Designing Your Life: Mastering the Skills You Need with January Donovan

Welcome back to the Real Life Moms podcast. This is a place where you can take a break from the chaos of parenting and take time to focus on yourself. I'm Lisa Foster, your host, and today is all about restoring our self image and designing a life that we truly desire 

 And I am here with a fellow mom. She is January Donovan, who is not only a mother of eight, which is incredible in general, but she's also a bestselling author, the founder of the Women's School and the Wholeness Coaching School. And she's been featured in Forbes in their top self worth coaching programs.

January, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you so much. I am so honored and privileged and grateful for this conversation and opportunity to hear. Thank you, Lisa, I feel like your presence alone is just, calming. And I don't, I am so excited about this conversation today, but I have been watching your [00:01:00] videos.

You have so many amazing teaching tools and videos. And for me, there was an aha moment because I think I'm one of them. You said, you know, if you have a career, like you're going to be a doctor, you go to medical school, you get training. And as women. You do lots of things, right? We're parents, we're doing finances, we have our career, we have all these things.

And there's no one teaching anything. We're just literally being thrown in the deep end of a pool and we're trying to learn to swim and figure it out. And that just felt like, wow, that there's training for this. It felt like a relief, January. It felt just like a relief. And that's probably kind of the emotion that I, I receive when women, when I share with them, I said, you know, you're often blamed and shamed for the choices nobody ever showed you how to make.

And really the untrained woman suffers unnecessarily. And we are seeing that with the data with overwhelm and stress and anxiety. I [00:02:00] mean, one out of five women are in antidepressant. They don't want to. If we don't have access to practical training, and I'm not just talking about kitchen, I'm talking about every part of our life, whether it's pivoting skills or planning skills or, you know, managing our mind or emotion, those are non negotiable for a fulfilling life.

And I just think that it's highway robbery that everyone else gets training. And just because we're born women, we just assume that we know how to be a woman. That is not the case. And so I, I honestly think that we're not even having the right conversation in our culture. We're, you know, this is what the women are doing and this is awful and is it, you know, balance and we're, we're trying to figure out the whole balance schedule.

I'm like, you're not going to balance anything unless you, you don't have, unless you have the skills. You're always going to be imbalanced because you actually don't have the tools to actually build the fulfilling life you deeply desire. But it's also so hopeful because any woman can learn the [00:03:00] skill.

And that is, to me, what's exciting is that when women actually have the skills, they actually realize, well, I actually thought motherhood was hard and messy and yes, there are moments of it. But it doesn't have to, but it feels that way when you're just trying to fly the plane and also build at the same time.

You know, and I think that it's unfair to mothers, it's unfair to all of us, and I think that there needs to be an introduction of training women how to be a woman as a way to actually create sustainable transformation for the future so that We expect women to be fulfilled and that the norm is not the unfulfilled mother, wife, friend.

So I think that's the culprit is really the lack of training, but also secondly, we're not seen as an integrated version of ourselves. You know, it's like, this is the mommy life and this is the career life and this is your mental health and this is your [00:04:00] physical and this is your wealth. And I'm like, if we really stop and think if I'm not happy in my friendship, that impacts my.

Self image that impacts my mental health that impacts the way I show up in my relationships If I'm not happy as a mom that impacts every part of our life And so we have to stop kind of looking at women as only parts of who she is Every part of you matters Lisa every part of us and I think the switch is Neurological and I say that because I think the programming has to be in the subconscious conditioning to see with eyes of wholeness We are so conditioned, you know, I, I train my daughters, I have, I have four teenagers, you know, sometimes we just have this idea that when we look at like people magazine, you're like, you know, who wears it better, right?

And, okay, it's fine. It's really no big deal. But if you think about underlying, perhaps, narrative underneath our culture, it's like we're just seeing the outfit and not even the human person behind it. And that we're somehow okay with this idea of just [00:05:00] comparing people, comparing women, right? And, and I'm like, I wonder how she feels when somebody compares her. 

