Hello, everyone. Welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind. I’m your host, Kristin Maxwell, and in this show we explore the process of transformation and give you tools and strategies that you can use to transform your own life. Today we have the pleasure of talking to Sarah Johnson about why balance and resiliency are crucial aspects of personal development. It’s going to be really fun to talk to Sarah because she’s somebody with a mission who has a little bit of a different background.
She is a former English teacher and principal turned author and entrepreneur and she’s living her own leap of faith on a mission to teach the masses the message of balance, resiliency, and faith. She is a state and national conference speaker around these topics and is also passionate about amplifying and empowering women through her podcast, In Awe. So Sarah, welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind.
Thank you, Kristin. I’m so grateful that I can have this conversation with you today and speak life into your listeners.
Yes, thank you. What a beautiful way to put that. Life with your listeners. Oh, I like that.
Go ahead.
No, go ahead. What were you going to say?
I was just going to say I genuinely believe that for listeners of podcasts, they are listening and hearing our messages and they land where they need to when they need to. That’s part of my main mission is just bringing those messages and speaking life balance.
Okay, perfect. That is so lovely. Often that’s my own experience with listening to podcasts is there are days where it’s exactly what you need to get out of whatever funk you are in, whatever way you are looking at the world, it lands and it gives you something that’s like, “Oh, there’s hope right there. Right there.”
Yes.
So my first question is always what superpower did you uncover as the result of mastering your mind?
I just love this question because I’ve just been doing a lot of recent development in my own life on this topic because I think so often we move through life quickly and we don’t really think. We’re always in our mind, right? So we don’t realize that the things we’re thinking are not the things that other people think. I mean, sometimes we just realize they’re a superpower only after we’ve spent time really analyzing ourselves. I’ve done that. So I can tell you that I have two actually, Kristin.
Oh, good.
Yeah. One of them is actually noticing the beauty and excellence in the world around me. When I first discovered that I thought, “Oh, it seems so fluffy” and people think that just doesn’t really matter and it’s all Rose colored glasses and things like that.
I’ve recently spent a lot of time learning about my own disposition through the Enneagram and I’ve learned that I’m an Enneagram seven with a wing of eight, which explains a lot about myself. But a huge part of that is a character strength in just seeing the joy and the good around me. But I realized that it’s a super power because it turns out that not everybody is in awe of the sunrise the way I am. Those that follow me on social media will understand what I’m talking about. I live in a really tiny town and there’s a dock that I love to run to and I will catch that sunrise. I know that I have a hundred and some opportunities every summer because we have nine months of winter where I live.
So I take that opportunity, but it also translates to just noticing the special moments in my life so that it doesn’t pass me by quickly. I realized that a lot of us are on the hamster wheel and we’re not taking time to do that. I just do that kind of naturally and I didn’t realize that was a superpower until I started looking at it and cultivating it. I think the second super power is really a disposition of gratitude. I understand that that comes naturally to me, and I also understand that it’s something that I have to discipline myself to continue to grow and to foster. I also believe there’s so much really beautiful research out there about gratitude and its foundation to actually make us more joyful, right?
So it’s not that we’re joyful so we can be grateful. It’s that our gratitude makes us joyful. I realized that that is a super power because it’s carried me through the loss of a brother to suicide, the near demise of my marriage. I chose to leave my position, but there’s a challenge in that and just wandering through the wilderness. But that ability to see what I have to be grateful for has really carried me balancing through all of that. So it’s an incredible superpower that I believe anybody could master truly.
Yes. Oh, you just said so much. So much. The first one I’m going to point out is I love what you’re talking about with the Enneagram, and I’m sure lots of people who are listening don’t know what that is, but if you have the chance to check it out, it is amazing. What I love is you are a seven and I think what you’re saying and what I understand is sevens, you’re going to naturally see the good in the world. You’re going to be like, “Hey, life is a party. Let’s go enjoy the world.”
I am a six and a six looks at the world from a place of fear, hence my show and my focus on helping people really get out of that, which is a place of, “Oh my gosh, I’m not safe.” That’s the way that I look at the world. So for you listeners who aren’t aware of it, it’s so incredible to know that there is just a natural way that some people have come to the world and it’s nothing wrong with you, it’s just who you are.
Yeah. I would say if you haven’t already engaged with the Enneagram, I think it’s so … I actually wrote about this recently and I think it’s really important that we do spend time knowing yourselves. What I love about the Enneagram is that it helps to reveal how we are at our healthiest and our unhealthy states and how we handle stress from that vantage point of our core style. So for the seven, the negative side of that can be that we can cope and cover up and ignore the hard stuff. So that could be the default, but because I know myself, for example, I’m making sure that I’m mindful of not coping and that I walk into the pain and I grow through the pain. But that was not always the case. In fact, even in recent years, I didn’t even realize I was coping.
So there’s a lot of stigma that can come with being an Enneagram seven because you’re flighty and you just flip from one thing to the other. But my wing, my eight, is leadership so that grounds me and it’s good because when I was reading through the description of that, at one point I was like, “Ah, people are just going to see me as flaky if I start telling them I’m a seven,” but I am my unique version of that seven. I think that’s really critical when you engage in any type of a personality inventory that we understand the base of where it’s coming from, but what do you bring to that and what is your life experience and your own unique imprint bring to that?
Yes. I have to say from just looking at your website and all the things you do, you are definitely not flaky. You would not get these things done if you were a flake, just to everybody out there. The other thing that I love that you brought up there is this idea of gratitude and how practicing gratitude actually makes you more grateful and the science behind it. Because yes, I used to be like, “Don’t tell me just to be grateful for things.”
I know, I can see all these terrible things that are happening in the world and the scary things. How can I be grateful for it? But when you start to learn to turn your brain towards gratitude, you start rewiring it so that it naturally goes there instead of to the places of what’s wrong. It goes, “Hey, what’s right?” And it literally changes how you feel and how you think when you make it a practice. So I love that you’re showing how it has carried you through.
I really appreciate your unique composition, how you share that you come from a place of fear because I would imagine then you have to exercise your no dominant hand to do those things. I really can value how challenging that could be. But I really also see and I’ve seen so many people that I’ve worked with over the last year or so in being intentional about my own mission, seeing how no matter where we come from, it does change and it can change those pathways in our brain. It’s so critical that we all do that, especially when we’re fed so much negativity.
Yes. And this is one of the reasons I have the podcast is because for decades of my life I was anxious all the time about losing, the loss, death. I mean, as long as I can remember. I learned through a combination of spirituality and changing my brain, like discipline and working on my beliefs on a whole different level, I learned to not live from that place and that’s what I want to share because even though I was happy and my life was great, I had anxiety always. So that’s my mission, is to help people with that.
Then we have to talk about you and actually your mission, but we have to go to a break first. So can you tell people where they can learn about you and your work?
Yes, I am on pretty much every social media platform that most people go to, @sarahsajohnson. You can find me on my website, which links to all that as well. It’s sarahsajohnson.com.
Great. Hang on, everybody, and when we come back, we’re going to be talking about balance and resiliency as key aspects of personal development.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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