What does it really take to lead with vision, especially when you’re building something brand new in uncertain terrain? This week on the Leading Woman in Tech podcast, I’m joined by Jackie Peters, a startup founder and tech visionary with over 25 years of experience shaping the future across everything from mobile gaming to AI-powered radiology, and the all-important privacy preserving data platforms. Try saying that one fast.

Jackie is one of those leaders who combines the deep technical insights with empathetic, intuitive team building. She’s a champion, blah, Let’s try that again.

She’s a champion of privacy by design, a human-centred design advocate, and one who knows how to bring complex innovation to life with clarity and heart. In today’s conversation, I’m exploring with Jackie what it really means to lead before you are ready. What it took for her to lead when she was just a kid, essentially. How to break big vision into action and how to build something bold, if you don’t have a degree, a roadmap, or all the answers.

If you’re navigating a seasonal growth, feeling the tension between your ambition and your overwhelm, or you just need a reminder that your instincts are worth trusting, this one’s for you. Let’s dive in. 

Toni Collis:

Welcome to the show, Jackie. Thank you for joining us today.

Jackie Peters:

Hey Toni, thanks so much for having me here and thanks for everything you do.

Toni Collis:

Thank you so much. Well, let’s dive straight on in. Tell us about you and your journey today. When we spoke, when we first met, you shared such a fascinating and independent journey from leaving home at 15 to becoming a visionary leader that are today. So tell us about that journey. Tell us about what you do today, but also how those early experiences really shaped your approach to risk taking and building your career.

Jackie Peters:

Yeah, sure, happy to. Yeah, so I have had not a very traditional path. As you mentioned, I left home when I was 15 and lived on my own on and off for many years. I took my GED, started college when I was 16. Didn’t finish that either because I taught myself how to code during Web 1.0 and then that sort of just led to a whole career.

And yeah, I think that, you know, certainly leaving home at a young age, and I grew up in a middle-class household on the East Coast in Connecticut. And by all intents and purposes, right, I should have stayed where I was. But something really compelled me to leave. Something told me that this life I was living wasn’t really all there was.

And so I left with very little money and very little support. And I think one of the things that I really learned is that I don’t need money to be happy. And so that really did shape the trajectory of my career because a lot of the decisions I made were less to do with money and more to do with curiosity.

Toni Collis:

that less to do with money and more to do with curiosity. Well how’s that got you to where you are today? I know that you say you don’t view yourself as a woman in tech but by all accounts you are so tell us like what is it that you do today and how did you get from that kid leaving making those decisions based on what if it’s not money what was it like what was in your head?

Jackie Peters:

Yeah, I think I’ve always been just a naturally curious person. A friend of mine who’s a neuroscientist says that some people have an extra layer of dopaminergenic neurons in their prefrontal cortex that leads to them experiencing satisfaction, like a dopamine rush when they solve problems. So that might be me. I’m not sure, but I’ve always really just been a curious person. so, you know, after teaching myself to code when I was in my late teens, early twenties, that sort of launched me into a career that was really driven by curiosity, right? I just really enjoyed this space. I started off as an engineer. I spent some time coding. Back then you don’t have, we didn’t have IDEs. I was like sitting in a pop-a-song chair with a keyboard in my lap, getting bursitis and writing and coding in notepad. And it was a very frustrating experience. That led me to get curious about design because, okay, like, I’m writing all this code, but ultimately people have to use these things that I’m building and design was a lot more gratifying in the sense that if I didn’t like the way something looked, I could move a pixel or an anchor point and it would look the way I wanted it versus what I was coding, you know, having to chop out entire functions and things. And so I got really into design and then I was in this position where I could both design and write code, which was a rarity, especially back during the first dot com bubble. And so that led to all sorts of freelance opportunities for me. started my first company when I was 20, it was called Pixel Commotion. And Pixel Commotion was basically a digital agency that was, pretty much a self proprietorship, but I had consultants and contractors that I would subcontract out to. And then from there, I started a larger digital agency that I had for about 10 years called Heavy Bag Media. And my partner and I grew that from nothing to about 8 million in ARR.

