Transcript EP 281 – Self-Love Isn’t Selfish with Jenna Banks

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Dr. Taz: Welcome back, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Super Woman Wellness, where you know we’re determined to bring you back to your super powered self. And joining me today is a special guest to talk about something we all struggle with. In fact, I think it’s been a really long journey to overcome self love and really accepting and loving yourself and loving the things that are coming into your life. That is one that I know that I personally have struggled with since I was a little girl and it’s really taking now when I’m about to turn 50, ah, for me to understand and come into my power. But Jenna Banks is here. She’s an entrepreneur, a public speaker and author, a podcast host, and a real estate investor. And of course a self-love advocate focused on women’s empowerment and gender equality. Her new book is I Love Me More: How to Find Happiness and Success Through Self-Love.

Dr. Taz: She’s done all kinds of amazing things, but essentially she’s been very focused on this issue of self love. She’s someone who learned to never question her instincts. She trusted the inner call to quit her comfortable six figure corporate job, and start a home based marketing products business in 2012, with $400 and a laptop. While running the company, she simultaneously wrapped up a profitable real estate venture and then sold her marketing products business for half a million dollars. All right. We got to break this all down. Welcome to the show Jenna. She’s a fellow Atlantan too, so that makes me even more excited, but talk to us, talk to us about how you became passionate about this issue. You’ve done a lot in your life. You’ve run some businesses, you’ve invested. Where did this sort of passion for helping women understand their own power and embracing themselves come from?

Jenna Banks: Really good question. It wasn’t something I was always focused on, but it was something I was focused on for myself. Much like you, it sounds like you were on your self love journey. I was too. You know what, oddly enough, I didn’t know the term self love as a term until I started researching to write the book. I was calling it something else entirely, but come to find out,

Dr. Taz: What were you calling it?

Jenna Banks: I was calling it like, I almost titled the book religion of you just because,

Dr. Taz: Okay.

Jenna Banks: It felt like that’s what it was. It’s like realizing that we need to honor ourselves first and we have to make our happiness our number one priority. And as women, we’ve been programmed and conditioned to put ourselves really last on the list. And it’s really telling when I ask women, I have it actually as a question on my website even, is to write down who are the most important people in your life and anyone listening right now, I’d like you to think about that too. Like,

Dr. Taz: That’s a good one.

Jenna Banks: Who are the most important people in your life and usually women won’t even list themselves on the list.

Dr. Taz: Nope.

Jenna Banks: Yeah. So that’s literally, having conversations with my friends and realizing, oh my goodness, this is a problem. I’ve overcome these things for the most part. I think we’re always still on our self love journey, but I had come so far and I was getting questioned about things like, how did I get to where I became, feeling in my power. And I realized after doing some journaling and really thinking about it, that it really was a long journey. And so I started just journaling about it and I realized there’s a lot here I could share with other women to help them learn through my own journey of where I came from a place of self-loathing and a lack of worth and self value to a place where yeah, I love myself more, more than anyone else, and it’s not selfish and not narcissistic.

Dr. Taz: And that’s such a hard line for women to understand and navigate I think, because I think we feel like when we do a lot for ourselves or set time away for ourselves, whether we’re moms or business women or whatever we are, that we are being selfish and we are being narcissistic. But the bigger issue I think, is the self-loathing piece because I know I had that and I grew up in a dysfunctional household and I looked different from everybody else back then. And I was in a different private school. My body’s different. Like there are so many things that were different about me, right?

Dr. Taz: And so I always thought my self-loathing was from all of that stuff that I had gone through. But now I have a 14 year old daughter who is, I think, incredible and gorgeous and brilliant and all that other stuff, but she has it too. And she’s in a loving home with lots of benefits and all this other stuff. And so it’s just like, it actually inspired me to do my TED Talk. I did a TED Talk I think, it was back in 2017 or 2018 on how we literally somehow passed this down to a certain extent. And we stored it in our DNA because just watching her, knowing my story, my mom’s story, my grandmother’s story. I’m like what’s happening here? And so where does self-loathing begin? Do we need to understand that before we can get to self-love? Is that an essential first step?

