Welcome And Meet Jeanne

Announcer 0:07

Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion, the podcast designed to inspire your greatness and thrive through life. Get ready to conquer your fears. Here's your host, psychotherapist, coach, and empowerment expert, Beverley Glazer.

Growing Up Around Addiction

Beverley Glazer 0:27

Have you ever felt you wanted to change your life and find deeper meaning? Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion, the podcast for women who believe in their dreams regardless of their age and keep thriving beyond their limitations. I'm Beverly Glazer, and I'm a coach and a mentor to women who want to create more value in their careers and in their personal lives by changing their inner game. And you can find me on reinventimpossible.com. So I want you to meet Jeanne Blasburg. Jean is a mother, an athlete, a writer, and CEO of Flynn Creek Farms in Wisconsin. Listen as she shares her insights and the choices she made that will leave you contemplating your own possibilities in life. Welcome, Jane. Thank you, Beverly. I'm very excited to be here. Well, you have quite a story, and I'm sure everybody is just gonna follow through and they'll be in awe because you started from this child growing up, as we all do, but you came from an alcoholic family. Your mom was an alcoholic, and she was a drug addict, and you were an only child. So that had to have impacted you. What was life like for you?

Jeanne Blasberg 1:56

Well, you know, it's one of those things that you don't really realize your life is um unusual until you get a little older and you look back. So it wasn't really until my late teens and early adulthood when I, you know, started realizing how other people lived that my relationship with my mother was quite um, I mean, nobody in this world loved me more than she did, but the boundaries weren't quite there. And I grew up on pins and needles, um, literally pins and needles, never knowing what was around the next corner and what each day would hold. So I guess on the negative side, I have grown up to really want to control my situation, and that's one of the things I've had to work through. But on the positive side, I think I have a really super tuned set of antenna in terms of empathy and seeing feeling out a situation when I walk into a room and um and observing and like taking in a lot of messages that other people may not have ever needed to. But it was my survival instinct, and so I think it's has served me well. You know, you try to look for the silver lining and everything, but um yeah, I can't say I um I did grow up in a situation with parents who were too young to become parents and were troubled. Um but I'd have to say my life has not been that bad. Um I actually think that the opportunity to really evaluate it from an early age, because as my mother was in rehab, obviously I was also learning a lot about the tr um, I don't know, my propensity to potentially carry on this disease, and underwent a lot of therapy and self-discovery at an early age that I may not have had the opportunity to do otherwise.

Beverley Glazer 4:10

It's true. And it makes for a lot of good books.

Jeanne Blasberg 4:14

It does. Um being an only child, especially, I grew up with imaginary friends. I played alone a lot. I wrote things, I created stories. Even with my little Barbie dolls, I had a whole long script and movie going from day in and day out. So the idea of creating characters and drama in my head, um also seeing drama in my life, but I I did get a lot of good material, and I would say that, yeah, I'd say a lot of writers uh come at this profession because we're also trying to figure things out. Um things haven't always been that straightforward. And so the act of writing in its in and of itself is a way of processing the human experience and figuring things out. So it's been therapeutic as well as, you know, I feel like I have a knack for it given all the story I grew up with.

Beverley Glazer 5:12

Oh, you certainly did, but you didn't take that route at all. You went into um the executive world. Uh, you had a corporate career, uh, you were on Wall Street, you worked for the Federated Department stores. That is so far away from where you are today. I know. What was life like then?

Jeanne Blasberg 5:36

Well, the other side of the coin of being like an only child and coming from a very dysfunctional family, I think I really am the stereotypical like uh face of the family. I I thought if I can be perfect and show all these accomplishments and this perfect type A personality, then everybody will believe my family is fine and I will be carrying the flag of perfectionism. And so, therefore, how screwed up can things be if I'm always accomplishing things. And when I was graduating from college, the thing to do was to go to these interviews for these corporate training programs, investment banking, consulting, and so I hopped right on board and I was like, I'm getting one of those jobs. And also my father was in finance, so it was a way to kind of prove and please him. Um I did have a knack for it. I mean, I'm not like I definitely am a more of a word, verbal, visual creator, but I also have an analytic mind and I'm okay with numbers. I'm not like brilliant, but I could get through those times in finance, in investment banking, in strategic planning. And I'd have to say I learned a lot. I would never um I don't regret any of it, but the whole time I was in that world, I kind of knew I was forcing myself as a round peg into a square hole. Um, the thing it did provide, however, was some financial remuneration at a youngish age that allowed me some independence and to kind of have my own life and not depend on my parents. And the um ability to do that, given what I've already explained, was psychologically really important.

