Self-Care Isn't Separate: Why Your Well-Being Shapes Your Personal Brand with Jessie Spressart
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Description
Your personal brand isn’t just about what you deliver. It’s how you show up. If you’re exhausted, stressed to the point of breaking, or gripping your way through the week, that comes through too. No amount of polish can hide what’s happening underneath when you’re not actually taking care of yourself.
Jessie Spressart gets this. As founder and managing director of Optia Consulting, she helps law firms build cultures where people can do excellent work and be well at the same time. Her core belief is simple: doing your job well and taking care of yourself aren’t two separate conversations. They’re two sides of the same coin.
In this episode of Branding Room Only, Paula and Jessie unpack what really stops professionals from prioritizing their well-being and how stress quietly builds long before it becomes a crisis. Jessie shares practical resets you can use in five minutes or less, and explains why chasing perfection undermines the consistency your brand actually needs. They also dig into what it takes for leaders to get more comfortable talking about mental health, and why your brand suffers when what you think, feel, and do are out of alignment.
Chapters
1:19 — Jessie on personal brand, her three words, and her favorite quotes
5:44 — How moving from New Jersey to Louisville shaped her
7:48 — Jessie’s path from music historian to medieval history to law
11:14 — How a temp job as a legal secretary became 13 years at a firm
12:28 — The move from legal secretary to professional development
13:56 — Starting Optia Consulting in 2019 before the pandemic
15:44 — The shift from management training to well-being and mental health
19:42 — Why personal branding (and well-being) is about consistency, not perfection
22:09 — The biggest obstacles lawyers face around prioritizing well-being
26:22 — Shifting well-being from a program to part of the culture
28:39 — Mental Health Essentials for Leaders and why leaders must get conversant
33:23 — Stress and energy tools that take minutes, not hours
41:39 — Building a scaffolding of practices before you hit crisis
43:29 — Brain, body, behavior — and how all three show up in your brand
45:00 — Congruency and why misalignment kills your personal brand
50:02 — The part of her brand Jessie will never compromise
Connect With Jessie Spressart
Jessie Spressart is the Founder & Managing Director of Optia Consulting, where she helps law firms build cultures of trust, resilience, and sustainable performance. She’s a speaker, executive coach, and facilitator who believes that doing your job well and taking care of yourself aren’t separate conversations; rather, they're two sides of the same coin. With two decades in legal talent management and professional development, Jessie loves helping lawyers and legal professionals be at their best and do their best work.
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This episode is brought to you by PGE Consulting Group LLC.
PGE Consulting Group LLC empowers individuals and organizations to lead with purpose, presence, and impact. Specializing in leadership development and personal branding, we offer keynotes, custom programming, consulting, and strategic advising—all designed to elevate influence and performance at every level.
Founded and led by Paula Edgar, our work centers on practical strategies that enhance professional development, strengthen workplace culture, and drive meaningful, measurable change.
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Transcript
Paula Edgar: Welcome to Branding Room Only, the podcast where your personal brand gets a front-row seat. I'm Paula Edgar, and if you're here, it's because you know your brand isn't just about what you do. It's about how people experience you. In each episode, you'll hear stories, strategies, and lessons from leaders and influencers who built their brands and made their mark. And I'll share the tools you need to do the same. Let's go.
Hi, y'all. It's Paula Edgar, your host of Branding Room Only, and I'm very excited for my conversation today with my guest. Let me tell you about her. Jessie Spressart is the founder and managing director of Optia Consulting, where she helps law firms build cultures of trust, resilience, and sustainable performance.
She's a speaker, executive coach, and facilitator who believes that doing your job well and taking care of yourself aren't separate conversations. Rather, they're two sides of the same coin. With two decades in legal talent management and professional development, Jessie loves helping lawyers and legal professionals be at their best and do their best work.
Jessie, welcome to the Branding Room.
Jessie Spressart: Thank you so much, Paula. I'm so excited to be here with you today.
Paula Edgar: Me too. This is a well-fought-for time, and we're going to do it. All right. So I ask everybody, what does personal brand mean to you? How would you define it?
Jessie Spressart: You know, for me, it's what are you known for, right? To some extent, how people perceive you and hopefully those two pieces of a Venn diagram are a circle. So if you're doing it well, how you're putting yourself out there and how people are perceiving you are going to match up. So if your branding is working, then that's how it looks.
Paula Edgar: I love that. So speaking of brand, how would you define yourself in three words or short phrases?
Jessie Spressart: Three words for me, warm, vibrant, and surprising.
Paula Edgar: Oh, surprising.
Jessie Spressart: Surprising.
Paula Edgar: Yeah. I'm surprised by that word.
Jessie Spressart: See, I've already done my job.
Paula Edgar: So is that meaning that people underestimate you?
Jessie Spressart: Yeah. I mean, you can't tell from here, but I know we've met in person several times. I'm four foot 11. I'm very petite and people who experience me online when I see them in person, they're like, "Oh my gosh, I thought you were taller." So there's a little bit of surprise there. But also I do think that as somebody of short stature, people tend to underestimate you.