Jenna Banks: That’s a good question. For me self-loathing began because I lived in a family where my parents were narcissists. And when you live with a narcissist or you have a partner who’s a narcissist, it’s hard to love yourself because you’re so focused on pleasing them.

Dr. Taz: Right.

Jenna Banks: And so your sense of self-worth is derived from them. And if they don’t see you as worthy, if they’re not happy with you, if you haven’t pleased them, then you’re not worthy. And you take that personally. And that’s where my sense of self-loathing came from, is I’m not valuable unless I’m pleasing them and I’m not pleasing them so I must not be worth much. So, and I know that’s different for everybody. I highly doubt everyone comes from this really low place of self-loathing like I did, but I know there are a lot of people who did come from that and who do come from that and who do need the help to understand that it’s not you. You have to learn to look within. I love how you mentioned, first off I really want to watch your TED Talk.

Dr. Taz: It’s old now, but sure.

Jenna Banks: No. No. It’s really relevant because I talk about this a lot. We have been modeled by our mothers and our grandmothers before them, et cetera, about what a woman is, what a man is, what a boy is, what a girl is, how we behave, how we act. What’s good? What’s bad? And through my research, I’ve learned that we form around 95%, most of our belief system is formed by the tender age of seven.

Dr. Taz: Yeah.

Jenna Banks: And so by that point, you haven’t programmed yourself. You’ve been programmed by your parents and the other adults in your life. And then you carry that on as if this is how life should be. This is how I should behave. This is how women are treated. This is how women are viewed. This is how much power we can have or can’t have. We should play it small. All these things are programmed into us at an early age. And then we don’t question it anymore. And so my goal really with this book and the talks and all the stuff that I’m doing today is to shed this spotlight on these unconscious social norms that are passed on to us and that we act out and then we pass on to our children.

Dr. Taz: What are some of the things that we’re doing? I like looking at my own behavior. I’m like, did I do that? But anyhow, what are some of the things that we’re doing?

Jenna Banks: It’s something we all do. It’s something that I’ve been working hard on overcoming, and I’m pretty much almost there, but I still find myself defaulting to this mode of the nice girl syndrome. That’s one of them, just one. And that one is something I think pretty much every girl and woman can relate to. We think, but yeah, I’m a nice girl. We see this as a positive and there’s nothing wrong with being nice where it falls into it being the nice girl syndrome is when we abandon ourselves in order to help somebody else feel good. So we’re so concerned with the feelings of others. That’s how we’ve been raised. Make sure everyone feels good, that they like you. And we concern ourselves so much with the feelings of others that we abandon ourselves in the process. And that’s where it becomes destructive. I’ll give you a quick example.

Jenna Banks: I’m new to social media. I was not on it for the longest time. I really was never on Facebook. I just love my privacy. Can you imagine someone who put themselves out there like I did in my book? I’m very vulnerable and I just loved my privacy so much, so I never wanted to get on social media, but I decided to go ahead and get on it. I needed to, because now that I’m out there with a book.

Dr. Taz: Right.

Jenna Banks: So I had a very private Instagram account, but that’s about it. I had a LinkedIn account for professional life, but that was it. So I had an ex reach out to me on social media. I hadn’t talked to him in like 20 years.

Dr. Taz: Oh my gosh.

Jenna Banks: And you know how that, it’s like, oh, blast from the past.

Dr. Taz: Yeah.

Jenna Banks: Like, so he’s like, Hey, how’s it going? And I really hadn’t processed my feelings about how I felt about him reaching out, but I was like, oh, cool, Hey, good. How are you? Good. And I was like, Hey. He said something else back. And I was like, is he fishing? Let me just throw out a mention of my boyfriend. So I did that. Never know.

Dr. Taz: Yeah.

Jenna Banks: And he was like, cool, well, great, glad you’re doing well. And I really thought that would be the end of it. And then a few days later, he commented on a social media post. Like he was a friend of mine and I had to be honest with myself about how I felt about that. I didn’t like it. It didn’t feel good in my body and the old me, the nice girl me would’ve been well, he’s being nice. Right.

Dr. Taz: Yeah.

Jenna Banks: He’s not trying to harm me or he is not trying to be mean. He’s not doing anything wrong.

Dr. Taz: Right.

Jenna Banks: So just let it slide. Right.

Dr. Taz: Yeah.

