RAW FOOTAGE (pod 1)

Jess, a 19-year-old content creator, has started a podcast to share her thoughts and experiences. She talks about the importance of doing hard things and having the right mindset. She shares her story of leaving college after one semester because she felt it wasn't right for her. This decision led her to pursue modeling, acting, and starting her own business. She emphasizes the importance of living in the present and not worrying too much about the future. Okay. Oh my God. I don't even know where to start, to be honest. Welcome to my podcast. My name is Jess. I don't even know if this is going to be this. Wow. Okay. Oopsies. Oopsie daisies. All right. So I guess we should start by syncing the mic. What's up, guys? My name is Jess. I'm 19 years old. I've done a lot of hard things in my life, surprisingly, thus far. And I have a lot of thoughts, thoughts that I normally don't share with people besides from putting half my life on the internet. I guess this is the other half. So welcome. Welcome to my podcast. And please bear with me a little bit because... What's up, guys? My name is Jess. If you don't know me, I run a couple social media channels. What's up, guys? My name is Jess. I'm just going to jump right into this because I truly don't know where to start. I've probably done like three different openings so far. But welcome to my podcast. I've been wanting to start this for so, so long. I have a lot of thoughts lingering in my head. I actually have an index card right here, which I have some notes on. But again, I don't really know where to start. So I'm just going to jump right into it. I'm 19 years old. I don't know if I mentioned that. And surprisingly, I've done a lot of hard shit in my life. And I'm going to share it with you guys because I'm a big podcast listener. And a lot of the things I even tell myself are things that I follow through with and have helped me thus far throughout my life. So if you're wondering, if you're wondering why there is a black square on the wall, that's because I'm wallpapering everything behind me, except that it was taking too long. And I was like, I want to film this two weeks ago. So I'm just going to do it. I don't care if not everything's perfect. This is coming from the biggest perfectionist around. And here we go. We're jumping into it. This is raw. This is the first podcast I've ever recorded. The first microphoned landscape version, professional setting of audio recording that I think I've been in. So again, just going to bear with me. And we're going to jump to the first podcast episode today, which I don't even know what I'm going to title this. But I'm going to share a little bit about myself and why I even decided to start a podcast. And on the basis of everything I'm going to share today, it's all going to come down to one moral, which is why doing the hard thing is fucking hard. And it's also always the right thing to do. I feel like I'm like running out of breath already. All right. With that being said, hi, for the fifth time, my name is Jessica Farrow. I am an online fitness coach, a online content creator. I have, I have a TikTok account. I don't even know what to describe myself as. I do social media as one of my jobs. I work at a group fitness coaching bootcamp. I'm a babysitter. I'm most of all a girl trying to figure things out. So here we go. I want to start with the two hardest things I think I've done thus far in life. I don't even know. Like I'm also trying to think if I was a person listening to this, what I find this interesting, what I find this helpful, but I, I'm sorry, I don't care. This is why I named the podcast Just Jess, because this is just my internal monologue shining through and actually talking about this right now. I'm like thinking in the back of my head about editing, which this is all things I'm going to get into. Like, why am I thinking about editing a podcast when I'm filming a podcast right now? Future anxiety shining through. Anyways, the whole basis of this podcast is to share mindset, personal development tips that have helped me shine through. And the 19 years I've been on earth, I started getting back into personal development along when I started my fitness journey back in the beginning of 2021, I would say about the past year and a half, I've really, really prioritized my mental health, personal development, along with fitness and moving my body. But every difficult thing I've been through has actually led me to the basis of none of it's possible getting through it, conquering it, facing it, becoming aware of it without the right mentality and the right mindset. So that's what I'm going to get in today. So that's what I'm going to get into today a little bit, starting off with my college story. So I graduated high school at the end of 2022. Back in June, I was going to a small little school in my state, Montclair State University. Shout out, shout out Rocky. I love that school. If I honestly continued pursuing college, I definitely would say that was a great school. I met so many great people. I feel like I can't breathe out that much. I met so many great people. I made so many memories. It was actually one of the best times of my life until it wasn't. Because I had this like lingering feeling that something was off, something was wrong. I'm not meant to be here. And if I'm good at anything, I think it would be listening to intuition, gut feelings, God, the universe, whatever you want to call it. So I did one semester of college. It's actually kind of like hard talking about. It gets kind of sad. I left, like I decided to leave. I started school at the end of August. By October, I remember having the first conversation with my mom in the car, just started bursting out tears. And the fact that I knew that something was like off, I was thinking subconsciously, even when I like kind of first entered college, am I really supposed to be here? Like, am