And we had a bunch of really great clients. And I really liked agency work. We were doing things on the product side as well as on sort of branding, marketing, communication side. We were ahead of the curve on a lot of things, including digital video and augmented reality. And so that led to all sorts of interesting experiences for me. We worked a lot with a lot of large healthcare organizations like Beringer & O’Heim and Pfizer, Hartford Insurance. And so that was my first clue into the constraints that HIPAA has placed on healthcare organizations for many, many years. And that was sort of the first hint that there was a need for something like what I’m doing now, which is Blind Insight. Blind Insight is a private data platform that allows organizations to mobilize their sensitive data while remaining compliant and secure.

Toni Collis:

That’s very, very cool. think that just the journey from like going from the, you know, the software engineer who starts with, I did this too. Like I didn’t use Notepad. I used, I was a Unix base, so was Emacs. And be listening, who’s old enough? We’ll be like, you what? Yep, I loved it. When the first IDEs came along, I was like, no, I don’t like them. They’re no good for Fortran. At least they weren’t. The last time I wrote some Fortran code, I have to say it, there was no good IDE for Fortran. That might have changed today. It’s been a while since I’ve written a line of code.

But to go from that to several companies later, understanding what it takes now to help health tech or healthcare tech be HIPAA compliant, allow them to move data in the right way. mean, that’s quite a journey for somebody who didn’t go to college. Why do you think that is? Like, cause not going to college for some people would be like, I can’t run a business, I don’t have an MBA I can’t be, I have so many clients who say to me, I don’t have an MBA, I can’t be an executive. And I’m like, you do not need an executive to be an MBA to be an executive. Like what has set you well for success in this journey despite not having, or maybe because you don’t have an executive background. Like why are you so successful do you think?

Jackie Peters:

Yeah, well, so just to be pedantic, I did go to college. I just didn’t finish my degree. I got about three quarters of the way through and I wasn’t going for computer science or anything else. I was like pursuing a liberal arts degree and then all of sudden I got kind of like, you know, just T-boned basically by the internet and decided to go in that direction. But yeah, I mean, I think especially these days, you know, you don’t really need a degree to be successful in the world what you need is results and I just didn’t know any better I guess. I just decided I was going to do what I wanted to do and you know was you know a lot of perseverance and a little bit of luck is really the name of the game and so you know it was just a lot of hard work and doing a lot of meetings and ultimately at the end of the day people are doing business with you the person not you the piece of paper that you have, right? It’s pretty rare that a degree, I think, would get in your way in the technology field these days.

Toni Collis:

That’s interesting you say that because I, again, know, bear in mind the clients I’m working with, many are over 40, if not over 50 or later. And there is an obsession with you’ve got to have a college education, potentially you’ve got to have more than that or you aren’t fit. And I think, you know, that would apply also to getting investors to take you seriously. Certainly if you’re in a techie based industry. Am I correct that you’ve got investors investing in what you do? Is that right?

Jackie Peters:

We do, yes, we raised the pre-seed round and we’re currently working on our seed round. 

Toni Collis:

So I was like, am I just making that up? Because again, I think there’s this story. And what I really want to dig into here with you is you are an example of how this story is just not valid. And yeah, I hear week after week after week, possibly day after day, might even be that frequent. I can’t because. And the because is I don’t have that checkbox. And what I’m seeing here in front of me is somebody is extraordinarily successful despite not having the checkbox. In fact, I would argue because you don’t have that checkbox, because you figured out how to do it anyway. And actually, think that makes you personally, I think that makes you better equipped. think, you know, somebody who has collected qualifications, that’s me. I don’t actually think many of my qualifications were that helpful to my career. I actually think what the thing that’s made me good at what I do is getting out there and understanding the problems. And I would argue something like you’ve got there faster, right?

Jackie Peters:

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s really it, right? mean, nobody cares what degree you have. If you have, you know, increased ARR by several million dollars or you have closed big deals or you have shipped some breakthrough technology that nobody else has done before. And there’s a list somewhere. mean, Richard Branson was, I think, a high school dropout. But there’s I think Abraham Lincoln didn’t finish school even. There’s a list out there of like 110 very, very successful people that did not finish school. And for some people, think school is the right path. But if you are curious and you are self-motivated and you have some discipline, then I think that’s really all anybody needs. mean, of course, if you want to be a brain surgeon or a structural engineer, you probably need a degree. But yeah, I mean, like you said, a lot of this is really lived experience and the faster you can learn from lived experience, iterate, improve, get better at things, stay committed to goal and deliver. I think that’s really all that matters.