Marriage Travel And Switzerland Reset

Beverley Glazer 7:28

And you traveled, you lived in Switzerland, you were involved in sports, you built a wonderful life for yourself. What was that like? And how did you even get to Switzerland from America?

Jeanne Blasberg 7:44

Well, I married a wonderful man. We've been married 34 years, and he was the rock, uh, this the rock of stability. I mean, I don't want to say that's the only reason I was attracted to him. It certainly isn't. He's the kindest, most gentle soul. He listens and he loves with no limits. But he came from a family that was established in a community that was pretty normal. I mean, a few skeletons came out of the closet, but compared to what I'd grown up with, there was a family name, they'd lived somewhere for a long time, they had great reputation, they had all these traditions, and and I fell in love with that. But you know, after many years of being in the same city in which he grew up, he came home one day. Um, it was his midlife thing, I think, and he said, Genie, I thought I'd live all over the world, and I'm still walking the same streets I walked as a young kid, and I work for a multinational corporation, and I can transfer to any office. So what would you think? And I said, Absolutely, I'm with you a hundred percent. So we came home, and I think the choices were uh Shanghai, Amsterdam, or Zurich. And being a huge skier and outdoors person, I picked Switzerland and we lived there for three years. Our kids were a little bit kicking and screaming because they were in high school and junior high school, and it was a terrible age to uproot our family for them. But I think we all look back on those years and realize how important they were, both for my husband's sanity and for us to kind of realize you could pick us up and put us anywhere. And we could figure out the language if we had a passport and a credit card, we could pretty much figure out how to get some groceries purchased and figure out how to live. So I think that was just a really good lesson for all of us is that, you know, not only was my husband always in this very established setting in Boston, but my kids were kind of falling into the same pattern of that. And the lesson that we want to be uh citizens of the planet is something that, you know, I always I moved a lot, um, and so I took it for granted. But I think instilling that um comfort level of being able to relocate was important.

Beverley Glazer 10:24

And and then you went back to Boston.

Jeanne Blasberg 10:27

Yeah, we went back to Boston. So the period and time we left between 2009 and 2012 was kind of um a business opportunity for my husband, and then the need to come back really coincided with his parents getting on in their years and us wanting to be closer to them. We actually lived around the corner from them in Boston, so we were the beneficiaries of many wonderful three generations around the table um evenings, and we were able to be their primary caretakers towards the end of their life, and that was really, really meaningful and important.

COVID Triggers The Farm Leap

Beverley Glazer 11:05

Oh yes, oh yes, and you had a good life there. Um you wrote books, you were an acclaimed author, you you were on the board of the book festival. I mean, really some really wonderful stuff. And then COVID hit and it changed your life. What was going on there?