Jenna Banks: But the me of today knows that I have to protect my boundaries and I have to not worry about how he feels and about taking care of his feelings because I have to honor myself first. So what I did was open my DM, started writing out a note and just let it flow. It went something like this. Hey, we were actually never friends. We were together for a while. It was a very tumultuous relationship, to be honest. And what, I forget what he did, but he did something that really affected my trust.

Dr. Taz: Yeah.

Jenna Banks: And I was like, and so that was it. We broke up. And we’re not friends. I have no intentions of ever being friends with you. And as I was writing it, it felt really good to write it. But then going to hit send, ah, that guilt comes in, right, the nice girl syndrome wants you to like, oh no, no, be nice. But you know what I hit send, because that was my truth. And I’ll tell you what it felt like Dr. Taz, it felt amazing. I felt my power. I felt my power come back because that was a drain of my power. And I hit send. I didn’t look back. It had nothing to do with him. It had everything to do with me.

Dr. Taz: Wow.

Jenna Banks: And that’s the difference. The big difference is that as women, we tend to always play nice. Always be the nice person, look out for everyone else’s feelings before our own.

Dr. Taz: Yeah.

Jenna Banks: Right.

Dr. Taz: Yeah.

Jenna Banks: And so it’s honoring ourselves and not worrying about what the other person is going to feel or think or whatever. It’s being true to ourselves. That’s our power. And what I call these things drains when we let them happen, we let these power drains happen and it just, it makes us feel small. It makes us feel like less than. It drains our power from us. And this is really important for us to start to change this behavior and model different behavior for our daughters. So we teach them to be what I call power full, which is power F-U-L-L, full of our own power.

Dr. Taz: Well, what are ways we can do that? Like what are real practical things that maybe we could be conscious of so we could do that? We can A, first of all model it and then as we model things, right, like fake it until you make it, then hopefully it seeps in and we actually believe it. So what are maybe your top four or five things that we should be doing to sort of drive this forward?

Jenna Banks: Yeah. One of the big things is to understand that when you do something new, like let’s say what I did, telling this person, Hey, I don’t appreciate this. I’m going to accept my boundary. What we’re going to feel are a couple things, fear. Number one, scary. It’s scary to change behavior. And it’s scary to do something out of your yeah, just to change the behavior, but also to think about possibly hurting someone’s feelings. Then we’re going to feel guilt. Guilt is really important. I like driving this home because it’s something most women don’t know. I didn’t know until I started doing the research. Guilt keeps us in our programmed conditioned lanes and it affects women differently than it affects men. Men will feel guilty and there’s study behind this, there’s research behind this. Men will feel guilty for the most part, this is just generalizing here, but this is what the research shows, men will feel guilty when they do something that harms themselves like drinking too much or eating too much. Women feel guilty when we worry we’ve hurt someone’s feelings.

Dr. Taz: Yep.

Jenna Banks: And what happens is we turn this into shame and then anger at ourselves. It’s really toxic for us. In reality, what guilt is, what we feel when it happens, when it comes up is when we’re breaking a conditioned pattern or behavior.

Dr. Taz: Gotcha.

Jenna Banks: So for me, just thinking, Ooh, I’m going to write this DM to this person. I felt a little guilty. Was I doing something wrong? No, I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Unfortunately we tend to follow guilt and we let that drive our behavior. We think I’m doing something wrong. I’m breaking a moral code when we’re not.

Dr. Taz: Right.

Jenna Banks: So that’s the key, is to know, Hey, when you go to maybe change one of these behaviors that are disempowering, that you know you’re going to probably encounter guilt and you can’t give into that. You have to go consciously, make the choice. Like this is what I want for my life. And let me give you another indication that you’re on the right path. When you do like I did, you hit send, you stand up for yourself when someone’s crossing a boundary. And when you can get to the point where you do it instantly, you get past that discomfort, you get past that fear and you do it. It feels great. It feels great. And you know what that means? You’re standing in your power.

Dr. Taz: I love that. Fear, guilt, I’ve seen those as motivators for all kinds of behavior. I’ve seen them as blocks for making change. Right. What are a couple more that maybe we could identify with?