I wonder what her family life is like. I wonder what her, you know what day or her mental health is like and we've made something that should be abnormal and then we're like wondering why are women unfulfilled why are women suffering i think the infrastructure is just stacked up against us and lastly there's no language we don't we can't identify you know it's like part of the thing that we do in the woman's school half of it is literally language i'm like how do you want a positive life when you don't when you have negative language We have to reintroduce to the world a wholeness language.

 I'm eating it all up. It's so true. You know, we, I mean, I, I'm all different parts of myself, all different times. I go to work. I come home. I'm all over the place. But there is this one person at the [00:06:00] core that is showing up to each of those spots and how it's, Oh, amazing. It would feel to be able to be whole.

Everywhere and not feel so just all over the place. And like you said, it's a skill. And I think a lot of us out here just listening, didn't even know it's something we can learn. It's almost like if you didn't have it, you just don't have it, you know? But it's amazing. So what you do is. Incredible. And I'm so glad there's somebody like you in the world.

Tell me a little bit about what even got you on this path to want to help women in this way. Gosh, because I was a hot mess. That's the honest truth. You know, I, I came from an immigrant family. My mom was great, but as an immigrant family, she was busy, obviously just trying to And so I felt that, she didn't have the tools necessary to teach me in a world that's massively shifted.

Internet [00:07:00] started, social media started, the world shifted very dramatically in the last 80 years, especially with, the communication. And so most of us didn't really have the tools to kind of. figure out how to live as a woman in this new kind of world. And so I was just, really, I would say I was anxious, I was depressed, I didn't like who I was.

I think the word I described myself in high school, I was disgusted with who I was. And so my freshman year in college, first month, I met a woman who, she was a mentor in college, and she met with all these women, and her name was Elena, and I met with her for the first time. And she said, January, what kind of woman do you want to be?

And I remember sort of laughing, Lisa, I'm like, oh, Elena, you know, you, you don't have a choice, is it? Yes, you do. And so she said, let's design you. And so for three and a half years, I met her, uh, almost every single month I had my homework. I actually show it. Sometimes I do my training. And I had to actually submit it to her.

My first remark was to get rid of comparison and competition. Second one was to make my bed, before I went to the bathroom so [00:08:00] that I felt accomplished. And third one was actually to have our morning routine where I wake up at 4 30 in the morning, so I could plan. Exercise, uh, meditate, and that's what I did all through college.

And so that experience transformed my life. I didn't know it then. You know, I was this college girl who sort of, I think, was so lonely, depressed that I think when she said, jump 10, I'll jump 20. So. That trained me, honestly, with the skills I never knew I needed. And so that, I think, was my motivation. So I started helping women, and I think my wound became the compass towards my contribution and my cause, because I, I, I wasn't, I was passionate about it because I suffered for it.

And so I realized I wasn't alone. I, I really wasn't alone. Like we were all on the same page. Nobody trained us. So I 

think that's where, you know, really came from me. But what really came to me was I was 21 years old and I thought, [00:09:00] why don't we have a school and how to be a woman? And so I, I was 21 and I don't know, it just sort of came to me.

I just sort of, I, I imagined a school for women, Lisa. It was a dream. As a matter of fact, I just, I was in a speaking engagement last. Um, two weeks ago in Michigan and my, my friend who was there with me, she's like, January, you used to talk about the school. I was 21. I was huge. I drew it out. So the only reason why I said that, cause I thought there should be a school.

I, I would have, it would have saved me heartaches, you know? And so, and I just took one step. And, part of the issue that I'm seeing is that there's a lot of empowerment, but not a lot of equipment. So we walk out, go for a dream. How do you dream? Dreaming is a skill. Go have boundaries! Well, Boundary is a two fold skill set, you know, one is knowing your line, but knowing how to communicate your line, you know, so I thought if we had a school, then there's replicable frameworks and formulas that we can use generationally.

