Episode 297 – Jackeline Velez

Welcome to Episode 297 of What’s Your “And”? This is John Garrett, and each Wednesday, I interview a professional who, just like me, is known for a hobby or a passion or an interest outside of work. To put it another way, it’s encouraging people to find their “And”, those things above and beyond your technical skills, the things that actually differentiate you when you’re at work.

I’m so excited to let everyone know that my book’s being published in September. It’ll be available on Amazon and a few other websites, so check out whatsyourand.com for all the details. The pre-orders will start in August, so be sure and get on that. I can’t say how much it means that everyone’s listening to the show and changing the cultures where they work because of it, and the book will really help to spread this message.

Please don’t forget to hit subscribe so you don’t miss any of the future episodes. I love sharing such interesting stories each and every week, and this week is no different with my guest, Jackeline Velez. She’s a senior account manager with Xero, and now she’s with me here today. Jackeline, thanks so much for taking time to be with me on What’s Your “And”?

Jackeline: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to discuss my hobbies and discuss my journey and story with you. I think that the timing couldn’t have been perfect for where I am in my life. I think that what you’re doing is super inspirational, and I think that a lot of people can relate to it, and if not, be inspired by our stories.

John: Cool. Thank you so much. That means a lot. This is going to be awesome. I’m excited. We just met virtually, and yet I’m going to fire away rapid fire questions. Let’s get to know Jackeline on a new level. So, here it is.

Jackeline: I’m really good at over sharing, so.

John: Oh, okay, good, maybe it will be 27 questions then. You’re like, only 17? All right, here’s one, a favorite color.

Jackeline: Red.

John: Red, okay. How about a least favorite color?

Jackeline: Brown.

John: Brown. Okay, all right. Would you say more diamonds or pearls?

Jackeline: Ooh, diamonds, I guess. I don’t like either of them actually.

John: Oh, really? Okay, all right. So, turquoise or something else?

Jackeline: I like my birthstone, a Peridot. Peridot, I think that’s how you say it.

John: Oh, okay.

Jackeline: I like my birthstone. It’s like lime green.

John: Oh.

Jackeline: Green was my favorite color, but apparently red is my favorite color now because I just said it.

John: Whatever it is, it’s Christmas-related. We’re all good. How about pens or pencils?

Jackeline: Pens, for sure. Pencils, that’s only —

John: Nice, nice. You just don’t make mistakes. You’re just like, I don’t need to erase. How about when it comes to puzzles, Sudoku or crossword?

Jackeline: Crossword. I did Sudoku by accident recently.

John: You were like, the words don’t fit right. I don’t understand.

Jackeline: Well, I didn’t know how to play, and I was having this experience where I knew how to play somehow. It’s a long story.

John: Wow. Very cool, very cool. Would you say you’re more of an early bird or a night owl?

Jackeline: Early bird, I’m up early.

John: Yeah.

Jackeline: Yeah, for sure. Night owl kills me.

John: Good for you. How about do you have a favorite actor or actress?

Jackeline: Oh, man, actor or actress. That’s a really good question. I like Sarah Michelle Gellar. I like Buffy a lot, and I never got over it.

John: Yeah. Okay, that’s a solid answer. Okay, all right. How about — you’re in Texas — how about tea or sweet tea?

Jackeline: Tea, but I add a little bit of sweetener. Sweet tea’s too sweet, so you’ve got to have the right amount. So, unsweetened tea but just add sweetener.

John: Add just a little bit. Okay, all right. How about do you have a favorite number?

Jackeline: Eight.

John: Eight. Is there a reason?

Jackeline: Actually, I have two favorite numbers, but you asked for one. Eight was the one that came. There’s a lot of —

John: Okay. Well, you gave me one. What’s the other one?

Jackeline: Five. So, my birthday’s 85-85, so I just had to like love those numbers, and they come up for me a lot.

John: That’s fantastic. All right, how about a favorite Disney character?