Paula Edgar: I think that you're right, as a 5'1 girly, I think that you're right, people always are like, "I thought that you were taller," and I'm like, "I'm seven foot one in my head."
Jessie Spressart: Right exactly. I present much taller than I am but it's not just the physical. People often underestimate women and people underrepresented, and so I really love to show up as myself and have people be like, "Oh, that's not what I was expecting." In a good way, obviously.
Paula Edgar: Right. Like, oh, no, I love that. I love that. So do you have a favorite quote or motto?
Jessie Spressart: I have two, if that's okay. So the first one is from Isak Dinesen. She says that the cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.
Paula Edgar: I love that quote. I love that quote. Oh my gosh. Go ahead. What's the next one?
Jessie Spressart: And so I just want to say it pulls together my thoughts on my work. You have to work hard. Sometimes you just have to cry it out. You have to take care of yourself. So that's why I love that one.
The other one is from John Shedd and also is water related. It says a ship in harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are for.
Paula Edgar: I love that. You know what? It ties into the who of you because water is wellness too, right? Water is where you go for healing. I love that first quote. It's taken me to a space where I'm like, "Yep, tears."
Jessie Spressart: Sweat. Yep.
Paula Edgar: Yes. I've never done what I'm supposed to do. So the ship in the harbor won't work as well.
Jessie Spressart: Well, and it also goes to you can be somewhere super safe, but you're not going to grow. You're not going to learn. You're not going to take on new things. So I have to put my money where my mouth is where that is concerned, but that's what I'm hoping that I can help the people that I work with do, right? Put themselves out there a little bit further.
Paula Edgar: All right. So tell me when Jessie is coming into the room, getting on the stage, grabbing the mic. What song is playing in your head? What's your hype song?
Jessie Spressart: So I've been thinking about this a lot for quite a while because I could never figure it out. But then I guess maybe six months or so ago, I was listening to Harry Styles' "Kindness."
Paula Edgar: Oh, I don't know that one.
Jessie Spressart: Oh, you will know it if you hear it. It is a bop and you can't help but move and get into the groove when you're listening to it. It's just this call to action of let's all be kind to each other, which is also something that really matters to me. So when I heard that, I was like, "That is my song."
Paula Edgar: And needed now more than ever. So love that reflection as well. Okay. Tell me, where did you grow up, and how do you think that shaped you?
Jessie Spressart: Oh, my goodness. Well, I lived in New Jersey until I was almost 16. So I'm a Jersey girl at heart. Then when I was halfway through high school, I moved to Louisville, Kentucky.
Paula Edgar: Wow.
Jessie Spressart: Exactly. Exactly. So this goes to what shaped me. Moving from a very East Coast, Northeastern mentality, which I feel like I've maintained quite a bit, to a very different culture, way of being. Halfway through high school, let me tell you.
Paula Edgar: Wow, right. It's a hard time anyway.
Jessie Spressart: Not the easiest experience. It's a hard time. Then that was me being put out, I'm not in safe and harbor anymore to go back to that quote. And, I've moved around a lot since then, but the experience of being shifting in that space was really formative because I had to put myself out there. I had to learn how to be in a different space and learn how to be with different people who have different ways of being. I think it served me well, even though it's not something I would ever want to do again.
Paula Edgar: Yeah. I hear that. I'm reflecting on the first time I went to Louisville. First of all, I was like, "We're in Louisville." They were like, "That's not how you say it." Again, I was an adult, so at least I could take a part of the bourbon.
Jessie Spressart: Right. That was not available to me.
Paula Edgar: I was going to say it worked out better for my part but so that's a huge shift and I do think that a lot of the folks who I talked to on the podcast when they have had significant moves in formative years it shapes how they show up because you have to have grit, especially going from east to south, that's a lot, that's a lot.
So from there, little Jessie, Louisville, tell me about your education and career path.
Jessie Spressart: Yeah. So after that, I went to a tiny little school in Western New York called Roberts Wesleyan College. It's a university now. It was a small school and I loved it. I got to direct my own education. I had amazing professors who really cared about me and helping me learn.
I started as a music major and that didn't last long. I love music. It's beautiful. My original plan, original, original plan was to become a music historian. By the end of my first semester, I was like, "Yeah, this isn't going to work for me."
So I just dropped the music and stayed with history and stayed as a history major, pulled enough credits to get a communication minor, which was communication theory and rhetoric, and all of these things that actually really matter to me now when I put together programs for people and help me present and put myself out there. So all super formative.
Once I dropped the music historian plan, I was like, "Well, I'm going to be a history professor instead." So I really wanted to be a teacher and really help people learn and grow. After undergrad, I moved to Scotland to get a master's degree at St. Andrews University, which was amazing. I loved it and came back to the States on September 2nd of 2001.
I was like, "I'm going to take a week off to relax and get my bearings." My plan was to start looking for jobs on September 11th.
Paula Edgar: Oh, gosh.
