I mean? I wasn't raised with the belief thatâboth my parents immigrated here from Peru and worked hard and worked to become citizens of the US, which I'm super proud of. And, you know, Spanish was my first language. I had to learn English. I didn't know anything about what I could do with my circumstances.
I didn't have a belief that I could change anything. But in that place of apathy, where I'm literally praying somebody would blow the redlight so I could be done in this lifeâbecause suicide was not an option for me because of my children. I didn't want to leave them with that. But in my essence, I was wanting it to end because I was in so much pain. I was like, this isn't life. I don't want to live this life.
And then I would pray that my husband would crash in a plane crash when he'd go travel, and then maybe I could be a widow and that would be better. You know what I mean? And then I felt horrible shame and guilt overthinking such a horrific thing, you know? And so I was in this vicious cycle of, this really hurts.
And when these people acted kindly to me, I didn't know what it was. It short-circuited my brain. I didn't know to call it kindness. All I knew is that I felt something I hadn't felt before. And in that moment, I thought, if this feeling is available, then life is worth living.
And just from that little spark, I was able to then start to take action. And it was all in survival, but it served me. And there was enough in me that I was able to take the steps to get myself out of the situation I was in.
This is why I share with people right nowâthere's so much chaos going on politically and in our world. We feel helpless and hopeless. I want each of you to know that your act of kindness can change the trajectory of someone's life like it did mine. Those people will never know who they woke up.
Yeah. That is so awesome, those angels in your life, Jessie. Those angels in your life. Yeah.
Yes, exactly. And they're there waiting, but they need to connect with you. And they come in, and sometimes we miss them if we don't look for them, right?
If we can just really lean in, there's some divine choreography happening here. There's the hand of God or the universeâwhatever you believe in, is here at my back, not punishing me, not condemning me. There's something here for me. And you start to seek the light, and even in the deepest, darkest moment, you will find it.
That is so awesome. I appreciate that. Jessie, I want to go from here to something that you said, or something I read on your website, I think, but it's something from you.
And what it says, yes, it is, I think it is from your website, it says at least 75% of people are consistently feeling that they're not enough, whether it be their career, their appearance, their personal relationships. And this causes all this negative, disempowering behavior, such as all the addictive behaviors and imposter symptoms, disconnected from our own life.
And I wanted to just go on about that because, I mean, at least 75%, and I would say possibly even higher than that, are thinking that we're just not enough all the time.
Well, you know, it's such an important question because we don't realize that we're adopting that belief. It lives under the radar of our existence.
And what happens, if you think about a child that goes to the grocery store with their mom, and they're playing with toys in the aisle, and then mom goes to the end of the aisle to grab something. She can see him, but he can't see her, right? So all of a sudden he lifts up his head, he doesn't see his mom, screams, âMommy, where are you?â Right?
She's right there, sheâs like, you know, 10 secondsâand she's like, âI'm right here.â He's like, âOK,â you know, she comes in, she serves. There's no abuse, there's no bad intent. But the child, it's a human experience, the child anchors, I could be abandoned. I could be left behind.
It's an unconscious thing. So now when mommy leaves the room, he's anxious, he gets sad, he's upset, or when he can't see her. And he doesn't realize he's anchored this meaning.
So now he's 35 and he doesn't know why he can't keep a relationship because he's controlling, insecure, and jealous, because he's driving from an unconscious conditioning that I could be left behind. So now he's too clingy and he's holding on too tight, but he doesn't know to know.
I look at it as three pillars of trauma: there's undiagnosed, there's unacknowledged, and there's unresolved. So the undiagnosed are these, right? He doesn't know to know why he feels so insecure or unworthy or unlovable. He's equated that âI could be abandonedâ to âWhy am I not good enough to keep me?â
Right. And so again, it begins our not enoughness.
Or let's say you have alcoholic parentsâand, you know, my ex-husband is one of them, which, by the way, there's no vilification here. I love my ex-husband. This is not to vilify, this is for understanding. His mother called him a loser every day. She was an alcoholic mother. So he adopted the belief, if my mother thinks I'm a loser, well, gosh, I probably am, because she's supposed to love me. And she thinks I'm a loser, so I am.
So you adopt not enoughness.
In my particular circumstance, my father behaved this way. I adopted the belief that I was dirty. I was damaged goods. No one's going to love me. I was touched inappropriately by my father. That's icky. That's the meaning I made that I didn't know I made. So now I'm driving from that not enoughness, right?
And so it's just part of our human experience that we adopt these things. And they're like little microchips in our essence that now develop our identity.
Right, so then we have people that feel like an imposter, âOh, I show up this way, but if they only knew that I come from alcoholic parents and da da da.â Or, you know, you show up having to prove energy, or you show up controlling everything because then people see your strength, but inside you feel totally insignificant. Or you're shy and you're introverted and you don't show up because you're afraid that you'll get bullied again, or you'll get knocked down, or maybe your parents told you to stay back, or you found chaos and you only knew how to retreat.
So we adopt these belief systems, and it's wrecking our society. There's a lot of wounding.