Jenna Banks: Okay. So another one I talk a lot about is, especially in the book as well as toxic relationships. We have these relationships in our lives for better or for worse. They could be friends, they could be family. In my case, they were my parents. And I’ve had to distance and or detach from these people who literally were drains again, another drain of our power. We hold onto these ties as if they are permanent, like an old high school friend was one of my examples in my book. I had an old high school friend I knew for a long time, but every time I talked to her over however many years, maybe it was like once or twice a year, I wouldn’t feel good afterwards. I wouldn’t feel good. I feel icky. I feel like she doesn’t care about what’s going on in my life. It’s all about her. And but it was this obligation or whatever. And one day I was just like, no, I don’t want to return her calls anymore. And I just stopped and it felt great.

Dr. Taz: Yeah.

Jenna Banks: And so that’s another indication. So you have to really tune in, I talk about this a lot, just tuning into how you feel. Do I feel powered up or do I feel disempowered? Do I feel happy? Do I feel icky? And tune into that and honor that first and let’s stop playing nice girl. Let’s stop pleasing people and all that. Please yourself really is the key. Yeah.

Dr. Taz: I think your body sometimes tells you too, right? Like I think your brain is so programmed and your heart can be so blocked, but sometimes your body has the answer. Like if you just feel like cowering versus you’re like engaged and you’re into it, or I remember I have played this role probably because of my childhood, but I’ve played this role of the savior for so long, right? I’ve had girl friendships where like I’m doing, I’m like, are you okay? Are you okay? Is everything fine? What’s going on with you? Like putting all this energy into a friendship and like not really getting the return on the other end. And I did that for years, trying to please people I guess, or trying to make up for something.

Dr. Taz: And you’re right. I got to where it’s like, I can’t do this anymore. I don’t need to do this anymore. Like one way streets don’t really help anybody. Right. But I think that’s so true. Those relationships. Give us one more and then I do want to get to signs that you’re lacking self love. I think that’s really, there’s so much on here. I don’t even know what to say, but anyhow, you have to buy the book. But anyways, give us one more and then we’ll talk about signs that you might be lacking love. If you had to give women one more sign that they’re on that path, what would you tell them is something?

Jenna Banks: Okay. There are quite a few. Just the other one I’ll hit on is saying I’m sorry all the time.

Dr. Taz: Ooh. That’s a good one. That is a good one. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. No, I’m sorry. No, I’m sorry.

Jenna Banks: Sorry. I see it a lot. It programmed it into us as just this normal behavior. It’s just what you do when you’re, instead of saying pardon or excuse me. But we also shrink a little, like you mentioned the body, like what we feel in the body. When we say, sorry, we’re shrinking back a bit. And women tend to do this more than men. Although I do see a lot of guys picking up on this behavior just to kind of fit in or and so, but it’s really disempowering. For example, I live in a building where there’s an elevator. This happens all the time. Anytime a woman comes out the door she says, sorry. Why?

Dr. Taz: Yeah.

Jenna Banks: Why are you sorry? For taking up space?

Dr. Taz: Yeah.

Jenna Banks: Why are you sorry? You have every right to go out the door. Like, or it’s disempowering for us to say, sorry all the time.

Dr. Taz: Oh my gosh. Why are we so nice? What happened?

Jenna Banks: I know. There’s nothing wrong with being nice, but that’s not even nice.

Dr. Taz: Yeah.

Jenna Banks: That’s just saying I’m going to play small so you can seem bigger. What is that?

Dr. Taz: Yeah. So true. Well, what are eight signs that you’re lacking self love in your life? What could be a .

Jenna Banks: Eight, ooh that’s a lot. I’ll see if I can…

Dr. Taz: Let’s do four. Maybe not eight. Let’s do four.

Jenna Banks: One of the big ones is over giving, you talked about that and you definitely learned that lesson. It sounds like an over-giver. A lot of us wrap our sense of self-worth up in how much we give. Right. And so, and a lot of these things, we actually create identities out of. Oh, I’m the giver. I’m the martyr. I’m the, this. And over giving is just a recipe for becoming a doormat.

Dr. Taz: And turning really resentful down the road too. So yeah.

Jenna Banks: I was really, yeah. Just going to say that because it turns into resentment. I was that person.

Dr. Taz: Yeah.