Jessie Spressart: Yeah. So that was not exactly the plan. It went awry there. So I ended up working for a telephone company as a customer service rep for about 18 months. That obviously was not my big grand plan, but learning how to talk to people and really listen to what they needed and help them solve their problems and be with a group of people that were very different from my demographic, I learned so much, and it was very interesting 18 months.
I went back to grad school in New York City. I went to Fordham, still planning to be a history professor. Medieval history was my thing. A couple of years later, by that point, I had met the guy who would become my husband. I realized, you know what, this is actually not what I want. I didn't want to be stuck in a library studying something for seven more years just to get my PhD.
So I was like, "Okay, I don't know what I want because I've been going towards this for so long." I took a leave of absence, and I was in New York. So I did what everybody in New York does to get a temp job.
Paula Edgar: I was going to say, what's that?
Jessie Spressart: Get a temp job, pay the bills.
Paula Edgar: I could have gone a lot of places.
Jessie Spressart: The first temp job I got was at a firm in New York as a legal secretary. I supported a couple of partners and associate and they liked me and I liked them. I stayed at the firm for 13 years. So that's how I got into the law.
Paula Edgar: Wow. First of all, you did a lot of culture shifts in that. I heard when you were saying about the culture of the telephone, working that process and being around different people, but also hearing and speaking to other people, it gives you a muscle that you didn't know. I did it for a little bit as well. I was like, "First of all, this is not for me." I'm not a customer service girly. I'm like, "I actually don't care." So anyway, so that didn't work well for me, but I could see how that could connect to even how you interact with people now. You have a very calm demeanor about you. I love that. I love that. So then you came into our world.
Jessie Spressart: I did.
Paula Edgar: Yes. So how did you move from supporting those folks to supporting the folks?
Jessie Spressart: The folks. So, yeah. So I moved from legal secretary into PD a couple of years into my time at the firm because it was that time where all the big firms were building out their PD departments and getting everything set up. I was like, "I can do this. This actually fits with the type of stuff I wanted to do." Yes, it's not medieval history, but it is helping people learn and grow and become who they want to be.
So I was like, "Oh, this is great." Then I got to the point, like the whole department was growing and changing. I hit the point where I was like, "I need to do something different for myself." So I was like, "Well, I can go to another firm and do the same thing that I've been doing somewhere else," which there's nothing wrong with that. But I wasn't quite ready to take that.
At the time, my husband had been trying to convince me to move to Miami. I was like, "I can't. My firm doesn't have an office in Miami. This isn't an option." So it all came together in 2018 for us to move to Miami, for me to leave the firm, and to move into consulting. Because this was before the pandemic, but that was a way that I could work from somewhere else and we can try something different.
So I left in 2018 and have been in consulting. I started my business in 2019. Great time to start a business six months before pandemic.
Paula Edgar: You know, it's that resilience. That's 2001.
Jessie Spressart: Right? Are we sensing a theme here?
Paula Edgar: Yes. So how was that evolving the business, doing what you're doing at that time?
Jessie Spressart: It was incredibly freeing, honestly, because I had to completely let go of any expectation of making money, of selling my services because everybody was clawing back and it made sense and I understood it.
So it allowed me to just then be like, "Okay, well, what can I do? How can I serve? How can I be present for people and do what I can to support them?" It was amazing because I was really able to, again, listen to people, understand what they needed, help them be heard and seen and start to support them.
That helped me really develop what it was that I was going to end up offering. So that by the time firms were ready to buy and hire people again, I had really had a chance to build my brand and become known for something without that added pressure of "oh, I have to sell. I have to sell."
Paula Edgar: So what is that brand? What are you known for? Tell me. Tell me about the work going into the space of well-being, being well in PD.
Jessie Spressart: Yeah. So originally my plan was to focus on management skills, right? So how do you do your job? Delegation, feedback, managing expectations, which is one of my favorite things to talk about. Over the course of the pandemic, I was like, "There's so much more to this."
I come from a family of therapists and social workers. So mental health has always been important to me. I knew that already the legal industry struggling with anxiety, depression, and all sorts of mental health challenges. Then add in the pandemic, like this is going to be really, really difficult.
So I became a crisis text line counselor. Then I was like, "How can I apply this to my colleagues in the law?" So I became a mental health first aid instructor. It really just snowballed from there. So many firms were focusing on helping their people take care of themselves through this very, very difficult period.
I was like, "Yeah, we need people to be able to take care of themselves and be able to do their jobs well." The two are inextricably linked. That really is what grew out of all of that time where I was listening to folks and helping people get grounded in what they needed to be focusing on.
Paula Edgar: What really resonates for me about what you just said is not just that "I had an interest and started doing it," but you also acted and learned in order to support. So what I love about the folks who do PD well is that they are continuing to learn, right? It's an investment in yourself and then investing in others.
You have the hearing, noting the issue, supporting yourself, and then being able to support other folks. That is like a circle that not enough people complete in my mind.
Jessie Spressart: No, it's so true. It's really funny because I have found myself saying to some people recently that I have to put my well-being money where my well-being mouth is. I have to take care of myself. I have to make sure that I am getting sleep, moving my body, seeing my therapist, doing the things that I need to do so I can be at my personal best so that I can do my job well.