Toni Collis:

Yeah, yeah, 100%. Okay, well, let’s shift gears. Let’s talk about vision. Because one of the things when we first met was your power to break down a big picture into actionable steps really struck me. And I think that’s probably why, one of the reasons you’re so successful is you can hold that big vision, which I think is necessary to be a successful executive, to be a successful CEO, a successful founder. I think the job is the big vision, but what a lot of them A lot of them. A lot of people who can hold the big vision struggle with is breaking it down into the small pieces. Holding that vision, but also getting your team to focus in on what really matters today without being paralyzed by the scale of it. So tell me a little bit about that. What is your approach to breaking that big picture down?

Jackie Peters:

Yeah, yeah, think a lot of people have a big idea and they get intimidated by it, right? And they stay focused on that big idea, which seems insurmountable, overwhelming. How can I possibly accomplish this thing? But anything anybody has ever accomplished was just done one step at a time, right? So in early stage, it’s really about ruthless prioritization, right? So we have this big vision, right? But We have a saying, our only OKRs are get customers and keep customers, right? That’s all that matters.

Toni Collis:

Yeah. That’s so important. And actually just for anybody who’s doing this, I have a number of people working with me who are, you know, early stage, their CEOs or their co-founders or they’re an executive in those small companies. And they’re wondering why they’re not getting their next round of funding or they can’t get their first funding. And every time I’m like, the most important thing is proof that somebody’s prepared to spend a dollar. Your pricing doesn’t even need to work.

All right, but if somebody’s prepared to part with a single dollar, that says to an investor, this is something people, there’s an emotional resistance to spending a single dollar. If you can get somebody to pay you a dollar, it’s proof of concept that this is worth parting cash for. And until you do that, nobody’s going to invest in you, not in the current climate anyway. I think there’s a lot more resistance to investment of just an idea compared to like 10 years ago.

And so I think you’ve really hit the nail on the head. Like the ruthless priority is customers. When you’ve gone back, would you have done anything differently than what you’ve done or did you get that right from the, from the get-go?

Jackie Peters:

let’s see. Well, so I probably would have started the company a year earlier when people were writing checks off Notion documents. So as you mentioned, right, so we went from this era of build it and they will come in web 2.0, right? Where investors were just writing checks on technology, figuring like you’d figure out how to monetize it later. And that didn’t work out so well.

Jackie Peters:

So then of course the pendulum shifted. We couldn’t just find some balance, right? Then it was growth at all costs. Even if you’re hemorrhaging money, if you’re losing billions of dollars a month, which is actually going on with some of these AI companies right now that are getting this massive investment, it was growth at all costs. And that didn’t work out very well either. And so I think, you know, healthy and stable growth is hopefully what a lot of savvy investors are looking for today and building good businesses that have solid foundations. And so that’s really what I found helps move the needle today, right? Yes, you need something. You need a wait list. You need some LOIs. You need some self-serve, even if you have signups and they’re free, but people are actually using the product and they like it. And so those are signals that investors are going to be looking for and a good user experience, but also customer development process where you’re talking very closely with customers and potential customers along the way, bring on some advisors, right? We have a bunch of amazing advisors. have a global director at MasterCard. We have the former CISO of Robinhood, PIMCO, and Verobank for our financial services side of things. We have advisors from UCSF and health tech startups as well. So we’re very, close to customers. know, I’m constantly all over LinkedIn, reaching out to people asking if they’ll chat with me, not necessarily because

I’m trying to land them as a customer, but because I’m really interested in learning where are there really big problems that need solving. And you can have the best technology in the world, but if it doesn’t integrate easily, if it doesn’t bring value, it doesn’t matter, right? You’re just going to be a hammer.

Toni Collis:

I just, love that if you don’t have the best technology in the world, but it doesn’t bring value, it doesn’t integrate, there’s basically no point. And I think there’s something that some people just don’t realize. And I would argue for anybody, I know we have all sorts of leaders listening, not just the EOs and founders, but one of the conversations I’m pushing so hard for at the moment is whatever level of leader you are, right? As soon as you’ve got a director or above title, your responsibility is to be driving this momentum, be focusing in on.

Jackie Peters:

No one will use it, yeah.