Yeah, for sure. There's a lot of wounded. Amen to that. Speaking of wounded, I was wondering if you could talk about, you know, myths about traumaâyou know, that we have myths about⌠What are common myths about trauma?
Well, I think one of the myths is that we don't have any. Some people say, you know, I had a great upbringing. Parents were awesome. Always told me I was amazing, right? And so that's beautiful.
Sometimes what we do with trauma is we equate it to big traumas like rape or, you know, or physical abuse, which of course they are, but I say trauma is whatever the child made meaning of in the moment of the experience.
Like the child in the grocery store with the mom, that is a trauma moment, right? It's a moment where he made meaning of not enoughness: I could be abandoned, which equates to I'm not good enough to keep safe. He lost safety in just that millisecond or 10 seconds of âI don't know where my momis.â He felt unsafe. That unsafety equates to âWhy am I not enough to protect?â
It's not, again, the mom didn't do anything wrong. It's no abuse, but that's just who we are as human beings. And so it's very scary.
From that place, we identify, âI don't have any traumas. âTraumas could have come from a teacher, you got a bad grade on a test, and they handed you the grade or the test and they just looked at you and said, âYou're going to have a rough life.â Just make a comment like that, boom, microchip in the brain. âOof, I'm going to have a rough life.â
We don't know, it could have been you witnessing somebody be treated wrongly that created a trauma moment. You know what I mean? There are so many different layers to it that I think one of the myths is that we think we don't have it.
One of the ways I start, Shane, when I do coaching is I start to look at people and where they are today. In other words, sometimes they're like, âOh, I already healed my past. I already forgave my father. I alreadyâŚâ you know, all these things.
And I'm like, OK, so if you're here, it's because there's something limiting you right now, whether you're not asking for the promotion, whether you're not opening up that business, whether you're not building the best relationship you could have.
Where's the limitation today? Let's talk about it. And every time we talk about the limitation today, there is an invisible thread that goes back to a trauma moment where the human being created limitation.
Once we're able to unravel that and see that and heal it, now we can move forward in our lives.
Because part of the thing with personal development right now, which is amazing, we have tools: change your mindset, change your state, change your story, positive affirmations. All these things are amazing, don't get me wrong. However, they're tools that move us through, but we're not actually healing.
So here's what happens: now we move through, we get empowered for the moment, but then we find ourselves disempowered again. And now we have a bigger reason to beat ourselves up, âOof, I read the books, I went to the seminar, I'm doing the thing, why am I still here? What's wrong with me?â And now we have a deeper invitation of shame.
It's kind of like installing new software on an old operating system, expecting it not to glitch. It's going to glitch because the operating system has not been upgraded to receive the new software. So that's why it's so imperative that we actually heal.
So when you talk about healing, this is super great, I mean, there's so much in it that is awesome about what you're saying.
The things that I'm hearing are, first of all, just that most, or probably all of us, I would say all of us, have experienced some trauma. So just to recognize that. And then the things that are inside this supercomputer that we may not be aware of, that we're holding to be true about ourselvesâthis meaning that we made in the past about somethingâis coming out in ways that we're, you know, we want to change, but we're not getting it done.
And so you're saying that sometimes we go through the, âWell, here's how, if you're doing this, here's how to get a different result. âAnd we do it, but then we kind of come back to it because we really haven't changed the internal meaning.
When you say healing, I'm assuming that what your meaning is, is getting the tools and help that are available today to be able to go back to really, foundationally change the meaning that we made about ourselves in this thing. You want to talk more about that?
Yes. So what we're doing is we're bringing an unconsciousâthese things were unconsciously created. We didn't purposely⌠that little boy in the grocery store didn't say, âOoh, I'm going to anchor abandonment.â It was an unconscious thing that the human being does.
What we're doing is we're bringing the unconscious to consciousness. We're bringing it forward because now, when we look at it, we can now make a conscious decision of what we do with that experience.
For instance, for me, when I was little, I learned to build traps to warn me when my father was coming into my room. It didn't really work, but it helped me feel better. And so you can look at that and say, âThat's tragic that a little girl had to build traps to warn her when her father was coming into her room,â which is true.
What I now see is a brave little girl. I see a little girl that showed courage. I see a little girl that was resilient. I see a little girl that was creative and resourceful, because that is also true.
So this one disempowers me and takes me out and makes me feel sad for myself, for that little girl. And this one empowers me and allows me to fall in love with the aspects of me that got through it.
And so we're not taught, right? Coaches say your past doesn't equal the future, and I disagree. I think it absolutely can. We're just not taught to seek the gifts in it. If we don't look for the gift, we only remember the pain.
That's huge right there because I think what you're saying is that you might not be able to change the circumstances of the past, but you can damn sure change the past, in other words, the way that what happened for you.
What you see, yeah. And I equate it to, I help you see the unseen so you never unsee it.
Because now, when I look at myself as that little girl because trust me, I judged that little girl. I judged myself profusely. Because now I'm all grown up and I'm smart, right? So now I'm like, you should have fought harder, you should have kicked, you should have screamed, you should have spit, you should have poked his eyeâyou should have all these things, because now I'm all grown up and smart and I know better.