I run this business. I have an assistant, but it's me. So if I'm really struggling on the wellbeing side, my business is going to struggle. So I take that very personally. That's what I try to help other people understand.
Paula Edgar: I mean, it resonates for me because, I mean, we're in similar situations. I was actually at a conference recently and somebody was like, "Well, Paula, are you taking care of yourself?" I was like, "Am I taking? I take care of myself more than most people take care of themselves."
I went through my list of all the things that I do and I reflected in anticipation of this conversation, too, in that I had a strategy, didn't realize I had a strategy. I was just taking care of myself. I was just saying, "Paula, you have to go to therapy once a week. Paula, you need to get a massage once a week."
But putting it all together and actually listing it out for the person, they were like, "Okay, yeah, you're doing pretty good there." But it is a reflection of that I am the product. Just like what you said, like I'm the person who's out, got to be front first thing. If not, everything else collapses, but that's everybody.
Jessie Spressart: Yes. Yes. It absolutely is. You know, you can be working at a huge firm and have a ton of people around you, and it still is true that if you're not taking care of yourself, your work is going to suffer. It's not going to be sustainable.
One thing that is so important to me to communicate to people is we're not after perfection here, right? Either with our work or with our wellbeing, we're looking for consistency. We're looking for, and this goes back to branding, right? Branding is not perfect. It's consistent.
So it's the same thing. We're looking for consistency. So you know what? You have really intense weeks and months where you can't be at a hundred percent work-wise or wellbeing-wise or personally, right? But you do your best. Sometimes your best is 80% and that 80% is your hundred percent.
You do what you have to do. Not that I would actually have anything to point to recently, but it's true. So a lot of people don't engage with taking care of themselves and wellbeing because they think "I have to do it all and I have to do it all perfectly," and it's all or nothing.
I have a colleague who does similar things in a different space. She's like, "Can we stop with the all or nothing and go with all or something?" I'm like, "Brandi, that is the best."
Paula Edgar: Because it puts less on the hook, which is a part of wellbeing, right?
Jessie Spressart: Yeah, exactly, exactly. What is one small thing I can do? I also think a lot of times people think you have to do something huge in order to be successful. I keep coming back to no, it's actually the really small things that build up both work-wise and well-being-wise to be that consistency of showing up and doing what you need to do.
Paula Edgar: So you brought it in already in terms of your response before. But I really wanted to dig into the branding piece of this, which is a good brand is based on excellent work product. To your point, not perfection, but excellence. It should be what we're striving for.
In thinking about you saying that taking care of yourself and doing the job are not separate, they're the same, really makes me think that if you are not taking care of yourself, your brand is not going to show up the way you want it to show up either.
Jessie Spressart: It's true. It's true.
Paula Edgar: Yeah. Tell me what you think the biggest barriers that lawyers, you know, our peeps and legal professionals, face when it comes to prioritizing. Because well-being is not necessarily at the first part of the evaluation list.
Jessie Spressart: Right. I know. I wish it were. I'm working on it. No, the biggest obstacle I do think is perfection, that you have to do it all. You have to get it all right. I think another huge obstacle is the perception that you, as a lawyer, can't take care of yourself.
Paula Edgar: Talk more about that.
Jessie Spressart: Well, right. There are billing pressures and client pressures and the need to be on all the time in case somebody needs you at two o'clock in the morning. There are times where that is true, but it is not all the time.
So it's these preconceived notions, these limiting beliefs, to use some coaching speak, you're not allowed to take care of yourself because your work comes first all the time. I really, really want to challenge that.
Paula Edgar: Do you think that that's what people, the challenge is that in this culture of the law, that it was not being modeled, that people weren't seeing folks doing that. So the perception is a self-fulfilling prophecy of I must be the stoic person who gets everything done and is always on and not realizing that there are some people who are actually taking care of themselves. They're just not sharing it.
Jessie Spressart: Right. Right. Well, because it's not acceptable to be like, "Oh, hey, I took my PTO and went on vacation and made sure that all of my matters were being handled by somebody else so I could actually not open my laptop for a day or a week or whatever."
Paula Edgar: A week.
Jessie Spressart: I know. I know. Even that gives me a little bit of, "Did I just say that?"
Paula Edgar: I have a question that I want to ask you to piggyback on that, that I have been thinking about, but I didn't think to ask you ahead of time. So it is this, what are your thoughts on unlimited PTO?
Jessie Spressart: Ah. I think it is very blurry, and I'm not a fan. Like I was saying before, clear expectations are one of the most powerful gifts you can give somebody. When you say take all the time you want, you have unlimited PTO, that is such a vague statement because it's not true. You can't take all the time you want. So telling people to use your best judgment, I'm sorry, not everybody has great judgment.
Paula Edgar: There's that.
Jessie Spressart: And there are people who are like, "If I take any time, I'm going to get penalized for it." There are other people who are going to be like, "I'm going to take two months off." Then there's internal one-upsmanship of how little time you're taking, when actually the goal is for people to take time. You have to take time. You have to take care of yourself. You have to rejuvenate. You have to recharge. So I would rather it just be super clear.