Toni Collis:

the company needs to have healthy stable growth as you put it and be customer focused. Without the customer, there is no, we live in a society where customers drive business and that’s not wrong, it just is, right? We can debate that but it is the society we live in. And so you’ve got to have that like focus lens and it doesn’t matter if you’re the chief accounting officer or the head engineer, there’s still got to be a customer focus. I think so many of us just are so head down.

And I think as a CEO, it’s really dangerous, but it’s very common to be so heads down, you just don’t see. You don’t see that bigger picture, you’re just not holding it. It’s like, I can only hold this detail here. No, the job, the job is to hold here, but make sure your team is executing down here, right?

Jackie Peters:

Yep, absolutely true and keeping the team the entire team as you mentioned as close to the customer as possible without you know significantly impacting productivity because you know ultimately if everybody understands from the most you know junior engineer to the Top, know executive leadership, right why they’re doing what they’re doing They’re also able to act more autonomously and come up with you know better solutions So instead of telling somebody what to do you can tell them?

why something needs to be done. And now they’re able to take that and run with it and reason.

Toni Collis:

Yeah, I think that why is so important and we always forget that, right? We just think, just execute. No, the why means that they can solve problems rather than coming back to you when the way you told them to do it doesn’t work. It’s so simple, but sorry

Jackie Peters:

Yes, yes, try to work with people that I trust and empower them with data. In our case, it’s what do customers want and need and in what trust the people that I brought on board to work with that data and come up with solutions.

Toni Collis:

So let’s shift gears again, because I want to talk a little bit about raising venture capital, especially as a woman, right? We’re women. And again, I’ve had many people on the podcast who’ve talked both about how it’s so hard to raise as a woman, actually how to do it as a woman. What’s your take? Are there biases that you’ve encountered? How do you stay focused when there are setbacks, whether or not it’s because of your gender or otherwise?

because I don’t know anybody who’s asked for investment who’s not been said, nah, go away. So tell us a little bit about that, your experience of raising venture capital and what’s gone well, what’s not gone well, how much would you put down to buy us?

Jackie Peters:

Yeah, so it’s interesting, you know, I’ve come across a few situations both raising capital and not, and of course you can never really prove bias, especially because a lot of it is unconscious. You can only suspect it. And there are all of these staggering statistics, like women only received, I think it was one and a half or 2 % of venture capital, but I’m not sure. Well, here’s the thing is I’m not sure what is the percentage of women who applied. I’m sure it’s not 50-50, right? 

Toni Collis:

And it’s going down at the moment. That’s really heartbreaking to me.

Jackie Peters :

you know, is it 10 % that like, you know, female CEOs out of the entire pool of companies applying for venture funding, which would make 2 % not that bad, right? And so I think part of this is that it ends up being a self-fulfilling thing because women hear how hard it is to raise money and they decide that they’re not going to do it. And so now you have fewer women applying. So of course it’s going to be fewer women that are getting funded, right? And so

Jackie Peters:

I’ve really never let anything stop me. Now is a better time, arguably than ever, to be a woman. If you already have a, you know, executive role, a director of a role, and, you know, whether you’re a woman or not, you’re doing better than 99 % of the globe, right? And so we have more opportunity than we’ve ever had. Is it maybe a little harder? Yes, but things are a little harder for all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. I probably have encountered some bias. One interesting thing is I read a stat and I can’t remember the exact number, but someone did some research. They went to a tech conference and they eavesdropped on conversations between investors and founders. And they found that when they were speaking to a woman, they were something like 70 % more likely to ask for facts and figures to back up.

what the woman was saying, whereas if it was a man, they would grab onto the vision and just sort of believe them inherently and not ask for any data points to back it up. And while I can’t say that I’ve experienced that because I’m a woman, because again, I have no way of doing, I have experienced that over and over over again. I’ve been in, you know, final meetings with partner pitches where they’ve been like, Hey, yeah, okay. You’ve got, you know, four out the five T’s right. Traction, TAM, technology. There’s, there’s certain things that they look for.

But we’ve pulled the trigger before when someone was a little low on one of the Ts. So let’s do the partner meeting. And then of course in that partner meeting, everybody wants to see all the data and all this stuff. And then it ends up going in a different direction. So did that happen because I’m a woman? No idea, but probably.