Jackeline: Oh, I don’t like Disney, man. Disney ruined everything. I think Belle because she liked to read a lot, and I read a lot as a child.

John: Okay, okay, all right.

Jackeline: I don’t like any of the messaging. If you go back and look at that, it’s really damaging for women. You wait for Prince Charming or you fall in love with this abusive beast. That’s really, really bad. Those are really, really bad.

John: You’re totally right. I shouldn’t be laughing, but you’re right. The way you described it though.

Jackeline: My friend just said, the little mermaid, she hated herself. She was like, I hate my fins. It’s all about self-love, not self-hate. Then she did change for her man to love her. It’s the worst.

John: No, it’s brutal.

Jackeline: I think that Disney’s coming out with better things now but —

John: Yeah, totally.

Jackeline: I definitely have that opinion.

John: Yeah, I mean, I just like Goofy. It’s like, all right, there you go.

Jackeline: Oh, yeah, I agree with that one.

John: But that’s super old. How about cats or dogs?

Jackeline: Dogs, man.

John: Dog?

Jackeline: I have a dog. Yeah. Yeah, I have a miniature poodle.

John: Oh, very cool, all right. Since you have your accounting background, balance sheet or income statement.

Jackeline: Ooh, balance sheet.

John: Balance sheet, okay, just pick one. That’s cool. For your computer, are you a PC or a Mac?

Jackeline: Xero forced me to have a Mac. When I first started, they forced us to do it, but now the new people that are starting, they have a PC. So, I’m a Mac person, but I don’t know how to use it. It’s been like three years.

John: I don’t know how to use them either. That’s why I don’t use them.

Jackeline: I still have one. I just do it for the bare minimum. This may as well be a tablet at this point.

John: There you go. It’s a tablet. That’s awesome. That’s very cool. How about a favorite ice cream flavor?

Jackeline: Ooh, cookies and cream.

John: Solid answer. Star Wars or Star Trek?

Jackeline: Neither. I don’t know anything about…

John: Okay, fair enough, fair enough. Okay, next one then, perfect, how about a favorite movie of all time? Clearly not a Disney one.

Jackeline: Yeah. Favorite movie, that’s not a fair question.

John: Or more than one, go ahead.

Jackeline: It’s kind of sad is I don’t really watch any movies.

John: Oh, okay, favorite TV show of all time?

Jackeline: Oh, my favorite TV show, Impractical Jokers Have you ever watched that?

John: Yeah, I have.

Jackeline: They have a movie. I probably would love that movie. They’re just silly and hilarious. For movies, I was liking these French comedies for a while. I don’t know. I just have this — you know, another movie that I really love is Mean Girls. I just have —

John: Oh, yeah.

Jackeline: — this teenage taste sometimes.

John: Right. I feel like you’re a 13-year-old at heart.

Jackeline: I really am.

Jackeline: Yeah, I really am. I really am.

John: Cool It, we might as well throw that one in there, too.

Jackeline: That was a great movie, yeah.

John: See, there you go. All right, and the last one, last one, favorite thing you own or the favorite thing you have.

Jackeline: A favorite thing I own or have, probably my collection of books. Yeah, it’s kind of a boring answer but —

John: No, not at all.

Jackeline: A lot of them, I haven’t gotten to, but I really have just started to learn about the way the brain works, just started learning about trauma. From the yoga, I started learning all this stuff and about patterns and how we get stuck and just — there’s so much information about out there. I have a collection of books that, one day, I want to get through all of them.

John: Yeah, that’s fantastic, very cool, which dovetails perfectly into the yoga, like you said. How did you get started with that?

Jackeline: I was an accountant for ten years, I told you that, really didn’t like it. I was kind of spiraling out of control. I didn’t really have a hobby at that time. My hobby was to go out and party and drink. I didn’t really drink until I was 21. This is going somewhere. I was going out every weekend. Just the discontent that I had in my life and lack of fulfillment, I had been taking it out that way. It all came to a head at one point.

