Heroes in Business - Alex Petrowski, 5EP Podcast Conversation with Nancy Gale Founder of JAMAH and AMBITION

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

Embracing hard work. Nancy Gale is the Founder of JAMAH and Founder of the non-profit AMBITION and platform 23 Years of Ramen. She stops by the 5EP Podcast to discuss with Alex the disservice given to the idea of hard work and how to change the dialog around value and mental health. Further topics they delve into in this 2part interview include resilience through challenges, choosing happiness and cause in commerce. Join the growing community 5ep_podcast on Instagram

Hey Siri, what's on my calendar for today? Today, you have the 5EP podcast. Would you like to keep it on your calendar? 5EP? Yeah! Welcome to the 5EP podcast. Interview interviews and conversations to guide the genesis of personal development. Mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, and social. The five pillars of living a five exclamation point life. On now with your host, Alex Petrowski. your host, Alex Petrowski. Welcome to another episode of the 5EP podcast. I'm here with my guest, Nancy Gale. She had founded JAMA all the way back in around 2000, and then 10 years later had founded a nonprofit, Ambition ambition that she had ensured was

intertwined with JAMA so that if one doesn't succeed, the other one doesn't succeed and that they truly need each other and that she is driving the intersection of cause and commerce on a daily basis with those two endeavors. So without further ado, Nancy Gale. Hi, Alex. It's so nice to see you. It's great to see you, Nancy. I'm excited today, especially because we're going to be talking about the topic of work-life balance and pretty much all the negative things said about a hard work ethic and really demonizing hard work. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that topic of hard work and what it truly means to you. So I would say in the first place, I'm an advocate of work-life blend.

The idea of balance, just for me personally, I've always struggled with that statement and this whole search for balance where I feel, from my experience, when I blend all the components of my life is when I really feel that I'm in the sort of depth of my happiness. And what I've discovered is that the people I work with become very dear friends in many, many cases. And then in many cases, my very dear friends are people I do business with. And I think this hunt for the perfect balance becomes sort of a monster of its own, which ultimately becomes, I believe, very depressing. And I think that, and I don't know if it's my generation or just whatever the sort of, you know, social media influence, but somehow we've skipped over something that I know was very prevalent in my upbringing, which was talking about the joy of hard work and what it does for you when you set a goal and you conquer and you achieve. And I'm always mystified that we we revere incredible athletes. athletes. But in this day and age, if we were to really talk about what it takes to be a gold medal athlete or, you know, winners of the finals, it takes a lot of hard work, the very work that we're now being cautioned to not emphasize with students of today.

And I know we have so many, you know, discussions around mental health. But I believe personally, that our mental health is also really, it's not something that needs to be separated from our work, I think we can attend to both. And in my nonprofit, we talk about that all the time that the discussions around hard work and work ethic are never separated from taking care of oneself. And so I always say to our students, you know, what's really good for your mental health, setting goals, achieving, conquering, believing in yourself. And I think that when we push that aside, we really escalate issues with mental health. So I feel like to be really holistic, we need to look at these together, not in this idea that one is separate from the other. And if I just don't

work as hard, my mental health will not be better. So that's my two cents or five cents. Yeah, Nancy, I truly believe that blend is crucial. And that in this day and age, you're going to find a lot of naysayers that are going to ask you, why do you do this? Why do you do that? You're not getting paid for this. You're not seeing any immediate results. Why are you putting in the extra work? What would you tell somebody who is a naysayer telling you, you need to take a step back and take a break for yourself and not put in this extra work if there's no immediate goal? for yourself and not put in this extra work if there's no immediate goal? I would say it's so important to look at long-term goals. So in first grade, when you're learning the basics, right, of writing or whatever age we are, when we learn to write our name, because to me, that's saying that once I got the end down, since I can't write the whole name, that I should stop right there. That all that I'm putting into this doesn't make sense because I don't have my full name written out today. And again, I think I can't really blame the kids of today for feeling this way,

because I just, again, I don't feel like my generation perhaps has done their job in explaining what hard work really means and the beauty of that and defining it, I look back in my career and I never looked at an internship, for instance, or volunteering as working for free. I looked at all of that as opportunity that will help me reach my goals. And so many people that I volunteered for, and so many places that I interned, those people were critical in my advancement toward my success. And so I think, in fact, even with ambition, everything we do is volunteer. And often I will get people that will say, well, you can't expect people to come to class to work with these kids for free. And I say, I don't expect it for free. But volunteerism is really, really important.