I really meant for this life? Like, am I really going to join a sorority? Like nothing wrong with that. But it was just an intuitive thought. I thought that I was trying to push away until I actually said those words to my mom. I don't know if school is the right thing for me. And it brought it to the surface. It bubbled up to the surface. And that is all you need to start a thought and take action, honestly, is becoming aware of it. So I first brought that up to my mom back in October of 2022. And then I told my best friend, Emily was the first one I told that I was thinking about leaving school. That was back in November. A lot of back and forth that I don't want to leave. I'm going to leave. I don't want to leave. I don't want to leave. Comes winter break of my first semester, planning on not leaving at this point. And it was like a couple days before I was going to move back into school for the second semester, the spring semester, my freshman year. I just walked into the kitchen. I was like holding things in my hand because we were going to go back to school to drop them off. My mom goes, you're not going back. And I said, I'm not going back. And that sentence literally changed everything for me. Everything. Just coming into awareness about a thought and accepting it. And oh, my God, the millions of thoughts that are running around my mind at this point. How am I going to tell my roommate? How am I going to tell this person what's going to happen? What am I going to do? I'm not going to have a degree. So many thoughts racing through my head. But the only thing I could focus on was I'm actually taking the jump. So I left school. It all happened pretty quickly. It was probably the most detrimental six months of my life. Between leaving school in January 2023 to probably June, summer, May 2023. So confusing. So confusing. But this was the pivotal thing that led me to everything I have and everything I am right now. And I'm not saying right now is where I want to be by any means. But if I did not take that initial step, if I did not take that initial jump, I would have been dozens of steps behind from where I wanted to be right now. So feeling lost, following your purpose, and not being afraid to do that hard thing. After I left school, I was diving into a bunch of different things I wanted to do. I was in the city. I live in New Jersey. So it's pretty close. I was in New York City, probably three or four times a week meeting with modeling agencies, doing freelance modeling, photo shoots, trying to get into acting. My brother's becoming an actor, so I was doing that with him. I was going on some different talk shows as guests, traveling to Connecticut, again, the city, Pennsylvania for a bunch of these shoots that I'm finding on backstage.com, Craigslist, so many different things. And I was like, you know what? I have no direction right now. I'm going to follow what's in my heart, the things I want to do right now. And if you were to tell me, summer 2022, going into college, that I not only dropped out of college, but I also started a business, I would just not believe you. I would just not believe you. And I think that's the beautiful thing about life, is you're not going to know what's going to happen in the future because it didn't happen yet. And this is something I've been learning my couple years diving into personal development. Anxiety comes from the future. What's my future going to look like? Am I going to meet this person? Am I going to have X amount of money? Baby, it didn't happen yet. It didn't happen yet. The future is created. And this is something I needed to hear a year and a half ago when I was the most lost and confused in my life. I was so worried and so dependent on the future and what the future held. And all I needed to hear was that you need to live in the right now. I literally have a tattoo on my arm that says be in the now because this is something I still struggle with. But everything else aside, after I did the modeling, I did the acting for a little bit. I started to post more on social media. It was always something I was doing here and there after my weight loss journey of 50 pounds that all happened in the year of 2021. And I just started getting into it. I remember the first reel I posted on Instagram was back in April, the beginning of April 2023. Just kind of fooling around, looking back at them now, those reels that were asked, but the growth. And I know this first episode is jumping around a lot, but the growth that I've seen in myself has been tremendous. And to even think this morning, I woke up at 1130 AM, guys, so not perfect. Even to think this morning how I was shitting on myself so much, like you can do more. What are you doing? You're wasting your time. You need to wake up early and do this, this, and this. What about all the things you've done? I'm talking to myself, but I'm also talking to you because I know, especially if you're at this point in the episode, you find value in this. Pause. Take a step back. You've come a long way. You've done a lot. When I started posting on social media, I did not expect it to grow the way it's grown. And I'm not going to lie, it's definitely been a slower season for me right now, just on top of everything I've been doing. But from that mid-summer to beginning of fall 2023, I had a lot of engagement on my social media. I was taking my NASM certified personal training test. It was a lot of fun. I had a lot of engagement on my social media. I was taking my NASM certified personal training test. It was a lot of good things are happening. And I think that's also the thing about life. There are so many different seasons, so many different growing points, growing pain, growing points and growing pains. There's so many different ups and downs. And when I just, I started posting on socials, it wasn't only the engagement, it was the influence. I'm like, I love helping people. Like