What happened was, during that time, you’re not supposed to drink here in Texas. They’re very strict. I continued to drink, and I got into a little bit of trouble. Nothing bad happened, but because I continued to drink and they found out, I had a moment where I thought, why can’t I stop? The definition of an addiction, you can’t stop. Addiction, I started reading about that too, and learning about what’s behind that.

The guy that I was seeing at the time had been doing Ashtanga Yoga, which is a very specific, very strict yoga. He wasn’t doing it every morning, but the idea is you wake up every morning and do it when it’s like the crack of dawn. It’s very intense. It’s very hard. You do it six days a week, and you just stretch yourself a lot.

I do things now that I didn’t ever imagine I could do with my — bend my body. I’m not a flexible person. I didn’t do gymnastics, and I hated yoga. I hated it. I thought it was just annoying, and I didn’t want to relax. I was like, no, I want to do something fun.

John: I would just be ecstatic to be able to tie my shoes without losing my breath, touch my toes.

Jackeline: A lot of females can bend and they did gymnastics or dance, growing up. I just wasn’t bendy, and so identified with the guys because I was strong but — I wasn’t as strong as them. The reason why I like Ashtanga is because there was a lot of jumping involved. It’s very dynamic, and it’s fast.

John: Oh, there you go.

Jackeline: I really started to — so I started to do that. This person I was seeing was really actually horrible, it turns out. He didn’t want me to do it, and so I started doing it on my own. At this time, I was an auditor for an oil company and I was traveling the world. So, I started doing this practice every day in my hotel room, and I taught myself it, every day.

So the reason why I kind of started it was because I already stopped drinking, and stopping drinking was like going through a breakup. It was like I miss my best friend. I didn’t have my glass of wine at night. I wasn’t drinking excessively every single time. I wasn’t drinking till I blacked out, but it was often. Out of that habit, I picked up that new habit, and the yoga really — it changed everything. I was about 30 pounds overweight whenever I was drinking a lot, and when I stopped drinking, I lost the 30 pounds like that, like within a month.

John: That’s amazing.

Jackeline: Yeah. So, this form of yoga, you start realizing how — for example, like I’m an early bird, but I was never honoring that. I would stay up late and just try to accommodate other people. So, you start realizing like how much you sleep, how much water you drink, what foods you’re eating and everything, how that’s impacting you. Sometimes people on social media, they’re like, “Did you lose weight because of yoga?” I’m like, I don’t think it was really yoga itself. I think it’s awareness that it gives you, so, yeah, I got super fit really fast. I’d never been fit before my entire life.

John: That’s awesome.

Jackeline: Yeah, it’s really cool.

John: And that’s so deep, the things that you’re saying of just how you — not honoring yourself. You were trying to appease others, even though you knew, this isn’t really who I am or what I maybe want to be. Or maybe you didn’t know what you wanted to be. You were just like, this doesn’t feel right, but this is what everyone else is doing, so I should probably just go along with it because I’m supposed to be like this apparently.

Jackeline: Right. I thought it was normal. Especially in accounting, accountants drink a lot, and I thought it was normal to — I was in my 20s. Well, we go out and party but, honestly, it didn’t make me feel very good. Anything that I do, I want it to have meaning, and it didn’t have meaning. It was fun. I don’t remember half of it, but it was fun. We’d dance, and I’d laugh all night, but it didn’t fulfill me in the way that I feel like I’m fulfilling myself now.

John: That’s awesome. That’s very cool, yeah. I think that that translates over into the office as well, where a lot of us aren’t being who we think we’re supposed to be, or we’re trying to be what we think we’re supposed to be, what other people are trying to tell us.

Jackeline: Well, luckily — so what ended up happening was I got laid off from that job where I was traveling a lot, which was a blessing. Then I took about six months off before I started at Xero. I did a lot of traveling to South America. I did some weird stuff. At that time, I did a retreat where I did Ayahuasca. I don’t know if you know what that is.