And that's really what I love to do, you know, that's what we [00:10:00] do at my school. I said, this is your dream. This is your skill. You know, this is what you do. This is how you. Do a three step boundary. So I think that's where it came from for me. And my passion, I think just kind of grew from there because I saw the fruit when women were just shown how.

Yeah. And I love, I love that fact, that sentence that you said, like, how do you want to design yourself? I just, I think that's amazing. So what are the concepts that you feel that every single woman should know? Number one, I think that their worth is unconditional. What does that mean? 

It means that nothing changes your value. And the reason why that's one of the most important thing is because we are living in our culture where the metric of what women feels makes them valuable is what we call the poisonous pea based on their power, they feel it makes them, you know, we look at somebody was Transcribed Power.

And we think we're less important than them. We place higher value. We call it the power, our possessions. That's why we go to [00:11:00] these name brands or mansions. We look for people with money and we think I'm not quite as good as that. Right. Popularity, we, we treat somebody maybe better with 2 million followers and five followers, what we can produce.

And that happens at a very young age. It's almost like we reward somebody who was an A student with not somebody who maybe had a greater effort. of the C student. You know, it's all about the prestige and what school you go to and our, um, perfection. So that has become the poison of us understanding that nothing changes our value.

Women are valuable simply because we are born. So we've been conditioned to believe that we're only important if and when we're popular. Right? We've got power, we've got the position, we've got the, you know, the perfect body and what's happening right now is that women won't design their life because they don't think they deserve it. So that's the first thing is that we have to retrain women to see [00:12:00] that nothing changes their value. Nothing. Which means that they can have more money, less money, be a mom, be a stay home mom. That's not what makes you valuable. And I actually give women physical evidence of their value. I talk about, you know, their, the science of their brain.

I talk about their time in history and we put all that combination and we ask ourselves, you're really a rare human being. So that's number one is that we have to teach up because that's the foundation of us actually aspiring for the life that we want. Otherwise we'll always doubt.

What we believe we deserve. That's number one. And I think the second thing is that, we have to be intentional about our training. It doesn't just happen, overwhelm comes from being underskilled. And so if every season of our life, make it a, uh, I would say a norm that we're just training.

Like the training that I needed with four kids is different than I train with six kids and eight kids. It [00:13:00] compounds and it builds. And so that's what I think it's let's shift and make a generational shift of saying women just train. We train our mind, our body, and our spirit. So that's the second one.

And then I think, um, I would say that the third one is that we have to be intentional about designing the life that we want. So good. So good. Would you mind diving deeper into helping us like, What is teaching us look like? What does that mindset or skill building look like? You know, for any of any one of those? Great question. So, training. So Just like athletes train, just like Olympians train, it's never one and done, and it's this idea that you're constantly doing it.

So training, what I teach women, I said, the shift is that we train for life and for our life. So that's, I think, one, and it's not, you always think you're done with school. So what I tell women is that part of your day is studying. Every mom should study. What are they studying? They're studying [00:14:00] themselves, they're studying the world, and they're studying the people around them. 

Like, that, to me, should be part of prayer, meditation, whatever it is that you do in the morning, study. Like, I'm a mom of eight, I study every day. Like, it's just part, cause there's, I have so much to learn, unlearn and relearn. So, what does that look like? Then, I think the first thing we need to do is to actually give ourselves, language.

So that you understand every part of you so I can go dive into that if you want me to Lisa Yeah, we sort of talk about the whole woman, which is there's eight parts that we talked about First one is a self image and if you see the woman's clothed of wheel Self image is the opinion that we hold of ourself.

It is our first relationship is with ourselves So we need to know how to have a relationship with ourself So I talked about teaching women how to have that first relationship with himself a self image Number two is our health and in the woman's school. We actually integrated, which means our mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health is actually combined together and not separated.

Sometimes I see like mental health, physical health, and [00:15:00] the reason why that's integrated, and I think it's important to integrate it, because our thoughts, like if I am stressed or, you know, I'm stressed at work, all of a sudden I feel emotionally anxious. And then my body tenses up and I'm spiritually hijacked.