And, you know, if you were asked to build a, you know, to spend a day with Habitat for Humanity, for instance, to build a house, you volunteer and you're excited about it and you share that, but you don't tell people you built a house for free today. So I feel that collectively, we all want to get on board with anything that's going to be positive progress in this world. So I think we have to change the verbiage around a lot of it. And I have a dear friend, he's a cinematographer, and he always tells his students or any, sorry, young people coming up in the business, he'll always say, any moment you are not on a paid gig, you should have a camera in your hand. you should have a camera in your hand. So I think what we need to do is educate people more on opportunity as opposed to I'm working for free. And granted, we all know when, and maybe that is something actually that we need to talk about more when someone is trying to take advantage of us. If I sign up for an internship

and all I'm doing is sweeping floors and getting coffee and I'm never around learning about the business, then yes, someone should hire a grunt worker and pay them to do the grunt work. But if I'm getting coffee and I'm sweeping floors and I'm also invited into learning about this business, a business I don't know about. So I certainly, as a young intern, don't expect to be paid. If it's an actual internship and say I'm getting college credit, that's the payment. Because no one would hire me at the skill set I have. And I also understand that someone training me in an internship is taking away time from doing business. So I feel like we need to really step way back and define what internships are and what volunteering is versus what someone looking to just get someone to do free work is. Yeah, there's a fine line between being taken advantage of and then also having an energy transfer that's mutually beneficial for both parties to where it may not involve a large

salary or even a salary at all. But the fact that you're getting the experience while you're also filling the needs of this company by doing the grunt work at the same time, because somebody needs to do it. And most people that started out at that company and built their way up, they started out right where you are at that moment. And they already know how to do that stuff, which allows them to be able to find the person to fill that need and allow them to grow in other ways later on. Most people don't realize that most people look at it short sighted to where they're just looking for the paycheck, they're looking for the benefits, they're not looking at it as as much of a long term view as you are. And really, these days, you're going to get naysayers and people that aren't your cheerleader and all different aspects of life. How do you

tactfully get around those naysayers and those people that aren't your cheerleaders that are going to be in the workplace no matter what each day that you have to work with? Because I'm sure everybody here has worked with people that they don't like to work with. And there's a way to get around it tactfully and there's a way to not get around it tactfully. I find for me, just quietly walking away. It is my best weapon. Now, if I'm in the same room with them, I can still walk away mentally, I can smile. And I can just not engage in that conversation, which for me is is really the best answer. Because if I engage, I owe it to myself to stand up for myself. But I know that in many instances, especially with an assayer, that's not going to work. So I have to look at that person and say, you know what,

that person probably can't even see beyond today for themselves. So they certainly can't see beyond today for me. So my best weapon is going to be staying in my own confidence and learning what I need to learn and tactfully, kindly, just not engaging in that conversation because all that conversation does is bring you down. And what I have found too, is if you're just quiet, that person who's your naysayer, if you don't engage in that conversation, you might hear a thing or two that certainly doesn't tell you not to do what you're doing, but might actually help you in your fight. Oh, certainly. And in life, you're going to have teachers that are positive teachers and negative teachers that teach you how not to do

things, which actually, in a way, it'll build your resilience and how to navigate around these people, which leads us to our next topic, which is resilience through major events. And you've had some incredibly drastic life-changing events that not many people have experienced. And you've been able to come out of it the other side, a stronger, better my life, as many people have. I've had the death of a father. I've had, I think, the typical steps in life that many people have experienced. But I've had three major events that I often, I don't on a daily basis find people that can say, oh, that happened to me as well. The first one is my mom spent the better part of my high school years in the hospital. She was in the hospital for almost two years straight in and out

of a coma. And then she was in and out of the hospital, actually, for the next two years. And then she came out of that and lived a life that is hard to even describe. She had an energy and a will. So I think that was sort of my groundwork in life is that we can overcome anything groundwork in life is that we can overcome anything. And that spending time focusing on how we got there is much less productive than spending time on how we move forward. And so that again, that sets sort of the groundwork or the foundation for my life. Then when I was 25, I was raped, brutally raped, attacked, walking down the street one Fourth of July evening in 1988. And I had a very interesting moment, not maybe a week beyond our week after my attack. And I called my mom, I was listening to the radio, and a, an advertisement for the Rape Crisis Center,

which was really, that was the one place that was doing really good work in that area, place that was doing really good work in that area, in that arena at the time. And they had this sort of dark Gothic music. And a woman's voice comes on and you hear her say, Oh, my, I was raped, and I'll never I need to respond or react to this. And I had this conversation with my mom. And I, from the outset, did not feel like a victim. feel like a victim. I felt like someone who was sort of indescribable to me was the perpetrator, but it didn't make me the victim. And everywhere I went, the conversation was all about what happened. I didn't feel there was a lot of conversation around how to get to point B, point C. And so I actually moved, I was moving to LA at the time, and I wanted to volunteer for the