John: Not at all though, but I was going to ask you once you finished with that part. I’ll be like, what is that?

Jackeline: It’s a medicine that comes from trees that they make in South America. Anyway, so I did that and then I learned a lot about myself. What ends up happening, it’s like a experience that you have. It’s like a psychedelic experience, which I’ve never had done, and it was — the reason why I’m bringing it up is because, at that point, I had seen actually my — I had a premonition, somewhat, of my job at Xero, which is really interesting. I saw it, in a way, of I feel like I manifested it. I didn’t know at the time.

Also, shortly thereafter, I decided that I wanted to sign up — I found this music school here in Houston, and I had signed up for it, and I wrote a song. Around that time, I think I just started at Xero. I absolutely love my career at Xero. It’s a great culture. They have a principle called hashtag human, and so when I started I was really open about the yoga. They were very accepting of my my lifestyle, and all that.

What I was going to say was that, around that time, 2016, I wrote a song. It was just about being free and believing in yourself and not having doubts, because a lot of what I’ve gone through is because I doubted myself. I showed the person I was seeing at the time, and he completely just said, “This is horrible,” and I was really upset.

John: Oh, yeah. Wow. You’re like, the songs about you, dude. It’s literally about you, literally.

Jackeline: No, even if it’s not, if somebody loves something, you encourage them, and you give them feedback. I’m not victimizing myself or demonizing him. That was just — it’s a part of my story because that will never happen to me again because, at that point, I stopped with the music. I always wanted to write, and I always wanted to get back into it, but I was like, oh, I suck. I was damaged. So, yeah, that that happened, but I kind of went off track.

John: Oh, no, no. I think that that’s something that’s so hard for a lot of us is that we have these hobbies or these outside of work interests, and just because you’re not named a famous singer, doesn’t mean — Beyonce — doesn’t mean that you’re bad at music. It’s your hobby, and you’re doing it for you. You’re not doing it for everyone else. Once you start getting paid and selling tickets, now you’re doing it for the other people, but until then, who cares? You didn’t hear Beyonce’s first song. Maybe Beyonce’s first song was absolutely terrible. We don’t know because we weren’t around.

Jackeline: Well, you’re a comedian. You know that it takes a lot of — I like to think that — I love comedians, by the way. I love funny stuff.

John: Because they’re the best. No, I’m just kidding.

Jackeline: Oh, yeah. You really want to be comedic, but there’s only so many hours of the day.

John: That’s true. That’s true.

Jackeline: It’s just, comedians though, you have to keep trying, and you have to keep putting yourself out there. It’s the same type of thing with any kind of artists or anybody who’s doing the creative. You have to continue to work on your craft and not worry about it being good, necessarily, because even — for example, a lot of people that have, were successful with music. I’m not saying I’m going to be Beyonce. In fact, I don’t want to be Beyonce. I’m me, and my story is very unique.

John: Exactly.

Jackeline: A lot of people who have been very successful and blew up or whatever, say that the piece of art or the piece of music that got them famous wasn’t what they expected it to be.

John: Totally. It’s just continuing to put it out there. It’s cool that Xero supports you with this. You talk about the yoga and this experience and your mindfulness.

Jackeline: It’s everything, yeah, and the consciousness. So then the yoga and the mindfulness and all of that, led me — so the type of yoga that I was doing, I didn’t know was preparing me to be able to meditate. I hated meditation. I hated yoga. I was a very energetic person. I want to run. I want to fight somebody. I don’t want to —

John: There you go. That’s the opposite of yoga.

Jackeline: Funny enough, I learned it’s actually not. You can be pretty bad, A.

John: It’s pretty cathartic to just punch a bag a lot.

Jackeline: Yeah, so I never thought I would be a yogi or meditator. So doing yoga actually got me ready, I think, to have the ability to sit down and meditate. So, what I had learned through this process, so, two, three years ago — so I’ve been seeing this horrible person for about five years. He’s not a horrible person. He just treated me horribly.