Toni Collis:

Yeah. So here’s an interesting one just to, you again, challenge what’s going on here. I’m very, very, my job, I’m here about to elevate women in tech, so I’m incredibly sympathetic to the bias that’s going on. It’s wrong, right? And there is definitely bias going on. Like you just, you know, you cited a study where they’ve overheard conversations and there’s clear bias and conscious or conscious is, you know, something that I don’t want to dive into. I like to think most people are not aware of it, but that’s because I like to the best of the human race, maybe naively.

I think if you don’t do that, you might just go mad. But we do know that with investment, that women like, I can’t remember the stats, but women-led companies who do get investment are far more likely to go unicorn. It’s an order of magnitude more likely, something like that. Don’t know the exact numbers. So that’s focused on as one of the reasons why we should be investing more in women, but I can’t help but think it’s one of these same things that I see with leadership, which is women are held to a higher standard. And you’ve just described exactly that. I would argue by digging into the numbers, it’s women being held to a higher standard. It’s unfair because men aren’t being held to that. But it’s really a good idea to hold everybody to that. And there’s such a focus, whether it’s leadership, investment, whatever it is, obviously I do have a leadership all day long, that we’re held to this unfair standard. I’m like, it’s actually a better standard. Rather than complaining that we’re being held here, we should be complaining that men are only being held here. Because actually if we were all lifted up there,

it would be better and I think that’s often lost in the noise. I don’t know what your take is on that.

Jackie Peters:

Yeah, no, that’s actually a great observation and it makes total sense, right? mean, the more challenges that you overcome, the stronger and more capable person you are, right? So that would make sense.

Toni Collis:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. And I definitely say, you know, your story, your entire story from Leaving School at 15, I mean, one of the reasons you are successful, I would argue, is because of the tenacity, the grit that you’ve obviously had to get to this point. There’s a reason why you’re successful. And I don’t know what came first, the tenacity or this or, you know, the success because of the tenacity, but I would argue that today, part of the reason you’re so successful is because you’ve just learned over and over again. Does that resonate with you, do think?

Jackie Peters:

Absolutely. Yeah, I’m not afraid to fail, but I’m also very driven towards success, right? So I’ve always, and to answer your question, I’ve always been like that, right? So my dad and I would do projects together and we were building a work bench one day and we were out of screws, so he went to get some and I just built it out of nails while he was gone. And I was in like elementary school and it was like pretty much finished by the time he got back. So yeah, I mean, honestly, I think it is that

sort of curiosity, right, that drives me and then, you know, the satisfaction of solving a problem. One time I did take my parents’ stereo apart when I was little and could not put it back together. I got in really big trouble.

Toni Collis:

It’s when you put it back together and it works, but there’s more pieces than you started with. That’s happened to me. This is why, there’s a joke in my house. I’m not allowed to deal with real things. I’m a theoretician at heart because when I deal with real life, I break things. I can break anything if I just look at it the wrong way sometimes. There’s a bit of a joke around here. So give me the theory. I can deal with the theory. That was my specialism. But yeah, the real life, I just break things.

So the final question I want to ask before we move on to the quickfire round is what advice would you give to somebody starting out today? Starting out as an entrepreneur, have this big idea, but they don’t know where to get started. What would you say, what do you wish you told yourself at the beginning?

Jackie Peters:

Yeah, so I would say, know, step number one is, like I said, talk to customers first and foremost. Make sure that there is a buyer for this and that you at least have, right? Like we have been this whole time getting signal because we’ve been having conversations. Even if that doesn’t convert, we know after we’ve had hundreds of conversations with customers, like we’re on the right track, we know what we need to build. So that would be number one.

Number two would be if you can’t bootstrap, mean bootstrap for a little while, get something built, even if it’s just for a couple of months. Now you have what you need to go to friends and family to raise or angel investors to raise a small friends and family around. And that can be done, there’s safe agreements, which is kind of the standard way to do things. Happy to connect with anybody if they would like to go in any more detail. raise a little bit of money, angel round, 200,000 or in a thousand, enough to get something built that would function as a proof of concept, a minimum viable product. You’re not at minimum lovable yet, but like something. Now you go out and do demos with customers, you try to build a wait list, you try to get some letters of intent, and now you have everything you need to successfully raise real round.