Paula Edgar: I think that there are going to be studies, there probably already are, that I just don't know about, that are going to say that unlimited PTO means people don't take PTO.
Jessie Spressart: I think that there may already be.
Paula Edgar: Yeah, because it's like the best marketing setup I've ever heard in my life. It's like, you have unlimited PTOs. I'm like, "Yes, I'm going to go there because I have unlimited PTO." Then I'm like, "Wait a minute."
Jessie Spressart: Yeah. Well, and there's a financial aspect to it too, right? Because if it's unlimited, then you're not banking anything. Then if you leave the firm or the organization, they don't have to pay you out. So there's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff there, but it's a recipe for people to not take it. We need people to take time off.
Paula Edgar: Well, speaking of firms and some of the things that are internal to them, a lot of people think of well-being as a program rather than a core part of their culture. So what do you think is the difference in terms of it being programmatic versus cultural, and then how do you shift those mindsets? How do you do that?
Jessie Spressart: Yeah, well, I was just thinking as you're asking, it's a mindset. You're right, it's not a program. There needs to be programmatic aspects of it because people don't necessarily know what it is that they need to do to take care of themselves. Especially if you've been going to law school, clerking, working, not taking time off, your brain gets to a space of, I don't even know how to relax, rest, do what I need to do.
So there needs to be education and support around what does that look like, whether it's stress management, how to build your energy, all of these things. So we have to educate, but it needs to permeate all aspects. So I think of it similarly to diversity and inclusion efforts that need to be part of everything that a firm does.
Paula Edgar: Not a program on it.
Jessie Spressart: Not a program, not a come learn about biases. That's very important. And it needs to be part of everything. So when I teach a program on managing expectations or moving from an individual contributor to somebody who's managing other people, I'm talking about how you're doing your job, but there is always a wellbeing element. If you're hiring me, you're getting both. It's just not possible for me to extricate them. So I encourage the firms that I work with to be thinking about it with what I'm doing with them, but also more holistically across the board.
Paula Edgar: I know that the culture shift any place starts from the top down. So how is it that you work with leaders to have them understand that mind shift that you just talked about and also understand prioritizing performance, which you have to do because it's a business, and also self-care and all this?
Jessie Spressart: Yeah. There's not like a million things there, Paula.
Paula Edgar: Give us the answer, Jessie.
Jessie Spressart: So I teach a program very creatively called Mental Health Essentials for Leaders. Naming is not my strong suit, but I think it's one of the most important things that I provide and teach and offer because it is speaking directly to law firm leaders, partners, practice group leaders, executive committees, directors on the administrative side who tend to be a little bit older.
So we're talking baby boomers, Gen X, and elder millennials who have a very different frame of reference from our younger folks who are coming up. I talk to them about why it's important to be paying attention to mental health and well-being and give them a frame of reference that it's not just a diagnosis of anxiety or depression or whatever, but there's an entire biopsychosocial model of how people are going to experience mental health.
You can have a diagnosis and be doing really, really well. You can not have a diagnosis and be really struggling. So it's not a straight line. So unfortunately, I talk about how complex and complicated it is. But also, that means it's in some ways a little more straightforward because you just have to meet people where they are.
So we talk about listening non-judgmentally, listening actively, being present, focusing on what's going on with the person. Sometimes that's a performance conversation. Sometimes it's an, "I'm concerned about your well-being and how can we support you?" Hopefully, it doesn't become an urgent situation where somebody needs to act on somebody's behalf, but sometimes that happens.
People ask me, "What do I say? What do I do?" I have to say, "It depends. I'm sorry." But having a framework of how to go, understanding the firm's policies, because every firm's a little different, and knowing how to provide that support goes a long way.
Honestly, performance, performance conversations, mental health, again, it all overlaps in our times. So when I'm talking to firm leadership, I say the folks coming in now are so much more conversant about mental health and well-being. They are happy to talk about it. They openly talk about their diagnoses and what they have going on. They expect firm leaders to be able to be conversant as well. So if you're not Mr. or Ms. Firm Leader, you need to be.
Paula Edgar: Yeah. To be best in class as a leader and to be best in class as an organization. If you're not meeting the moment and you're not listening to what the culture is shifting outside of your doors and then also in your doors, then I hate the business case, but that's the business case to be conversant in this, to want to know more so that you can support all the things and also be a better leader.
Jessie Spressart: Yeah. At the very, very basic level, mental health and well-being is a risk management issue. My brand is not around business case and risk management and insurance and all of that kind of stuff, but it is so true and it is so important. The more we can convince people that that is true. Unfortunately, it often happens that it's not really paid attention to until there is an unfortunate event, until something happens where they're like, "Oh no, we really have to figure this out." I really, really wish we could get out in front of that. I'm working on it. I'm trying.