And so we can't just sort of like, eat healthy, but not mentally manage your mind. So health is integrated. The goal for health is to have optimal energy to show up, right? I mean, that's the whole goal word. We don't want to be walking and mentally, emotionally, physically tired. Number three is friendship.

Which, right now, loneliness is an international epidemic, Lisa. And, you know, we have to think about why. Why? Well, we, maybe we lack the skill of actually conversation, because maybe in a world that's going so fast in social media, we don't know how to nurture the depths of our soul, we don't know what we need, so we need to reteach what friendship is, you know, the way we describe friendship is Accompaniment, and accountability, and a journey to becoming who we want to be, who we're created to be, that whole version of ourself.[00:16:00] 

So we need to learn how to be friends, and there's all this, you know, obviously you have to get rid of comparison and competition, so we have to reteach that as a model. Like, we don't have a lot of time, and so I teach women, I said, you need to know how to be a friend that's genuine, sincere, and deep, and with very less amount of time.

Which means you need to be more skilled because we don't have two hours and you know this because sometimes we go out and we have friends and we spend two hours and we still don't feel meaningful. We still feel like empty, right? But you can be with somebody who you feel like, wow, I was inspired by that.

I was challenged by it. It was hard, but it was so good. But ah, it was meaningful. And it was only 10 minutes, you know, whatever time you have. So friendship. And then the fourth one is that intimacy, which is the most sacred part of who we are. That's reserved for somebody who has earned the right to be there.

I mean, think about it, Lisa, we have 50 percent divorce rate. So many people are, women are unhappy with their marriage. They're getting shame for it and blame for it. They're not respected in their marriage. Who's training us prior to actually being married. I tell women, I'm like, if you don't know [00:17:00] that seven in the communication world, 7 percent are words, 38 percent tonality, 55 percent body language, it's going to be an uphill battle in any relationship.

And so we need to train women. We need to train them how to hold. a standard, how to speak with our tonality, but also how to hold their man accountable, how to hold themselves accountable. There's a whole slew of training that's necessary to actually have a fulfilling, intimate relationship. 

How to have a standard. What does that look like? How do you pivot? How do you recalibrate? How do you reset expectations? And then, our contribution, which is really kind of our, I would say the fulfillment of our potential outside of our home, our career, maybe it doesn't have to be career, it could be volunteer, whatever sort of makes us feel like it's an extension of our, you know, passion.

And so most women are in a job that they don't like, and always this scarcity mentality because we've been programmed to believe that. You have to be practical, you know, and sure you have to be practical, but you can also find [00:18:00] something that's practical that also makes you feel alive. You know, like it's not work for the work's sake.

We spend so much time in our work. We want to know that we're valued there, that we set the right expectation, but it also makes us feel there's always a life within us. And I think women are craving for meaningful work. And then our environment, which is a people place, and it's composed of people and places in our environment.

How are we going to allow that physical environment actually impact our interior environment? We have to know that, like, our homes should feel peaceful. And if it doesn't, it's because we lack the skill training. I mean, who teaches us how to order our home, right? I mean, so much even, I, I'm training women and life is stressful and I, when I get down to the different parts, we call it the arena.

It's actually because they just lack kitchen skills. Like cleaning the kitchen should not take you more than 15 minutes a night. It shouldn't be, you know, but I mean, when I did that [00:19:00] training, I literally had to time myself in cleaning the counter. I had to time myself, that was part of my training, but that was just one part of the arena.

And so anyways, so environment, how do we do that? How do we hold a standard in our environment? And then our wealth, and it's not just money. Wealth is an abundance of time, our treasure, and our talent for the purpose of contribution because we can't hoard stuff and expect to be fulfilled.

The secret to living is giving, you know, Tony Robbins tells us. And so, how do we teach women that actually learning how to build resources, extra income, money, knowing how to build a routine so we have more time actually makes you more fulfilled. Right? And then obviously your family, the basic infrastructure.