John: Right, right, it just wasn’t right.

Jackeline: Yeah. I got out and then I learned a lot about narcissistic abuse. I don’t know if you know what that is. Basically, it’s like emotional abuse, and it’s involves a lot of manipulation and gaslighting. I don’t know if you know that.

John: Okay. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah.

Jackeline: So I started noticing and I started sharing with people on social media about it. Over the last few years, I’ve gotten so many messages where people are like, “I had a boss who’s narcissistic to me, who manipulated me and made me feel like — and I see that a lot in the accounting world too, with a lot of partners. I work with accountants, right, sell Xero to accountants, and I talk to accountants every day. Out of the blue, people started telling me — I was counseling them a little bit, it was really crazy — telling me that they went through this experience where they had a boss who — and I had this too — who would put them down and make them feel really unworthy and gaslight them. It happens a lot in that industry. So, even that helped me.

John: Cool how it’s translated over into work. Because that’s what I was going to ask you is, it’s cool that you’re able to share it, but do you feel like it gives you a skill? Clearly it does because it’s part, not therapists, but you’re more than just an expert with technical skills. You’re able to actually help people through other parts of running their business or doing their careers better.

Jackeline: I don’t know why you became an accountant, but the reason why I did, I’m not even a numbers person. I was never good at Math. People are like, “Why did you major in Accounting?”

John: I got a D in physics, so that’s pretty much why I was not in engineering anymore. I was like, okay.

Jackeline: Yeah, I was the same with Math, and the reason why I got through college Math is because there was Accounting in it. I understood Accounting.

John: Okay, interesting.

Jackeline: So, I had a passion for business. I worked at a small business when I was young, and so I always loved business. I always wanted to be a businesswoman, and the accounting always seemed like it was too hard. I’d never been good at anything technical. I was always good at writing or choir or something artistic

I thought in order to be successful in life, you have to be technical. You have to have those types of skills because that’s what society tells you. I wanted a technical degree, and I wanted security. A lot of accountants want security. Secretly, nobody really knows this, when I first started college, I majored in Music Theater and double majored in Business, but I didn’t believe in myself at that time, and so I decided to do accounting. I feel like a lot of accountants, they’re afraid. Humans and are afraid, in general.

John: Yeah, all professionals, yeah, we just want to be secure. We want to have a steady income with benefits and all of that.

Jackeline: Right. So, learning all of this stuff that I’ve been learning, where sometimes we’ll allow somebody to take over our brains a little bit or like —

John: Influence us.

Jackeline: Yeah, to stop thinking for ourselves because we’re afraid, or we feel like we’re not good enough, or that our voice doesn’t need to be heard. That has been — so, the theme that I think all of this is for me, is empowerment. I like to think that in my work at Xero, I empower accountants through technology and through consulting because we’re very consultative. I know about tech stacks. I know how to do, I think I still know how to do accounting. I haven’t done it in a while.

John: Right, debits on the left, credits on the right, right? There we go.

Jackeline: That’s about all I have at left, but I think you never forget. You can always back your way into it.

John: No, that’s awesome though. It’s so awesome how you don’t have to feel like you need to hide this. If anything, it’s a tool that you have in your tool belt when you go to work. It’s not something that, well, I like to do it and whatever. No, no, this is actually a part of my job skills. It’s just as much as knowing how to run Xero or how to do a journal entry. It’s also the yoga and the meditation and the mindfulness and all of that as well, which is really, really fantastic.

Jackeline: And all of this, for me, has like started to — I’ve gone into like mental health now because it’s all related. Because yoga, especially, I’ve seen a lot of fitness influencers, they’ll start going into a mindfulness consciousness spirituality, because there’s this notion that the mind and the body are separate. They’re really not. Your mind and body are all in the same — for example, there’s this author named Candace Pert, and she came up with a lot of the concepts of the scientists and researchers that I really like. She basically discovered that when you have an emotional reaction to something, your body creates specific chemicals. So, I talked about it.