Paula Edgar: We're relying on you, Jessie, to figure this all out. Speaking of figuring it out, you mentioned that you come from a family of folks who are thinking about therapy and wellness and all of those good things. You've taken the Mental Health First Aid. What are some of the practices or tools that you have found to be really helpful and impactful for professionals who are under pressure, a.k.a. all of us?
Jessie Spressart: So we've already talked about moving your body, eating well, going to therapy, getting good sleep. Not all of the most in-fashion wellness, well-being trends are accessible to everybody in our space. I think meditation is amazing. I think it's very important. I also think that it's not something that everybody has the time and the capability and the capacity to build that habit while they have all these billing pressures.
So knowing specific things you can do, I like to joke in 0.3 or less to interrupt your stress cycle. When you find your brain or your body starting to get completely overactivated and dysregulated, what can you do to bring yourself back? Giving people tools to do that so that they don't spin out. Helping people learn what are specific things you can do again in five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, depending on how much time you have, to boost your energy, to refill your cup so that you have what you need to keep going.
Again, it's going away from here's one class to here are specific things that you can do without having to build a new habit or learn an entirely new space to help yourself.
Paula Edgar: What are those practices? Which ones are your go-tos?
Jessie Spressart: So when I get super, super stressed, one of my stress interruption, stress sets is to sing about what is stressing me out.
Paula Edgar: Oh, there's that music. There's that music coming back.
Jessie Spressart: But like put whatever you're stressed about to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."
Paula Edgar: That is hilarious. I love that.
Jessie Spressart: It is hilarious. But the point of it is to help you make it less scary. It's not that it's not serious. I take all of this very seriously. But when you can put words and music to something, it helps lighten the mood a little bit. It gives your brain something else to do other than catastrophizing and ruminating and going over and over what's happening.
So that often can help me snap out of it. Yesterday, I was having a moment with Canva because it has once again updated its entire interface. I am not a graphic designer. I was trying to do something that should have been very simple. I felt myself just really getting super frustrated.
I got up. I left my desk. I went for a walk just down the street and back. But that is something that is accessible to many people. Even if walking isn't something that's fully accessible to you, taking yourself away from your screen for a little bit to just give yourself a moment.
Paula Edgar: Which one? Which screen?
Jessie Spressart: All of them. But giving yourself that time to step back and reset can both recharge your energy and interrupt your stress cycle. So just little, and neither of those things took hours.
Paula Edgar: Yeah. I love that you shared the twinkle twinkle. I'm going to try that. I like to curse at things. I'm a big fan. I'm a Brooklyn girl. I love to just start cursing at things, and be like, "Well."
Jessie Spressart: The Jersey in me sees the Brooklyn in you.
Paula Edgar: Exactly. Here we are. Here's a trick that I like to use now too, which is I tend to get really stressed and frustrated from email where somebody will send me an email and it will put me in a frozen state where I'm like, “You.” Thankfully, I love AI for this. So I'm like, "Listen, respond to this and make it sound like I'm not mad." Let's see what it says.
But my favorite trick before I even get to that is respond to this like an angry Jamaican. So it does it in patois, and it makes me laugh every single time. So for me, I'm like, "Oh, yes," because I can hear it in my grandmother's voice and it makes me laugh. So all of you try that in the accent of your choice, and it'll be fun. Trust me.
Jessie Spressart: Yeah. So that and the singing both have the effect of interrupting just how frustrated you are with humor. It lightens things up. That often helps disconnect the super stressful moment from how we're feeling about it.
Paula Edgar: Yeah. Laughter brings energy too, right?
Jessie Spressart: Sure does.
Paula Edgar: The actual act of laughing. Yeah. Yeah. I love that you're talking about both the stress response and energy. They're not the same. You can tap into those resources differently. Yes, I'm stressed. Let me go punch something. Also, I feel the energy's down. What can I do here?
They don't necessarily have to be the same thing, but they're things in the toolkit that you should be thinking about. I find a lot of people I talk to, I remember, this was years ago, that I was at a bar association event. I went into the bathroom and there was a woman sitting on the counter of the sink in the bathroom crying. The empath in me was like, "Oh my God, why are you crying?"
She was upset about work, but she was at this bar event with all these folks outside drinking, et cetera. She was like, “I couldn't do it anymore.” I was unable to help her other than to be like, "I'm so sorry that you're feeling this way." I was like, I have to go to the bathroom. Went to the bathroom, came back. I was like, "I got to wash my hands. Excuse me."
It was a very awkward thing. It still sticks with me that that happened. But I thought to myself, "I'm sure a lot of people take a respite, number one, in the bathroom in any place. But when you get to that point where you're at tears, you're in the emergent, as opposed to what can we do to make that hopefully not have to happen?
So how do you remember when it's building up what some of those tools are? Are there ways to set up your environment to remind you of things that you can do in order to interrupt what is happening?
Jessie Spressart: Yeah. So first of all, I think you need to learn how to pay attention to the warning signs.
Paula Edgar: Oh. Say more about that.
Jessie Spressart: So for that person in the bathroom, she likely had been kind of—it was building, building, building until it hit a point where she couldn't do it anymore. It's very rarely just a switch. So the first thing is what is happening? What thoughts are you having? What are you feeling in your body?
