Day 46: Jeanette Joy Fisher

November 15, 2009 at 12:01 am, Category: Inspiration

“And maybe your dreams don’t always exactly go the way that you want, as we all know, but you are given other opportunities and other things come up that is like a gift or a light bulb or something, “Oh, wait a minute, let’s go that way and let’s do this instead.”  All that really matters is the love that you share while you’re here.”

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Toni Reece: Jeanette, I want to thank you so very much for giving your time to us for this interview, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?

Jeanette Joy Fisher: Well thank you.  My name is Jeanette Joy Fisher, and I’m happy to be here.   I’m not sure exactly how to introduce myself because I am so varied.  I am a former college professor.  I wrote a lot of books about design psychology including textbooks, and I went on to help my speaker friends write books of their own, and I help them market their books online, so I do a lot of things.

Toni: It certainly sounds like it!  When you think about inspiration, Jeanette, and in the work that you do or even in your personal life, who do you inspire and how do you do that?

Jeanette: Years ago, I started out helping parents with newly diagnosed children with disabilities, so I would inspire them by showing that it was possible for them to have a full life even though they had a child with severe problems; and from there I just started working with people and inspiring families.  Now I went into helping widows.  Lately, I’ve helped parents of children who passed away, and now it seems that through Twitter, I’m helping young people who are going through very depressing times, and I’ve had them even send me direct messages saying thank you.  One young man said that he was suicidal, and I gave him some really good things to think about.  So I’ve gone from just really grieving people to people with depression, and my whole thing was to show the art of glorious living through being happy and joyful and in our society, that’s really hard today for a lot of people.

Toni: Jeanette, can you help provide an example to all of those people that will be listening to your interview today?  The things that you have spoken about so far are very powerful, and can you help us understand what you mean by the art of glorious living?

Jeanette: Well, I did a lot of research into happiness for my design psychology textbooks and my design psychology theories for interior design and what makes you feel happiness, and I discovered a few things, that actual planning of events makes you happy; and it does more than that.  I mean, we can design a room to make you feel happy.  We can design a room to help you heal, even.  And if we can design a room to do that, why not design a life to make you happy?

I call it the eight elements of your being — and it’s kind of complicated to go into for 15 minutes — but I do give free teleseminars on the eight elements of your being, and it has to do with your spiritual side, your physical, your emotional, and your health, and then there’s balance on those four levels to the other side of that.  If you keep everything in balance, it really helps you to keep on going.  It’s like a wheel with eight spokes; like a bicycle wheel.  If one of the spokes breaks, it will spin out of control.  It won’t go straight, or you can’t steer it straight.  So if you have something that is out of whack in your life, you’re just not going to be able to be productive.

Men are more able to focus and make money and do things when they’re under a deadline, but many women let their emotions … because we’re more emotional, and if we don’t have everything in alignment, we kind of tend to not focus on anything and we just keep going off in different directions.  And I am the first one to admit that I do that, too, so I have to keep coming back to my spokes and saying “Okay, we need to work on this one and get this one a little bit longer this week.”

Toni: And so when you’re working with other people, whether it’s by accident, people that find you on Twitter or if it’s by design, you really … how you go about this is, as an example, point out those eight particular spokes of that wheel to help them stay in balance.  Is that basically how you might help someone to stay inspired or to be inspired?

Jeanette: Well, I have only really worked mainly with women on doing that, but I will give them like an exercise.  And I don’t really make any plans for them, but I just point that if you know that you have this problem or that problem, then if you work on that then, the rest of your life might become more harmonious.  And part of that has to do with your home life.  You have a lot of speakers up here speaking about how to … self-help books and everything, but I think that you really need to have your environment be supportive of your emotional needs, so I really focus on the home front a lot.  And now with today’s homeless people, that even gets even harder.

Toni: When you’re working with people or you’re speaking or just day-to-day relationships, how does all of this translate into helping explore potential in others?

Jeanette: I think that when people figure out what they need to maybe learn or experience so that they can be more complete in their knowledge of themselves, then that opens them up to help other people so that they can develop their passion and go towards their goal, whatever their life purpose is.  One of the things I like to have people do is to write out – this might sound a little bit morbid and you’ve probably heard this before – but write out your obituary and what you want to leave, your legacy, and then start backwards and figure out a plan and how to get there.

And maybe your dreams don’t always exactly go the way that you want, as we all know, but you are given other opportunities and other things come up that is like a gift or a light bulb or something, “Oh, wait a minute, let’s go that way and let’s do this instead.”  All that really matters is the love that you share while you’re here.

Losing my daughter and my husband, I know that very well.  You can’t take all these possessions with you, and I think especially nesting mothers they want to have everything, and they want to accumulate so much stuff.  And when I’m helping somebody with a design of a room or something it’s like “Do you really need that much stuff?”  Because people really put too much in their homes.  It’s too heavy.  They need to lighten up.

Toni: I would hate to have you come into my home!

Jeanette: No, you wouldn’t!