I think of society in the building block. How are, how do we build a society when we also have degraded mothers feeling as though they're a second class citizen? So anyways, that's the whole woman, you know, how do we raise children that are disciplined? Well, we need to have mothers that are disciplined.

And so that's the whole vision of the woman. And that's what I believe women are hungry for right now, Lisa, [00:20:00] is that we need to give language for every part of our arena. We need to show her how to actually. design every part of her life, the life that she wants, and also the life that she deserves, that fulfilling life. I mean, so, it's so complete, the structure. The right word. It's complete. It's whole. It's whole. That's right. I'm wondering, from all your experience with so many women, what is the thing that you see the most that people get stuck against or just blocked 

in getting through this process? Oh gosh, there's so many.

I'm sorry. It's, part of it is that when I start training women, It's like foreign, it's like, you've been speaking English the whole time, all of a sudden you start to speak French. And it was like, nobody ever showed them. Honestly, I'll tell you this, like, this is one of the first things I do.

I give women the whole arena, and I tell them, and I walk them through this process, I do it fast. Um, what do you not want to put up with, in that particular part of it, and what do you [00:21:00] want? And I'm telling you, Lisa, women sometimes just weep. January I've never even thought about what I wanted. I've been so busy raising kids.

I've been so busy in my career. Nobody's ever asked me. I've never even had that language. What do you not want to put up with anymore? But then because they're looking at different parts of friendship, they're like, Like, I, maybe I know what I don't want, but I've never thought about every part of me and what I don't want in part, I actually don't want that friend who is toxic.

I actually don't want a kitchen where I feel like it's dirty at night. The hard part is seeing the awareness that they have been robbed of the life that they could have. I think, because then all of a sudden they're realizing, oh my gosh, have I lost all my life? You know, and I tell women that nothing is wasted if you use it for the good.

Because all those pain, and that's what I did, you know, all the things that I never had, I worked harder to have, and I'm using it to help other women. And those are the [00:22:00] greatest convictions. So I think that's hard, uh, for women, just the initial kind of like, I've lost so much of my life. And so I think that's, It takes a while because, and I, and the second thing that I say is that it's easy for us to numb.

And what I mean by that, they could look at this and they're like, Oh my gosh, January, like I'm not there. And I'm like, well, your alternative is to give up. And so it gets hard to feel like we have to do this. And that's why I think you have to do this with every, with, with a group of women. That's why our model is what we call core four.

I can give you a great course, but you won't do it. I can give you the best course. You need a community, you need a coach, and you need a commitment. So there's our core four, C4, uh, model. And so we really need an army of women, we need a grassroot effort. And then when, you know, you've got friends that are training together and friends that are holding each other accountable, friends that are studying their tonality, I think it's like, I don't know, it's a world opens.

And that to me is. I, I still honestly get emotional [00:23:00] when I hear women like, Oh, like, I never thought this was possible. Like I was teaching a woman and she was 70 and I was teaching her to discover the dream of the season. And she's there, she's 70 and she was, I was in a speaking engagement and she's, she's Paula.

I talk about her and she's in the microphone and she's like, I'm really trying to wrestle my dream of the season. And I'm sorry. I said, Paula, could you just stop? Like you're 70 and you're figuring out your dream. Because somebody showed you how like, ah, we give up on our life not because we want to, but because we don't know how to have more life in our life.

 Oh, and I love that you had this person that you were saying this 70, because I think a big point that we have to make here is it's like never too late. You know, I think we get stuck in like, well, I'm older now, this is it, you know, but 

yes, I've been listening to even the Tony Robbins just had his summit and I've been on there too.

And there's someone 80 on there, you know, going to these things and, and learning. And that it, it [00:24:00] doesn't have to stop ever. You can dream at any age and do this work. So that, I love that so much. And train. And train. That's, you know, because that's what we call, you know, dreaming comes before discipline. We just want to go to discipline.