Rape Crisis Center. And the more I thought about it, I thought, you know, I want to do something that's more proactive. And I ended up getting involved with a gentleman who has self-defense schools. And I spoke to his audiences or attendees. And what I discovered or what was really confirmed for me is that resilience is a choice. So I think I was sort of raised with resilience and I under, I, but I don't think I ever looked at resilience and recognize one can choose to be resilient. I think there was an, this idea that resilience was something one either is or isn't. And so then 10 years, a little over 10 years ago, my mother was murdered in a home invasion. And that is something, I mean, just even now you say that sentence, it's just not something you'd ever imagine would be strung together with the words that include my mother. And then the case went cold. And thankfully, we were able to eventually get

the cold case reopened. And we were able to find the perpetrator and he is now in prison. But even through something as horrific as this, and my mom was my biggest cheerleader, we were really, really close. I realized I had to make another choice. And the choice is, do I, other than the logistics, of course, of how she died and trying to get the case reopened. open. It's up to me to decide I want to move forward and live a life that honors her legacy. And I don't want this person to take two lives because our lives can be taken even if we're still alive. So I realized that I had to make that choice every day to really dig into my resilience. And that is a choice that has to be made every day, just like going back to our prior conversation, working hard and doing what it takes. I think we get a little sort of cocky in our consciousness and we think, got this figured out, I'll just drive forward. My personal experience is that every day, you have to remind yourself what your goals are, and the promise that you've made to yourself as to how you want to live out those goals.

Yes. And I agree that each and every day with various things that pop up, there are opportunities to not only improve your self-esteem, but improve your resilience. And that if you take each opportunity in the sense of I need to do whatever this person tells me and act a certain way when tragic things happen, you're negatively impacting your resilience and self-esteem and you're taking steps backwards. When in fact that most people go through one of those things and will say, Oh, I've went through my biggest obstacle in life. I have no more obstacles. Life's going to throw you curve balls all the time. And that's your opportunity to continue to continually improve. And eventually you can be an example to help out other people like you're doing right now to where you're sharing your story with power, which is, which is not, which is not showcasing it as, uh, oh, poor me or pity me. You're showcasing as it, it's, it's an opportunity to learn and become better

and put your next foot forward on the path and not, not be, uh, uh, not be pushed along the path onto something that, that doesn't suit you best. So that leads me on to the next topic where there's choosing happiness and joy, no matter what. And even through the darkest of times, it can be extremely difficult. So I'd love some advice on how to stay happy and be joyful even through the tough times. So I know, and obviously, right, we can all just speak from our own experience. I remember when my right when my mom had passed, and we were having a celebration of life. And someone said to me, No, you can cry. It concerns me that you're not crying. And I said, I don't believe for me that if I cry this week or that there's

anything I can do that's going to make this okay. So what I can choose to do is live every single day again reminding myself where I want to be in this world and where my mom would want me to be and one of the things I know and it's the simplest thing in the world is what happens when we smile and when we smile from the gut. So even in the worst of crisis, if you smile from your gut for that second, you cannot be sad. It doesn't work. Try it. And again, it's very important that it's a smile from your whole body. And it also doesn't mean that when you stop smiling, you're going to be okay. But it injects moments of energy. And so for me, when I think about my mom, I can't not smile. And I think of her in many ways other than how she passed. I think of just who she was, the joy she brought me,

you know, the fights we had when I was a teenager, just our whole life together. So I can't think of her without smiling. So that's a commitment I made is like, is that is something that I have to continue to do to honor her. And again, to honor her by living a life that would mean something. When you look forward, again, even talking earlier about with business, when you look forward, you have to, it forces you to take into consideration the tools that you need. So the other thing that I know is really, really important, again, for me is using a voice, and we call it in the nonprofit, power, not pity. So, you know, with a lot of what's going on in the world today, we're hearing a lot of ranting and people getting up and talking about the horrible things they've been through. about the horrible things they've been through.

But what I keep thinking when I see that is many of the people that we're hearing these horror stories from, we're also seeing them live success in many other facets of their life. So what I want to know is, how did you get there? That's what I want our students to understand. That's what I want kids to to understand. That's what I want kids to understand is the compassion that is necessary when you hear those things and you hear these stories.

But then how did you get from A to B? And what I've discovered is if you speak with power, not pity, you take away the victimhood. And if I can share my story with power and then tell you how I got through it, then I become a leader. And this is what we tell all our students. You share these stories of your great challenges with power, not pity. And you discover that you've helped somebody that puts you in a leadership position. So I feel, and those two, the smiling and the power, not pity, for me, they just absolutely go together. But I feel like the smiling is something, it's just a favor we can do to ourselves in those moments. It ignites a certain amount of energy that nothing else can or does. Yeah, and it builds mental fortitude

through the tough times to smile and get through it in that way. Because a lot of people think that they're only going to be happy when it's worn off. And you're going to be happy the sooner it takes you to smile and really look at it through a different perspective. And with that, that concludes our episode with Nancy Gale.

I look forward to seeing you all next week on the 5EP Podcast. I'm Alex Petrowski, tuning off. Thank you. You've been listening to the 5EP Podcast with Alex Petrowski. Interviews and conversations to guide the genesis of personal development.

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