Toni: That’s true, I probably wouldn’t, but you would definitely be saying that statement to me, “Toni, there’s too much in here.”  And that’s a beautiful way to describe how you might explore someone’s potential.  Now, if we focus on you and inspiration, what do you need to be inspired, Jeanette, and how do you stay inspired?

Jeanette: I need love to stay inspired, and I get that from my family.  I have wonderful children and young grandchildren, and they just are so joyful and so innocent and they really give me a lot of love, so I need to be with them; and that’s why I travel a lot to be with my family and friends.  And I have developed a really unique set of friendships over the last couple of years, and the support that I get from my friends — even on Twitter — is really wonderful, because I can wake up and … I have problems sometimes sleeping, and so I have friends all around the world, and I call them my international list of friends.  No matter what time it is, I can have someone I can get into a deep conversation with and we move from Twitter onto Skype or by phone, so it’s not just on Twitter.

Toni: So basically, one of the ways that you need to stay inspired or when you need inspiration is to seek the warmth and comfort and love of your family and your friends.  And I wrote down the word community that it struck me with Twitter and your international friends, you know, what a sense of community you must be getting from that.

Jeanette: Oh yes, and I have friends all around the world.  And through those connections, I have been to Australia, Haiti, a Caribbean cruise and all of these come from friendships that I’ve made on Twitter.  I went to Nashville for my birthday.  My friend threw me a birthday party at B. B. King’s … how fun is that?

Toni: Fantastic!  Are there certain tools or resources that you seem to go to when you are seeking inspiration in addition to the love that you need around you?

Jeanette: I found the most comfort in Emmet Fox’s books, especially the book Alter Your Life he wrote in the early 1900s.  So his books are available online, I think, from Guttenberg, and you can download them for free, but you can also buy them at the bookstores because they’ve been reprinted and I like to have a physical book in my hand.  And I think that Sermon on the Mount is a really great book that he wrote, but honestly, Alter Your Life is like the most fantastic book.  And on Jeanettefisher.com there is a download of The Greatest Thing in the World.  That’s a very inspirational book, too.

Toni: The Greatest Thing in the World?

Jeanette: Yes.

Toni: What makes those two things the inspirational tools for you?

Jeanette: Oh, they’re talking about love and about … I don’t know … Alter Your Life talks about the United States even, and how America is the only free country, it was set up like that, and what an inspiration we can be to the world.  So it’s not just a religious book.  It has a lot of depth to it, and it makes you feel like you can really contribute; so it takes you out of your misery and helps you to see the glorious part of living.  And that’s what I really want to do is have everybody see the glorious side of living and not just all the depression that we have because of the economy and because of the overwhelming media that we have.

You know, we have too much coming at us all the time, and we need to take a little bit of time to step back and to maybe meditate or pray or just have quiet time and to fill our minds with good things.  And one thing I would really like to say that really helps me is learning how to watch my thinking.

Toni: Oh, okay – what do you mean by that?

Jeanette: Well, without going into religion so much, although Jesus did say watch and pray — I’m not a preacher or anything like that — but if you watch your thoughts, you guard your thoughts, and then you keep your thoughts positive, you will have a much happier existence.  In other words, it’s kind of like turning your thoughts around, and something comes to you in a negative way, to turn it around into a positive thought and see what you can do to erase the negativity from that and just keep guard over what you let in.  Keep guard over who you let into your life.  Don’t let toxic people come in.  Don’t let your thoughts take you down to a path that’s just taking you to misery.  Think about happy things.  You can turn your life around just by watching your thoughts.

Toni: When you use your tools or just these wonderful, I mean completely wonderful, nuggets of information that you’re providing in this interview, what do you also do then, Jeanette, to continuously explore your own potential?

Jeanette: I don’t really think about my own potential so much; maybe I should.  I just always do every day what I think is the right thing to do to help other people, because I’m happy when I’m helping other people.  So when I’m giving love and support to others, that gives me love and support back.

Toni: And therefore that feeds the inspiration and potential.

Jeanette: Sometimes I think I’ve already done what I’m supposed to be doing, that I know I have another 40 or 50 years left.  My mother is still very healthy and vibrant and is an artisan, takes care of little children.  She takes care of her great-grandchildren.  So I know that I have a lot more that I can do, but I don’t know that I really need to.  It’s just every day if I’m helping someone from Twitter or someone in my family or one of my friends or just whatever comes to me, it’s like what I’m given to do that day.  I think that’s enough.

Toni: Honestly, I can say that I know that it’s early for you today, your day starting out, and I can say based on this interview the way that you have spoken about who you inspire and how and what you’ve done in your life to how you keep inspired by the books that you read, by the love that you need, by your community with people that you’ve met online; and I think that you’ve made one significant difference to anyone who’s going to listen or read this interview by you.  I know that I have, and so if you’re looking for one, you’ve got it today, but you will affect many, many others by this interview, and for that, I thank you.

Jeanette: Thank you.  I hope I can help you and other people.

Toni: You will.  You have.  Thank you very, very much, Jeanette, and I really hope that we speak again soon.  Thank you so much.

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For more information about Jeanette Joy Fisher:  www.jeanettefisher.com

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