So I used to condemn my little self. Now I can't go back to seeing her as a victim. I only see the power she gained because she got backup. So I can't unsee it.
It makes it harder for our mindset to go back to old patterns of behavior because you're too witness to it. I don't see her as a disempowered victim now. I see her as a beautiful little girl that went through what she went through so I could be who I am today.
I didn't know that I was going to need resourcefulness, creativity, and courage later in my life when I was getting a divorce or when I was having kids. I didn't know I was going to need it, but our Creator did.
That's awesome. That is beautiful. Thank you for that. Super powerful. Jessie, you want to share with us about what the fierce grace, what it means and how you go about it, how you use it?
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Fierce grace and why I call it the Fierce Grace Method is because it is the dual energies that live within all of us.
Like I just shared right now, we don't know light without dark. It is the polarity of life, right? We wouldn't know joy if we didn't know sadness. We wouldn't have the contrast. It's just how life is.
Fierce grace is a representation of both energies of understanding that our deepest, darkest moments are equivalent to the brightness of our light. The depth of our darkness is equivalent to the expansion of our light.
It's also the masculine and feminine. Both energies live within each and every one of us. Right now, we have a very exhausted society because, well, you know, women have been stomped down for so long that now we fought hard to prove we could do it allâand we absolutely can. But do we want to?
We have more women in their masculine energy when it isn't their core essence, and they're exhausted, they're burnt out, they're tired, and they don't know how to put down their guard. So what it's created is an imbalance in our society.
Our men don't know how to show up. They're just like, âShould I help you carry the groceries or will that be insulting you? I don't know.â So either we get hyper-masculine men or we get pleasers. And we're like, âOK, they're cool because they do the laundry,â but there's no polarity.
We need the polarity in order to know that we can put our guard down and we can be in the essence of who we are innately and allow the balance. It's not an âorâ energy it's an âandâ energy.
The difference between âI'm going to fight as a womanâ is different than âMama bear, I'm going to protect.â So that's the masculine in me. But if I'm living in that fight mode, then I'm going to attract a man who's going to want to fight me or who's going to want to walk around me on tiptoes. Neither one is good.
So how do we bring ourselves back to equilibrium and balance so that we're flowing through both and we're not driving from wound, we're driving from a healed, emotional, regulated state, which is our true core, authentic essence.
Wow, that is exceptional. That is exceptional. Thank you so much for your thoughts on all of this. That is a lot to consider.
I know that your wisdom and your experience just flow out of you very naturally. Jessie, I guess I'd just ask you for your last thoughts, summary overall, best you can. Life's a big, complicated process, it seems like some days, but if you were to sum it up, what would you like to leave us with today on the Stable Parenting Podcast?
Thank you for the question. I'd like to leave that life is a journey of exploration having the courage to look within.
Because the way we change the world, and the world could be the world in its entirety or it could be your world, your family, your children, your friends is being willing and courageous enough to look inside.
Where can I be the best version of myself? Where have I placed limitation on myself? What scares me? And starting to just take one step in that direction.
In fact, I have a gift for your audience. It's a 10-step guide to freedom. And in there, no matter what your situation, you matter and you can move out of it.
If I can come from a place of wanting to die, to now rejoicing every single day that I get to serve humanity, so can you. Right? And because I know some people might be thinking, âThis is all great, Jessie, but you don't understand my situation. You don't realize I can't do anything about it. I can't move. I don't have the money, or I don't have the supportâŚâ
Trust me when I tell you there are steps that you can take in this moment that will help move the needle to create that opening that I didn't know I had. I was grateful enough to have people in my life that were kind and triggered something in me.
So if you're looking for a message or a signal or a sign, this is it. This is it. Listen and know that you matter to the whole.
If we want to make a difference, if we want to be the best versions of ourselves, it starts with us. And trust that when you are able to look within and pull out the weeds that are damaging or putting a density in your essence, that immediately you start to serve humanity because you show up differently.
You now have different conversations. You now smile at the Starbucks lady and compliment her. And you don't know that she's about ready to go through divorce, or you don't know that she's in a domestic violence situation. You don't know the chaos she's going through. But because you showed up and you loved on her and just complimented her smile, it was just enough to keep her going.
We do not know the chaos people are living in, right? But it's up to us to show up in kindness. And when you are willing to look in the mirror and make yourself the best version of you, you will, in essence, help others do the same.
Awesome. Jessie, so we'll look for the free gift in the show notes. Anything you'd like to add to that as far as where people can find you?
Absolutely, you can go to IamFierceGrace.com and just know that on there, there's multiple ways to work with me.
If anything, if you're confused and you don't know what to do there's a âLet's Connectâ button. Just click on that. It is a free consultation, and it's just an opportunity for you and I to chat and to see, is there an opportunity where I could serve you?
I promise I don't take on anyone that I cannot help. But no matter what, we'll get some massive clarity, and we'll get you in the right direction to what you need in order for you to maximize the results in your life.
âAwesome. That is very good. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your time here today. That was some powerful words and I believe helpful. Thank you so much.
Ladies and gentlemen, Jessie Torres.
âThank you.
âAnd remember, you cannot fail as long as you Don't Ever Stop Chasing It.
â
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