So, chemically, let’s say, as a child, somebody put me down and made me feel really bad about myself, and that’s how I grew up. I’m not saying that’s how my parents were.

John: Yeah, but people at school, I mean, that’s how it is.

Jackeline: Yeah, they put me down. I think there’s a lot in society. So, there was a chemical reaction that happened and patterns that happened to my brain that printed that. Things like yoga, mindfulness, all that, that’s how you kind of reprogram that because what ends up happening is that, so you develop all that at a very young age, and it’s almost like it’s there. No matter what any kid has — it’s funny that I’m like a 12-year-old because I think we all are a child inside. I really —

John: I definitely am, that’s for sure.

Jackeline: I take that as a huge compliment. So, really, sometimes we get stuck. Even whenever helping accountants, they have to transition from an old way of thinking into new technology, right? In order to teach them how to change their businesses or change the way they’re working, I have to teach them how to change their brains and have the knowledge that I have to, not only the yoga, but the things I started researching about. Chemically, those chemical reactions and those, they’re called peptides that you create from those emotions, you want to go back to them as an adult, over and over again, become addicted to those feelings because your brain is just archiving all of those things from the past. We get stuck in the past. I thought I was an exception to, because I changed very quickly, but I definitely wasn’t, so I started doing a lot of work on myself.

John: That’s awesome. This is so encouraging to hear though, and it’s so great, not only just for you as an individual, but also just for your career as well. It’s just so encouraging to hear. Before we wrap up though, do you have any words for people that have a hobby or a passion that’s outside of work, or maybe they feel like they’re trying to pretend to be something that they’re probably not?

Jackeline: I see this a lot actually. We have our work persona, and then we have our personal persona. I resist that a lot. You’re the same person, whether to work, you’re one person. Especially now that everybody’s kids are climbing on them during web videos with work, but everything always has been integrated. It’s just we try to separate things out. I can’t do that. Maybe some people can.

I feel like the more authentic and more open you are, the better you’re going to work, no matter what you’re doing. Even if it’s something that you don’t love, you could actually create it into something you love if you bring your full self there. Because I know that I would only bring part of myself to work, I was never as successful as I am at Xero. My career’s been amazing because I just showed up. I’ve been through all these experiences, and I just showed up. And I said, this is who I am, and they’re accepting.

John: Yeah, and that’s the cool thing is when you did, you were like, oh, wow, it’s actually okay to do this. We’re in our own heads. We were telling ourselves that, or maybe someone actually explicitly said it out loud to us. But then once you do, then good things happen.

Jackeline: It’s scary at first. I still get scared. I was nervous about coming on this podcast, because it’s very scary to bring yourself out there, to say — I’m saying I want to write music, and I’m an accountant. I’m like, that’s scary.

John: That’s cool. That’s what that is, and you’re not alone. There’s so many other people that are the same. It’s just so cool to hear, so thank you so much for taking your time to be a part of this. This has been awesome, really awesome.

It’s only fair, before I wrap this up, because I started out the episode just firing away questions at you, get to know Jackeline, let’s get to know John a little bit. You’re now the host of the show. You’re in charge, so fire away whenever you’re ready.

Jackeline: So, when you were at PwC, did you you share that you did comedy, or how did that work?

John: Yeah. So, people would be like, “Hey, what did you do this weekend?” I didn’t know you were supposed to say nothing, so I was like, “Oh, well, I drove to Springfield, Illinois and did a comedy competition and won.” They were like, “Wait, what?” So then all of a sudden, it just becomes sad.

I also wrote a newsletter, like The Onion, satirical newsletter that another friend of mine, Jeff Wendel, and I would write every month, and then we would email it on firm email. This was when email was kind of new. Then people would still print it, and then it would get mixed into someone else’s print job. All of a sudden, someone who’s not supposed to have it would get the print. We had to put a huge disclaimer at the top like: Do not print this. We’re going to get fired. But then we never got fired. Everyone thought it was hilarious.