Toni Collis:

Yeah, I love that. Thank you for breaking that down for us. There’s so much that I think is just not known and not understood, but it’s actually a relatively simple process. It’s just having the determination to follow through and not skipping steps. That’s a mistake I see a lot. I went out with a lot of leaders who were starting a side hustle. They’re executives in one company, they want to start their own thing, and they’re so tempted to skip steps because they’re ready to quit their day job. And I’m like, no, no, no, we cannot skip this step. you don’t get a proof of concept out there, if you don’t start talking to people, how do you know you’re building the right thing if you haven’t spoken to your ideal client? Do you even know who your ideal client is? Are you just building something because it seems like a good idea to you? That is not going to.

Jackie Peters:

Yep. Yeah. And I think, sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt, but yeah, think there’s a big, there’s a big problem with getting too attached to your own ideas. Right. And so, and a lot of, you know, our competitors, so, you know, we’re in deep tech, right? We’ve done some breakthroughs in privacy preserving technologies that allow for real time analysis of encrypted data. And so that’s really nerdy. I mean, you can’t really get a whole lot nerder than that. But You know, we have a lot of, we have, and we have a lot of competition and it was, you know, it’s companies that are started by computer science people and PhDs and a lot of them, it doesn’t seem like, or some of them I know for a fact, you know, didn’t do that crucial step and it affected them later. Right. So don’t get too attached to your own ideas. Get attached to an outcome. What do you want to see changed in the world and listen to customers and work with that data to figure out what the best solution is.

Toni Collis:

Yeah, absolutely, where are the customers? I could talk about this one all day, especially the sensitive data side of it. That’s part of my previous career in supercomputing was dealing with health data. And that’s a hot mess to get right and do it ethically.

Jackie Peters:

Yeah, it’s been a big problem for many years. then luckily on this one, my timing was good. I’ve usually been too early, but you know, over the past few years, there’s been an eightfold increase in the amount of regulated data. And so if you have a global footprint, you are in highly regulated industry. It’s not just healthcare anymore.

Toni Collis:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, I wish you the best of luck, but before we part, let’s talk quick fire round. You ready for this? Some of my favourite questions here. What is the worst piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

Jackie Peters:

Well, I guess the worst piece of advice I’ve ever been given would have been to give up, which I’ve gotten from many people. Oh, maybe this is too much. Maybe you shouldn’t do this. Maybe you should do something safer. And I’ve encountered that along the way.

And sometimes actually it’s been good because like I said, not being attached to your own ideas. I had an idea about how this company would evolve when I first started it. And then I got some advice from a friend who thankfully took some time to really hammer it home. Speaking of not getting too attached. Yeah. And so he was, yeah, that was one case where it was like, don’t do this was actually good advice, but it was more like, hey, do this instead. And that was, that was how it ended up.

Toni Collis:

Too many of us are told to give up. And again, I think that’s one of those things where unconsciously women are more likely to be told that than men. It’s that kind of, don’t worry, sweetheart, I know this is hard. Why don’t you just give up and try again with something else? you’re like, no. Tenacity and grit gets you very, very long way. What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

Jackie Peters:

the best piece of advice I’ve ever been given. Can that come from reading books? Does it have to be verbal? So I like to read Dharma books. I have a mindfulness practice and the best piece of advice I’ve ever been given probably came from Buddhist scriptures and Buddhist teachings that remind us that somewhere we are standing on a ground before there’s division before there are concepts of hard and easy, right? And good and bad and stressed and relaxed, right? There is, these are all concepts, right? That we have, and we do have physical feelings in our body that we associate with these concepts, right? But they’re all concepts. And so to just remember that this is basically all my VR goggles, right?

And I can’t believe too much of what I’m seeing here because we really do create our own reality. We are only capable of processing a tiny amount of information at once. And we’re tuning ourselves to whatever it is we’re looking for. So if we’re looking for things that are bad and scary, we’re going to see things that are bad and scary. And so just remembering that we are standing on a ground that comes before all of that division is really helpful.

Toni Collis:

I love that. I spend an inordinately large amount of my time as a coach pointing out the other myriad ways that you can interpret that one thing that you’re taking this particular way. And I’m like, well, let’s just widen your horizons there, my love, and see that actually maybe there’s another way of looking at this. In fact, there’s an infinite number of ways of looking at this. And that can really allow us to step back from this is personal, it’s about me, it’s about this thing and just allow us, as you say, ground yourself, ground yourself in just what is the facts. And actually there are very, very few facts, unless you’re a mathematician.