all of these things that have been so hard for me in life, like just as a little young 19 year old, to know that I'm helping people that are two, three times my age, people that are even younger than me that want that positive influence has, positive influence has, it's everything I've worked for. And I'm working for right now, exactly why I'm starting this podcast. My fitness account, especially on Instagram, is definitely more business gauged. And it was a lot of posting about mindset and mindfulness. And there's going to be episodes in the future about weight loss and binge eating and how mindset is the root of that all. But it's also the root of life. Because every action you take depends on your thoughts. And I'm sure you guys, I'm sure y'all have heard, I'm sure you guys have heard this before. Your thoughts, your feelings affect your thoughts and your thoughts affect your actions. And that's why one of my biggest sayings of life is act off action, not emotion. Because if I was just acting off emotion, this past two years of my life since I left school or year and a half of my life since I left school, nothing would have gotten done. There wouldn't have been personal growth, there wouldn't have been physical growth, there wouldn't have been a business, there wouldn't have been social media engagement, there wouldn't have been networking, there wouldn't have been all these things that I've built for myself. And why? Because I actually sat in that feeling of uncomfortableness. Uncomfort? I actually sat in that feeling of uncomfort. I don't think any day of my life is comfortable. And I'm not saying that, that's not like, oh my god, like I feel so bad for like, no, no day in my life should be comfortable. Not, not in yours either. Because you're not growing when you're comfortable. Your comfort zone is where your dreams go to die. That's what everyone says. And I think this will be something that keeps being said for many more years to come. If I never followed, if I never follow what my gut was telling me back in 2022 when I was in school, if I never followed that calling and that push I had, it would have never opened a door to all these other things to come. Like I'm sitting here, filming my first podcast episode, something I've been wanting to do so long. And there's so many other things that feel this way too. Solo traveling, for example, it's not not going on a vacation, traveling, I'm meaning like, living out of hostels, budgeting, like meeting new people like backpacking. This is also something that's been deep in my gut rooted intuition for so long. And, and I'm honestly just waiting for that spark. I mean, to be like, all right, just enough. Like, it's coming soon. It's coming soon. I'm going to be 20 in about a month. I think it's exactly a month from today. Exactly a month from today. I'm going to be 20 years old. My parents keep asking what I want for my birthday. And I keep saying a plane ticket. Because now that I do run a business online, it that was always the goal to make consistent income online and just travel. So back end have definitely been working harder to make that income a little higher. So I can do this comfortably. But again, this is something I want to do. And this is intuition. This is God, this is God, whatever you want to call it, if it's calling you, and it's you keep thinking about it keeps tingling up giving you butterflies. Do it. Please do it. Listen to your own opinions because not only the ones of others matter. If I were to say and I know I keep alluding this back to dropping out of college, which I just want to preface was the best decision I could have made in my life. Losing 50 pounds was 100 times easier than this decision I made of leaving school. I do know a couple of people that have done that around me. It's really hard. It's really hard to break the stigma. Break what you've grown up being taught to go to high school, work hard, go to a good school, get a degree, and then work a job and then retire and then die. It's funny and I try not to judge people doing that and I'm not but especially when you have an aspiration that has nothing to do with school. It's a waste of time, it's a waste of money, it's a waste of energy and I'm beyond grateful I came to the conclusion of that because knowledge is a great thing. I'm not saying I would never go back to school but I've also invested my time, my income in mentors and people that have actually done this already to shorten the learning curve for me. What's more valuable than money? It's time. So invest your time, invest your energy, and your money into things that are worth it. If you're listening to this right now and you are stuck in school and you don't want to be there because you have a greater calling, whether that be artist, that doesn't just mean like a painter, it means you know creation, it means creativity, it means a lot of things that could be done at home from the comfort of your computer, please do it. Please do it because this is something I needed somebody to tell me and please never ever give up on your dream because that dream never dies. You're always going to have a desire. When I opened my online coaching business, that was a big goal. That was the goal that I was sitting there for like six months wanting to do and you want to know what happened when I did it? I was like, okay, so what's the next thing I could do to make myself happier, more money, more influence, more I hate that mentality and that is something I'm trying to break free of so much especially right now and this is something I think the podcast will help me with and help you guys with listening. If you have a desire taken into your own hands, nothing would affect nothing would have happened unless I came to that awareness that I needed to leave school, that I needed to lose weight, that I needed to start a business, that I needed to do X, Y, Z. Nobody is going to do it