All of a sudden, you show a little bit of color in a black and white world and, man, it’s just like a bug zapper. Everybody’s just drawn to it. Whatever your color is, whatever your personality is, let that out, unless you’re like a huge jerk, then don’t. Most of us are not. It was a cool thing where people remembered it for a long time, still do. That’s what they remember me for, nothing about any of the work I did or how many charge hours I put in.

Jackeline: That’s the thing is that even — whenever I was afraid, I didn’t tell anybody anything when I was at PwC. I didn’t tell them. I don’t even know really. I was ashamed to myself. I know that I wanted to be a good accountant, and just like, I wasn’t that good because it just wasn’t natural.

Jackeline: Well, in the beginning, none of us. That’s why they put us on cash. Go audit cash.

Jackeline: Yeah, and the funny thing is I got ten years into that career, and I was still auditing cash, which is really funny.

John: Actually, that’s winning in my book. That’s totally winning.

Jackeline: I thought I had evolved for a minute, and I never did. It’s just because I — it’s a long story, but I ended up — I remember the last job, I was auditing the balance sheet, and what’s part of balance sheet? Cash.

John: First line, there you go.

Jackeline: Another question. I was talking about the fear and the fear of putting yourself out there. How do you overcome that?

John: I think it’s from interviewing so many people for this and doing my own research and stuff, a lot of which will be in the book coming out in September, but I think it’s baby steps. The tone at the top is always nice, if that’s a thing where, like, you have at Xero, where apparently it’s just, that’s how it is here.

Even if you’re at a company where you don’t know or maybe it’s the opposite where they’re like, do not share; you still have a circle of friends that you go to lunch with or that you’re on a team with, that you just ask them and then they ask you and then you just start to get to know each other, and you just baby step into the deep end. You don’t jump off the high dive the first time at the pool. You get into shallow and then you kind of tiptoe.

Once you get some of those positive experiences, then you start to see that any of the negative experiences are actually an outlier, that most people are genuinely interested in you and when they hear something, we’re not in sixth grade anymore, where you’re going to get made fun of or stuck in a locker. It’s, wow, that’s great. That’s really cool. Whether I want to hear the song or not, or you want to share the song or not, it doesn’t matter. You’re doing it for you.

That’s the thing that I think that’s really important for people to remember, is you’re doing it for yourself. You’re also in your own lane. So, if you run, well, don’t compare times. It doesn’t matter. You ran a marathon, you ran 5K, whatever it is, that’s great. That’s really cool. It doesn’t matter. Well, I ran farther. So, what? You’re an idiot. I don’t care. I didn’t ask you, like, what was your time? I didn’t ask you. It doesn’t matter.

It’s just, like you said earlier on, which I thought was great, not doubting yourself, just own it. I think the more you lean in, the scarier it is, but the more you see that it’s pushing, it’s holding you up.

Jackeline: One thing that I didn’t mention too, which is really important piece of this is, for me, my career at Xero, because I went from being an accountant — because I started at Xero as an accountant, and I became a salesperson and did a lot of marketing and did a lot of different strategic things. My career at Xero brought me out of my shell, out of my accountant shell, and that’s really where I got to where I actually — I don’t think I would have ever been here had it not been for Xero. Xero helped my hobby, so it goes the other way around.

John: That’s even more fantastic right there, of where one feeds the other and then before you know it, both of them are better.

Jackeline: Mm-hmm, it really did it

John: What a great way to wrap this up. Thank you so much, Jackeline, for taking time to be with me on What’s Your “And”? This was really awesome.

Jackeline: Awesome.

John: If you want to see some pictures of Jackeline in action or maybe connect with her on social media, be sure to go to whatsyourand.com All the links are there, and while you’re on the page, please click that big button, do the anonymous research survey about corporate culture.

Thanks again for subscribing on iTunes or whatever app you use and for sharing this with your friends so they get the message that we’re all trying to spread that who you are is so much more than what you do.