Like, well, what fuels your discipline is your dream. What do you really want? And so then you can get up at 70 and be like, you know what, I need new boundary skills or I need to, I was this woman who was, she was close to her 80s and she's like writing scripts I was doing and one on one coaching with her and she's rewriting scripts to hold her husband accountable.

And she's been suffering this marriage for 50 years. She never knew how to hold her husband accountable. She's getting up in the morning and I'm like, Oh, you know, like that is hopeful for me, but also it makes me fiery. Women are robbed. Women are, they don't, they've never been shown how, and it goes back to the first where women are suffering unnecessarily for the choices nobody ever showed them by the way.

 Well, [00:25:00] tell, tell the listeners about some of the things that you do. Tell us about your school, what you offer, where they can find you. Yeah, you can find us at thewomanschool. com, and if you are ready and open and hungry, you can actually get a free coaching call. We have our signature masterclass, which I'm actually currently refilming, and I just renamed it the New Woman Masterclass.

This is the first time I've done it live. And in five years, this is the foundational course that I train women. And so you can get a free coaching to actually learn more about the new woman masterclass. So the new, actually it goes the new woman masterclass. com instead of this.

So just go in there and sign up for that free coaching. And if you also feel inspired and say, you know, January, um, I want to teach women how to do this. You can also learn about our wholenescoaching. com and learn more how you can actually build a business teaching women a life of wholeness. So those are the two avenues and, [00:26:00] you know, I just think our work has just begun.

 To me, this is, I think this is the new woman. It's the wholeness movement, Lisa. We can't go on like this, we can't. And I'll have that on the show notes too, so people can grab those links. So what would you like the listeners to walk away today after listening to this podcast if you could tell them to take this one step, this one first move, what would it be?

Invest in your wholeness, invest in the only life you have. Do not give up, because the world needs your light. Nobody can contribute what you offer this world. No one. You know, what you offer the world is unrepeatable and irreplaceable. But the only way you're going to be able to fully give that is that you actually need to acquire new skill set.

So, you know, Mozart wasn't born Mozart, you know, and we would be robbed the world of Mozart if Mozart never trained daily to be a Mozart. And so invest in who you are, not just for your sake, but for the sake of the [00:27:00] people that you love. Because I think we need a generational shift to that's what I would do.

Yes, beautiful, beautifully said, and, and you've created a space where people can also do that. So that's amazing. And I didn't plan, I really didn't, you know, we launched the Women's School five years ago. I, I trained women for free for 15 years, Lisa. I didn't charge a dime. I believed in it.

I loved it. I did it with four kids under four. I was just so passionate about it. Anyways, my husband said, January, do you want to reach? Thousands or millions. I said, yes, millions. And so she built a business. I know I had to build a business. So that was a real journey for me, but I kept fighting for it, you know, and kids after kids, I was learning new skills.

And it wasn't until really five years ago that we built a business after years and years of learning and had no result. But I, when I launched a woman's school and I just taught this training and how to be a woman, the women were like, how can we help other women? It's changing my marriage. It's changing my life.

It's changing my family. I mean, we have psychologists that use our [00:28:00] course. Therapist, because I think it's integrated. And so they said, how can we make money doing something that actually fulfills our call to serve? So that's really what the wholeness coaching was. I wasn't never thought , you know, I was like, I'm a teacher.

That's who I am. That's what I always, you know, I teach women. I can teach women all day long. I love it. But I think I, I, I think what I realized is that. Women are hungry to do something meaningful in the world. And why not use your time and get paid for it to serve your family? And that's what gets me excited.

I'm like, give them women opportunity to do both. They can fulfill their meaning, be a mom at the same time, because they can do it if, you know, I've got a lot of moms, but also make money. So like it's a one stop shop. Oh, it's amazing. It's amazing. Well, I so appreciate you, everything that you're doing. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing your time with us today.[00:29:00] 

Thank you. Thank you for humility, your openness and your graciousness. And I truly am grateful. It's such an honor. I love, love this work. I'm just so grateful for the opportunity.