If she's in the bathroom crying, her body is saying something. And good for her for being out and not crying in the middle of the space, but she's processing that. So the first thing is learn to notice the signs in yourself of when you're going to be going down that path of “Oh my gosh, this is not great and I'm about to cry,” or now I'm in tears.
So that's the first thing. That takes work and it takes practice. We are not in Western society trained to listen to our bodies and to know what's going on and to be able to interpret and understand the language of sensation. So that's a challenge, but if you can learn how to do that—and I am learning it, I am working on it. It is something that is a continual process.
But yesterday with the Canva thing, I was getting so frustrated and I could feel it in my body, and I knew I had to get up and go somewhere else before I threw my computer out the window, threw my phone across the room, whatever that looks like. So first you have to know what's showing up.
And then you need to have—I call it a scaffolding—of practices. So the stress presets, the energy boosters, people that you can text or call for a moment. You need to have the arsenal of things you can reach when you hit that.
Paula Edgar: So that means setting it up before you're there.
Jessie Spressart: Before you're there. Yeah.
Paula Edgar: Yeah. Right. I think that's what I was reaching for because so many folks, to your point of us not listening to our bodies and being trained to listen to our bodies, we're also not preparing our bodies and preparing ourselves for having that situation.
So I wanted to pull out that while you're sitting here thinking and listening to our conversation or watching our conversation, it would be great to be jotting down what are some of those things that help you feel reset, help you feel calm? Who are your people that you need to call?
Jessie Spressart: Yes. I will also add to that: spend a little bit of time thinking about what activates your stress. I know, I know. But a lot of times we don't know that we have been triggered into a stress response until we're already there and already spiraling.
So if you know that a certain kind of email is going to get you going, just be aware, “All right. I'm going to spend some time processing email. If this kind of email shows up, this is what I'm going to do.”
Paula Edgar: I love that. I love that.
Jessie Spressart: That, that again, paying attention to when certain things happen, what do I think? What do I feel? What do I want to do? So brain, body, behavior, how is that going to show up? Then you can plan. You can plan for it. Then it takes a lot less energy to actually deal with it. Then you have more energy for other things, but it just continues to build.
Paula Edgar: Which, and I'm thinking about the connections, you said the Bs, you said, what did you say?
Jessie Spressart: Brain, body, behavior.
Paula Edgar: Brain, body, behavior, hitting your brand? Thinking about all of those things is going to be what kind of helps you. I know everybody's talking about burnout, everybody's talking about all these other things, I don't even want us to get there. I want us to think, like everything else strategically, what do I have to do to maintain, to show up the way I want to show up? It's all of those things that lead you to the brand piece of this too.
So if y'all are like, "Well, why does this matter?" This is why it matters. This is why I wanted to have this conversation, because I'm like, "I know when folks are stressed out, they don't show up the way they want to. They don't. They do not." If they don't have these resources to tap into, and they're not looking at professionals like Jessie to help them navigate this, then your brand is going to suffer. Then you're going to have these challenges and I don't want you to get there. That's why we're having this conversation.
So speaking of that, what mistakes do you see professionals making when it comes to their brand, when they overlook the wellbeing side? Anything coming on?
Jessie Spressart: Yeah. So I think it's a lack of congruency.
Paula Edgar: Come on, SAT words.
Jessie Spressart: So congruency is really alignment between your thoughts and feelings, and behaviors, what you have going on inside, not matching what's going on outside. If that's not a definition of branding, I don't know what is.
Paula Edgar: It is. Check.
Jessie Spressart: Right. But it's also a psychological definition of this idea of congruency. So this is why it's important to me to be putting the practices into place so that when I talk about them, I'm not like, "But I don't do any of it. Do as I say, not as I do." So for branding, it's the same thing. You have to do as you say and do as you do. People will know.
Paula Edgar: Yes. All of you who are my consistent listeners, you'll recall that I did the brand series, maybe 20 episodes ago, where I talked about a time where my brand, I got stressed and my brand did not show up the way that it normally does. Essentially, it was, I was tired. Again, sleep is important. I was upset, and then I was stressed. Then I totally acted out like a toddler. That then showed up. One of my mentors was like, "Girl, what are you doing?" So it can show up even when you think you've got it taken care of, it can seep out if you're not actually managing that.
Jessie Spressart: Yeah. And having people who can be like, "Hey. I know you really care about this and you're not showing up the way that you may not be aware." Sometimes we're not, especially when we're in times of super stress and a lot going on and feeling like we're at the edge of our ability to control things. And no shame. We're human.
Paula Edgar: Yeah. Yes. Yes. Until the robots take us over.
Jessie Spressart: Until the robots take us over. But today is not that day. So having somebody who can be like, "Hey, I know you care so much about this and this isn't showing up," and it might be, "Why don't you take a step back for a minute? Why don't you give yourself a little bit of space" as opposed to you have to fix everything that's wrong? Because sometimes that just then pushes us even further into not doing it the way we want to do it because we're feeling that extra pressure. So just taking that moment to be like, okay, what actually needs to happen here? What do we need?