Jenna Banks: I was that person. And I’d sit there and I’d see, going, ugh, like why is it that I feel so drained? Because that’s what happens.

Dr. Taz: Yeah.

Jenna Banks: When we are emptied out, we’re not giving our love back to ourselves and we’re giving it to everyone else. I say your love is your power. It really is. You can give your power or your love away to everyone else. But if you’re not giving it back to yourself, you’re not powering yourself up. You’re just draining yourself. And that drain is what causes the feeling of resentment.

Dr. Taz: So true.

Jenna Banks: But it’s not benefiting you and it’s not benefiting those you love to over give like that. It’s great to give. We should, but we need to be giving after we’ve given to ourselves.

Dr. Taz: I love that. I think that’s so many women and there’s some men too that are guilty of over giving and then in a relationship getting very resentful, or angry, or checking out. These are common terms used, right? Because they’re just drained, they’re just depleted and we don’t want that to get to that point. So that’s a good one. What’s another one?

Jenna Banks: Another one related to guilt, this is something for all your moms out there. I’m a mom, my son’s 28 now. I’m almost 52. So 50 I mean, not 52. I’m not going to age myself.

Dr. Taz: You’re accelerating that train there.

Jenna Banks: 50 also.

Dr. Taz: When’s your birthday?

Jenna Banks: It’s December and I’ll be 49 in December. So once I get close to a round number I’m like,

Dr. Taz: Round up. I’ve been trying to round down. But again, .

Jenna Banks: But as a mom, we tend to also wrap our identity up in how well we give to our children. Right. How our children actually turn out. They become a reflection of us. And I certainly had that happen with my son. And he made some decisions for his life after I’d given him all the opportunities and he was on the right track and doing great in school and job and all of that and chose to make some bad decisions for his life.

Dr. Taz: Yeah.

Jenna Banks: And I talk about this in the book, I go into detail about it because it was hard to share it, but I thought it was really important to share this because the wrapping, my identity up in my child was causing me to deplete myself by self-sacrificing in order to get him back to this place that I had envisioned for him.

Dr. Taz: Right.

Jenna Banks: Because I saw him as a reflection of me, like how he turned out, reflected back on me.

Dr. Taz: Right.

Jenna Banks: When in reality, our children are just here to become themselves, the best version of themselves. And we can’t determine what that is. It’s not up to us. All we can do is give them every opportunity. But my son was an adult when all of this happened, he was 21. And they are on their own path. I would never have wanted anyone to be trying to mold me when I was an adult and as parents, we have to learn to understand that our kids are on their own journey. And ultimately I’ll just wrap it up by saying that he’s on Medicaid or medical state health insurance. He gets help with his food. He gets disability now. And it may sound like a shameful thing to say, but I put it out there boldly because if someone else can relate, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. This is not a reflection of my life. These are the choices that were made for his life by him. And he’s actually happy. Well fed, well taken care of, great medical care. There’s nothing wrong with his life. It just doesn’t reflect my life.

Dr. Taz: Right. Right. That’s so hard as moms. Right. That’s so hard for us to wrap our heads around and reckon with, and I think we get very, again, been there, very wrapped up in the kids and like what’s happening with them and what their path is going to be. Are there tools to pull us out of this? Are there, like, we talk about affirmations, we talk about spending time in nature, spending time with girlfriends, like what are some practical tools to pull us out of this conditioning and of this sorry syndrome and nice girl syndrome? For me it’s been work and still falling down sometimes and getting back up. Right.

Jenna Banks: Yeah.

Dr. Taz: So what would you say to all the women listening today? How can they kind of start to pull themselves out?

Jenna Banks: Absolutely. And I’m glad you asked. So I am all about being power full. And I have this concept, I call the power container and it’s this imaginary, imagine you have this vessel that rests in your soul that starts at the bottom of your stomach and goes all the way up to the top of your chest area. When it’s full, all the way up to your chest, when you’re on power full, F-U-L-L, you know what that feels like. You feel like blasting your favorite music and dancing in the car. You go into places like the grocery store and random strangers want to talk to you. You want to talk to random strangers.

Dr. Taz: Yeah.