Jeanne Blasberg 11:29

It really did, and you know, I I I'm really into like numerology and birth numbers, and I've been thinking about this recently because my birth number is all about stability and finding stability, and my life's purpose has to do with stability and process. And I'm thinking, Jeannie, you had everything. You had this stable, wonderful, found like established life in a beautiful home and community, and you sold it and gave it all up. Um, and so what is that about? Like, why did you blow this up? But I'm sitting here on a farm as we record this. Uh, I wouldn't have been able to invest in this farm if we hadn't sold our home in Boston, and actually I wouldn't have had the brain like the bandwidth to be here. But during COVID, my husband and I looked at each other, and we uh his parents had since passed, so being in Boston without them was actually a little bit painful. Our kids were all gone, and we felt like the world kind of needed us to do more than what we were doing. We have resources, we're healthy, we're intelligent, we're in our late 50s, and is the next 30 years gonna be travel and leisure activities, or are we gonna try to help some of the problems we were witnessing around the fragility of the food system, food insecurity, the heating planet, um accessibility to healthy food that would potentially keep people out of the hospital, keep them from getting cancers and other autoimmune diseases. And so we we in a very simplifying way, we drilled it all back to the health of the soil, and we thought we actually don't know that much about high-tech or AI or all this stuff or Bitcoin, crypto, but we can understand the benefits of a healthy topsoil that doesn't erode in which we grow our food. And so we set off on this journey to find a farm. And once we kind of put it out there, um things started appearing in our path that helped us figure this out. Um, really three years after, it was just three years ago on the 4th of July that we met up with or reconnected with an old family friend who said, I really want to be a regenerative farmer. And I was like, You've got to be kidding. Somebody told you to say that to me. And he said no, and we talked about business plans and all of his ideas, and then he really encouraged us to come to Wisconsin. Had never been to Wisconsin before, never set my foot in the state, although John and I started our marriage in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I've driven across country, so I'm not saying I'm just a flyover person, but I'd never been to the state of Wisconsin. But we fell in love with Madison, we fell in love with the driftless area southwest of Madison, and we started looking for property, and we were introduced to a fast casual chain of restaurants that wanted to have a farm associated with it from which they would procure veggies for their salad bowls. And all of a sudden we had a farmer and this old friend, and we had a customer, and then we found a farm, and then we thought we'd be kind of passive investors, but no, we invested big time in the restaurant, and my husband's on the board of that restaurant chain, and now I'm living almost full-time on the farm, and I can't get enough of it. So just being here, even though like everything I've rattled off sounds very busy and hectic, it's the exact opposite. Um, my mind slows down here, and I feel like I've I've kind of figured out how I was meant to be. I don't know that I'm saying I figured out who I was meant to be, but I'm kind of figuring out how I was meant to be in terms of like where I can really be at peace, but also be incredibly creative and collaborative and happy.

Rewriting Trauma Into Purpose

Beverley Glazer 15:44

Well, I can see that the farm has done so much for you. Has writing and the farm helped you overcome that trauma?

Jeanne Blasberg 15:55

Um I feel like I have a life of my own design that isn't anything that I really inherited. And so in that way, I feel like this is kind of cliche, but I'm writing a story of my own. Um when I'm in the presence of, my mother's no longer living, but when I'm in the presence of my father, other people in my family, I see in them a story about myself that isn't really the story I want anymore. Um it's a story of a poor pitiful young girl who wasn't really planned, who showed up into a rocky situation, who um, yeah, who was kind of my story in their eyes is what was the effect I had on them. And I'm that's their situ y issue. I I don't want to live with that anymore. I've decided the story I want from my own life is one of um helping and service and seeing like a greater purpose for why I'm here. I really do think that I was put on this planet to do something really important. And I'm just trying to say yes to the cues I'm getting along the way. And those are like I feel them physically and I feel them um emotionally. Um, but I I don't think you ever really heal from some childhood trauma. It's just part of who you are, but it I'm working it in the positive now as opposed to working it in the negative.

Beverley Glazer 17:35

Yeah, what I'm hearing, Gene, throughout this whole story is you're no longer a victim. You're no longer a victim of past circumstances. You are who you are and you're doing what you want to do. Yeah.

Simple Steps To Get Unstuck

Jeanne Blasberg 17:48

Absolutely. Um I I have the privilege of these resources. If you if you kind of sit and stew in your own uh obsessive thoughts and resentments, but you have the ability to get up and leave, it's kind of a shame. I mean, it did take the um facing fear and and and just saying, Boston is what I know, this community is what I know, these friends are what I know. Um, you know, the true friends I'm still friends with. We find ways to be together. You don't have to worry about losing your friends. But sometimes changing the scenery and actually taking on a big challenge that keeps you like bouncing out of bed in the morning, it really is um it really is important. I think as older women, we can be discounted, like our fertility years are gone, wait around and be a grandmother, um, you know, maybe make meals for, you know, there's a lot of good things you can do. But I also think we're like a force that's completely underestimated for how much we could change the world. Um I haven't really taken a vacation since COVID, but all of that money that I would have spent is going towards healing the land and and funding this farm. And I feel like it's I would never want to take a vacation. I feel like I'm having such an authentic, meaningful experience. I don't want to be like carted around on tour buses or boats to be like presented to what it's like here. It's not what it's like here. Like I'm in this part of the country and I'm really figuring out by living it what it's like, and I'm learning so much from my new neighbors. I I do think it's also just keeping me so busy. I'm not hovering over my kids. I have three young adult kids. They're so happy that they have this freedom and we check in and we're all doing something new, and I'm not waiting to be a grandmother or waiting to put on a wedding. Um, who knows if those things will ever happen? But I feel like I've completely climbed out of a paradigm of what I should be doing at this age. And I feel like I'm 25 again, learning a new job.