Paula Edgar: Absolutely. Absolutely. So let's get into, what about the fun stuff, Jesse? What, what do you do for fun? Speaking of not being stressed, what do you do for fun?
Jessie Spressart: Oh, I love to eat out. So like I was saying earlier, we live in Miami.
Paula Edgar: I was going to say, Miami is a good food city.
Jessie Spressart: Miami is a great, great food city. I live in a neighborhood that I can walk to a lot of really, really amazing restaurants. So eating out is one of my favorite things. I love to travel. I'm also, even though I love to travel, a huge homebody. So I am a knitter. I like to be making things with my hands.
There's a lot of evidence out there that things like knitting and sewing and embroidery and things like that, I hate the phrase, but the grandma crafts, support well-being because it helps you slow down. It keeps you off your screen. You're more likely to be focusing on that. I know that makes me feel like really nerdy that I'm like, "All of my hobbies have to do with well-being." But we want our hobbies to support our well-being.
Paula Edgar: Right. And to be part of the fullness of you as opposed to being separate.
Jessie Spressart: Right. The holistic thing. I'll say I started knitting in grad school because I wanted to be able to take a night off studying. If I was knitting, I was being productive. I don't necessarily recommend that as your rationale for picking up the hobby, but it has served me well.
Paula Edgar: I mean, it's true.
Jessie Spressart: It's true. It's true. Yeah. Yeah.
Paula Edgar: That's hilarious. Yeah. I have a girlfriend who's like, "I need to make sure that I get to watch my football games. But while I'm watching football, I knit. So that means I'm getting something."
Jessie Spressart: Yes. I'm right there with her.
Paula Edgar: There was an article about how more Gen Z are taking up knitting and that kind of thing, too. So clearly it's no longer just the grandma stuff. It is folks who are realizing that the screens are not necessarily our best friends and that we need to focus on something that brings us some joy and is a little productive.
I love it. All right. So, Jessie, tell me this. What is the authentic part of your brand that you will never compromise on?
Jessie Spressart: I mean, really, it is, I need to show up the way I really am.
Paula Edgar: Mm-hmm. Yes. Alignment again.
Jessie Spressart: It's alignment. It's the congruency. I know that I'm not perfect and I'm not going to get it exactly right every time, but when I get it wrong, repairing, apologizing, making it right. I don't ever want somebody to see me as something and then see me really and be like, "That is not at all." I'm happy to be surprising, but it needs to be surprising in a good way. It needs to not be underwhelming.
It needs to be like, "Oh yeah, she does put her wellbeing money where her wellbeing mouth is. She does really care about the people that she's working with and their wellbeing and their ability to do their jobs." It has to be real. It has to be true. It can't be something that people are like, "Oh yeah, she's just full of it." That would work for me.
Paula Edgar: I love it. So Branding Room Only is the name of the podcast, which is a play on the term standing room only because I'm clever. So tell me this, what is your magic? What is that thing about you that people would be standing room only, no seats left in the room to experience about you and your magic? What is it?
Jessie Spressart: People know that if they're going to come listen to me speak or whatever, they are going to get jam-packed, ton of information, context, theory. I am an academic after all. But also they're going to walk away with how to do it.
Paula Edgar: Tangible.
Jessie Spressart: Tangible outcomes, tangible things that you can do. I don't know if that sounds very magic-y, but there are so many people out there who have great keynotes and speeches and they're very inspiring. But you walk away and you're like, "Okay, what am I supposed to do?"
Paula Edgar: What am I going to do? Right. Right. No, I think that that is absolutely a magical piece because not enough folks make sure that it sticks because there's something to do. So I love that.
Jessie Spressart: I want people to feel like they can do something different to make their lives better after hearing me speak. 100%.
Paula Edgar: I love that. So speaking of which, how can people find out more about you and connect with you to find out how to be well and get tangible strategies?
Jessie Spressart: Yeah. So you can find me on LinkedIn, Jessie Spressart on LinkedIn. My company is Optia Consulting. So you can find me online at OptiaConsulting.com. Pretty straightforward. Please don't hesitate to reach out. Obviously, you can tell I love to talk about this stuff. That's it. LinkedIn, my website. I used to have an Instagram, but again, see that whole Canva debacle. That is not my highest priority right now. Maybe someday.
Paula Edgar: We need to make sure our priorities and we are well and not overwhelming ourselves. So I love that. So everybody go out and tell somebody who needs to think about taking care of themselves a little better, AKA everybody, to listen to this podcast. Stand by your brand and be well. Talk to you all really soon. Bye.
That's it for this episode. I appreciate you hanging out with me on Branding Room Only. Now, please do me a quick favor: head over to ratethispodcast.com/branding so more people can join this conversation. And make sure to stop by at paulaedgar.com/events to see what's next. Whether I'm live, online, or in person, I'd love to see you there. See you next time in the Branding Room. And until then, stand tall, shine bright, and always stand by your brand.