Jenna Banks: Because you’re radiant. You feel great. You’ve got a ton of energy. You feel like taking on creative projects. You want to go home and organize your house. We know what that feels like. We also know what the opposite feels like when we’re drained. We talked about this a little earlier about feeling resentful. We don’t feel good. We’re not motivated. Other signs are like, we don’t feel like our future looks very optimistic. We start to feel a little depressed, right?

Dr. Taz: Yeah.

Jenna Banks: You snap at the people you love, you kind of start to wonder what I would do is, and I still catch myself doing this sometimes, is starting to feel negatively towards certain people that we’re close to.

Dr. Taz: Yeah.

Jenna Banks: We start to kind of look at it from this filter, like, oh, but they’re not giving me enough attention or you just start to think about them negatively when all reality, what you’re not doing is what you should be doing. Filling yourself up with your own love. That is a sign for you that you need to start filling up. So how do we fill up? You practice self care as a regular thing. I’m talking daily, spend time. You ask about some of the tools, I like to journal and you do that too.

Dr. Taz: Yep. Every morning.

Jenna Banks: Every morning. And it doesn’t have to take that much time. If all you can squeeze in is 10 to 15 minutes, do it. It is so worth it because that little bit of personal connection time is you giving yourself your love. You’re connecting with yourself. You’re filling up. Other ways are just go get that massage if you’re feeling stressed out and don’t feel guilty about it. Go work out, go spend time in nature, go for a walk, but also stop the drains. Stop saying yes when you really want to say no. Right. And no, you’re just at your max. When I know I’m maxed out, I have to start saying no. No, to different things that I might even really want to do, but I know I’m just going to break myself if I do that.

Jenna Banks: So you just have to start paying attention to the things that are draining you. Honor yourself, put yourself first and practice self care on a daily basis. One more last tip I’ll give, I talk about this in the book is to figure out what makes you easily happy? I’m talking like, no, no, you don’t have to do much to get there. For me, it’s listening to music.

Dr. Taz: Me too. I was about to say that. So anyhow. Yes, for sure.

Jenna Banks: So easy. Right. You just turn on the music and bam, you get your mood lifted. Right. Another thing for me is taking a walk on a sunny day, just getting out of wherever I’m at and just taking that 30 minutes to an hour. It really just makes me feel better, instantly. This might sound crazy, but I love funny animal videos. TikTok and Instagram know my game because they literally feed me funny cat videos like every day. So, and that instantly when you start laughing, it gets you in a better mood. So I call those things your joy list. If you can just get a little joy going, start thinking about the quick things that can get your mood instantly in a good mood, but do it every day. Don’t wait till you’re drained.

Dr. Taz: Right.

Jenna Banks: Lift yourself up every day. That keeps you on this what I call power full, F-U-L-L. Just stay there all the time. When you start to feel low, when you start to go, Ooh, my power container’s feeling like it’s halfway full or I’m starting to feel a little empty. That’s your sign that you haven’t been taking care of yourself and practicing self-care and practicing your joy list. So if you just keep on that every single day, you’ll be good.

Dr. Taz: Love it. This is such a great topic. I mean, I’m telling you guys, we didn’t even touch half the things we wanted to talk about. So how can all of us connect with you, learn more about your book? What’s the best way to do that?

Jenna Banks: Thank you for asking. The easiest, fastest way is just to go to my website, which is jenna-banks.com because there I have links to all of my socials. I’m really active on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, you name it. Yeah. All the places. And then also you can find my book there easily too. It’s on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target. It’s even in airport bookstores right now.

Dr. Taz: Amazing.

Jenna Banks: Yeah. If you’re traveling and you have a minute, check it out there, but yeah, I’d love to connect with everyone.

Dr. Taz: Well, that’s wonderful. Well, thank you for taking time out today to join us. I appreciate it. This is a topic that we all, I think, at some level struggle with and we see it in our children as well. So really important stuff here. And I think the earlier we teach them the better, right?

Jenna Banks: Yeah.

Dr. Taz: Like the more we can help them identify, maybe they won’t have the exact same journey that we had. So we’ll see. But for everyone watching this episode of Super Woman Wellness, remember you can rate and review it and share it with your friends. And if you post a review, I will send you a free bottle of booze. Just DM me at hello@doctortaz.com and we will get it going your way. And I will see you next time.