Beverley Glazer 20:09

It just sounds like you're so content, Gene. What advice would you give to women who feel that they have no purpose or they have no direction or they're stuck? What would you tell them?

Jeanne Blasberg 20:20

I think one of the things that makes us feel stuck is a sense of fear or a sense of just obligation or responsibility. And I started shedding it very slowly. Um it's even as easy as like cleaning out a drawer or a closet full of crap that's kind of emblematic of your past, a drawer you've never opened. I mean, if you make it a month's practice, every day I'm just gonna like clean stuff out before you know it, you've got a house that's kind of pared down, and then you might think, maybe I don't want to live here anymore. What if I sold the house? It's already cleaned up. Um I don't know. It's just like taking those little steps. Sometimes the whole idea of what it would take to sell and move and do something different, it's exhausting. But um challenging yourself and making a game out of letting go of things and like I wonder if I could recycle or sell on Facebook Marketplace or do something every day for 30 days. I mean, that actually turns it into kind of a personal challenge that has fairly low risk. But at the end, when you realize how easy it is to and how fun it is to start like getting rid of the stuff, I remember I had a guy come over who bought silver. And I had been the one, I was the repository for my husband's side of the family, and my mother's side of the family had all the silver, and I felt like I've just got to keep it and I've got to shine it, and I never used it. But it was like symbolic of this fricking life that was expected of me, and one day. This guy came over and weighed it all and just wrote me a check and took it away, and I was so happy. And I felt like that was just one day, but that was like I'd lost 20 pounds and I was ready to run a race. I felt like I got rid of that. And it just was like one thing after another that started lightening, feel making me feel lighter, like I could move somewhere, I could do something. And it I'd say if you're feeling stuck, just think of all the ways you could simplify. Letting go of the club memberships or the things that you don't really care about, that don't, you know, as we got more and more into the environment and caring about our planet, we felt like golf, which was something we really enjoyed, was a little bit hypocritical. Letting go of those things, even though they came with like a lot of friends and a lot of past history, it it wasn't the thing and you know, gone. You know, I I don't know. I just I would just say letting things go. Um, it starts to feel like you just can't stop. You want to just get rid of everything that is just total BS.

Beverley Glazer 23:11

Terrific advice. Terrific. Thank you, Jean. Jeanne Blasberg is an award-winning best-selling author and essayist. She is the mother and an athlete, and she's the CEO of Flynn Creek Farms in Wisconsin. Where can people find you, Jean?

Jeanne Blasberg 23:30

I have um a website, which is just my name, Jeanneblastberg.com. I'm very active on social media, and all the links to my social media and my books can be found on my website. Um, my handle on Instagram is Gene Blasberg author. And I also write a newsletter once a month on Substack, which you could sign up for through my website. Um and that's and I'm I'm pretty active out there online. So if you look for me, I think you would you would find me quite easily.

Beverley Glazer 24:03

And if you didn't catch that, all these links are gonna be in the show notes, and they're also gonna be on my site too, which is reinventimpossible.com.

Reinvention Quiz And Closing

Jeanne Blasberg 24:13

Oh, Beverly, sorry. The other thing is the website for the farm, which is probably most important, flincreekfarm.com. So please include the link to that as well.

Beverley Glazer 24:24

Absolutely. That's going to be there, it's gonna be all in the show notes. That's terrific. And how can you keep living your best life, people? Download the reinvention readiness quiz and find out. And that also will be in the show notes below. And you can connect with me, Beverly Glazer, on all social media platforms, and in my positive group of women on Facebook, Women Over 50 Rock, and you can schedule a Zoom to talk to me personally. I want to thank you for listening and have you enjoyed this conversation. Please join me next week. Subscribe to get these episodes in your inbox, and drop us a review and send it to a friend. And remember, you only have one life, so live it with purpose and passion.

Announcer 25:24

Thank you for joining us. You can connect with Bev on her website, reinventimpossible.com. And while you're there, join our newsletter. Subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, keep aging with purpose and passion. And celebrate life.