for you. People can tell you but nobody's going to take the action and it's not the action that's hard, it's the consistent applied inspired action so when you don't feel like doing something, do it and do it 10 times harder and this is the whole basis of my podcast. I've gone through very hard things in the past couple years especially and I've not only learned how to get through any hard moment but to make it count and to make it matter and the fact that I did that one hard thing, that one pinnacle thing of leaving school and I'm going to say another one, weight loss, losing weight, going through a heartbreak, those things I am so grateful for. They would have never, never ever led me to such a beautiful outcome than where I am now. If you're listening, if you're still listening to this, you need to start listening to that gut feeling. You need to start finding yourself and start doing those hard things. This podcast, for example, has been in the works now after I decided to finally take action like a month and a half ago. I'm just now recording my first episode because it takes time. Good things take time. You take time. Your goals take time and I understand why I'm starting a podcast now. It's because in reality, I'm talking to myself. Yes, I could hear myself and I'm literally looking at a camera right now but I'm talking to myself and this is just reinforcing in my brain all those things that matter to me and all those things that will get me one foot in front of the other to eventually reach everything I've ever wanted. Everything I've ever wanted. I'm going to close out with this. You could look at life from the devilish, from the negative, from the world is crashing down on me side. Nothing's working out. Why can't I do this? Why does it seem so hard? Why am I not getting everything I'm working for? Or you can look at it like this. There's a plan. There has always been a plan since the day I stepped foot on this earth. Everything I'm going through right now, I need to go through to get me to the top, to get me to that next decision, to accomplish that goal. When you start looking at life from that perspective, everything changes because if I never had that perspective when I was leaving school, I would have never left. And I don't even want to think about where I'd be right now. Honestly, I don't. I really do not even want to think about where I'd be right now. But I do know I wouldn't know how to do hard shit. And I wouldn't know how to do it over and over and over again to make things a little easier. And if you want to start somewhere, pick a goal. Whether that be, I want to pick a goal. I always use fitness as an example, but let's say you want to lose five pounds by next month. Take action on that goal for one week. Yes, you are not going to lose five pounds in a week. Please don't do that. That is very unhealthy. But do the thing for seven days, for a week. And here's how it's going to go. It's going to be hard. It's going to be a hard week. You're not going to want to do things, but everything you don't want to do, you're going to do anyway. At the end of that week, you're going to sit back and be more confident. You're going to feel more energized. You're going to feel inspired You're going to feel inspired because that is the way confidence is built. And I'm going to do a whole nother episode all about confidence and how to build it. Confidence is built through hard things. And I'm honestly one of the most confident I've been in my entire life right now, because I've done those hard things and I've done them over and over and over again. And this is not like a, oh, praise Jess kind of situation. No, this is the reason why I started the Just Jess podcast. Everything Jess has learned to teach you and everything I am learning to only help you grow into that person you want to become. So with that being said, this first episode of my podcast is a little all over the place. I just want to thank you guys. So with that being said, I'm going to close out this first episode of my podcast, which is a little all over the place. Again, I had a structure, I had a whole plan written down, I kind of just spiraled, but kind of just an introduction, showing you my basis and who I am as a person, everything I'm trying to inspire and teach. The next episodes to come will definitely be more like narrowed down. And I'm just so excited to see where this goes. And make sure you follow my podcast, Instagram and my TikTok both at Just Jess podcast. The Instagram has an extra Jess or the Instagram has an extra S in it because somebody took the actual name, Just Jess podcast. And I was a little upset about it. I'm not going to lie, but make sure to follow those there. If you guys have any suggestions about what you want to see, what you need help with anything, please comment below. Let me know, shoot me a DM and email. Thank you so much. My good friend, Mike Clay has for giving me this microphone and audio interface and he's fired. Check out his podcast too, at Modern Day Artist. Check out his podcast as well. It's at Modern Day Artist. I'll be linked in the description below. If you're watching this on YouTube, on Spotify, Apple Music, wherever you are, thank you so much for listening. And if you finish this episode, that's a win for today, because this is all flooding in your awareness. And clearly it's something that you want to hear. So that is all she wrote, guys. I'm going to go edit this thing. Wish me luck. I wish I could tell you when or what time the podcast would be out, but I just don't know. Jess just doesn't know. So bear with me. Stay tuned. And so once I figure out a more structured plan, when I figure out actually how long this will take to edit, because I honestly expect these episodes to be a little shorter, but I'm now looking at this like 27 minutes long. So thank you guys so much for watching again. I love you. And keep rolling. Have a good day.