Jackie Peters:

Yes. Yeah, and especially right here in this moment, what are the facts, right? And what is stories I’m making up in my head or things I’m getting carried away with or convincing myself are true.

Toni Collis:

Yeah, 100%. Well, final question on the kind of question you’ve run. What is the last book you read and would you recommend it or listen to it for that matter?

Jackie Peters:

Yeah, also a Buddhist book. So there was a Buddhist priest called Dojen who lived in the 1200s, I think from 1200 to 1257. And he wrote a book called Genjo Koan. And so I recently read a book that was three different translations of Genjo Koan by three more modern Zen Buddhist priests. And Dojen was the founder of Soto Zen Buddhism, which is a certain school of Buddhism. And yes, I would recommend, think probably that people read it because it has a lot of that messaging in there about a place that comes before division. And I think that’s really helpful when you’re a founder. I don’t really differentiate that much between hard and easy because I know if I do easy now, it’s probably going to end up being hard later and it’s all just stuff. It’s just the stuff I’m doing. I’m doing something every minute of every day, like, and I might as well be doing stuff that is going to lead to the best result. And I’m not looking at it as hard. I’m just looking at it as the thing I’m doing.

Toni Collis:

I think unconsciously I don’t differentiate between hard and easy, but I hear that language all the time from people I work with. And it’s quite destroying to us. It’s like, I can’t do this. It’s so hard. I only have this much time for hard stuff in a day. I don’t have much stamina for hard. But actually to me, it’s like, well, am I doing anything right now? If not, let’s go have a nap. Like recharge. If you can’t do it, it doesn’t matter whether it’s hard or easy, go have a nap.

It’s often my philosophy, well maybe not now, so a cup of tea or coffee also works. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. This has been super powerful. So where can people find you? How can people connect with you? Find out more about what you do about blind insight as well. Where can we find you online?

Jackie Peters:

Yeah, so our website is blindinsight.com. You can learn more about our company there. We also have a page on LinkedIn. Please follow us. That’s where we share most of our organizational updates and news. And you can find me also on LinkedIn, slash Jackie Peters, and feel free to connect with me. I’d love to chat.

Toni Collis:

Absolutely, thank you so much. But before we wrap up, what would you want to leave us with today? What are the final thoughts that you would like to leave this community of extraordinary women leaders with?

Jackie Peters:

Yeah, think, you know, final thoughts is if you want to do something and you’ve got the requisite number of, you you have a normal functioning brain and, you know, you’re physically able to do it, you you’ve been blessed with that much and you’re in a position to do it, then there’s no reason not to, right? And to not be afraid to fail because all of my failures have led to all of my successes. And so You know, if you’re afraid, that’s okay. Be afraid and do it anyways.

Toni Collis:

I love it. Be afraid and do it anyways. And what a beautiful night to leave us with. I definitely think the key takeaway I’m going to take from this conversation today is that hard is potentially a good thing. And you highlighted it there once again in the, think hard is when we learn. will say if things have been easy, what have you learned? You haven’t actually learned what’s working because you don’t know what worked because it was all easy. There was no negative result to give you like, oh, that didn’t work. There’s the data point. Success doesn’t mean that the thing you were doing was a thing that worked, it might have just been something else you did. And so I often think that hard is good. Hard is where we grow, hard is where we expand, hard is where we have new opportunities, hard is where we do something different and good for the world, hard is where growth is, both personal but professional and business. So if you’re listening to this, maybe today is the day to lean into things being hard.

Not because they have to be hard. I love Jackie’s take on like don’t class things as hard or easy. I actually think that’s a really healthy place to be. But don’t be afraid when your brain goes, that’s challenging me. Maybe you lean into it and go, yay, I get to grow here. I want to leave you with that. I would love to hear if you’ve enjoyed this conversation. Please do hit like and subscribe on your favourite podcast player or on YouTube.

If you’re on YouTube, please leave us a comment. That is the best way to help us expand and get this message to more amazing, incredible women leaders. Remember that every one of us can make a difference and maybe it just comes from going, I’m going to lean into this being a bit uncomfortable today. Thank you for listening.