158 The Path to Navigating Anxiety and Renewal with Dr. Jeanne Retief

This episode features Dr. Jeanne Retief, who takes us through her incredible transformation from an international human rights expert to a skincare entrepreneur. Jeanne bravely opens up about her struggles with generational trauma and chronic anxiety. She shares the emotional details of her journey, the tough choices she made to prioritize her mental health, and the heart-wrenching decision to walk away from a globally respected consultancy she had built from the ground up. Her story is a powerful testament to resilience and the unpredictable paths to personal growth.

Find out more about Jeanne’s inspiring new ventures, including Figgi, a skincare brand designed for people with sensitive, anxiety-prone skin, and The Anxious Calm, an online community and app providing support for those managing anxiety. 

Jeanne’s journey offers valuable lessons on embracing change, managing mental health, and finding calm amidst chaos.

Find out more by clicking on these links

https://linkpop.com/figgibeauty
https://www.figgibeauty.com/
https://www.docjeanne.com/

Hello from your host, Carol Clegg. A coach for coaches! I work with women coaches to find balance with ease and flow, manage stress, cultivate self-empathy, and set meaningful goals that resonate with their individual coaching practices.

My clients often have too many ideas and struggle to decide which one to focus on first, leading to a HUGE BLOCK in just getting started. I love to help simplify the process, explore what is getting in the way and guide you to choose the next project, enjoy the journey, and celebrate progress while taking small, meaningful steps.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Thriving Through Mental Health Challenges
• 12:31 Anxious Calm and Figgy Beauty

Transcript

Carol Clegg: 0:00

Well, hello and welcome to Connect, inspire, create. I'm your host, cCarol Clegg, a progress and mindset business coach, here to help you thrive and flourish and turn those challenges into opportunities for growth. I'm so pleased you're here. Join me for the discussions that I hope will not only encourage you but also provide the dose of inspiration that you might just need today. This podcast is all about giving you your weekly dose of practical strategies, motivation and insightful conversations designed to boost your business skills, personal growth and happiness. So, whether you're looking to find balance, say goodbye to procrastination, or just in need of a friendly nudge towards your goals, remember we're all on this journey together. So grab your favorite cup of something, be it coffee, tea or something else, and let's dive into this conversation today. Well, thank you for listening to the show today and welcome Joining me is my guest, dr Jean Retief, a former international humans rights expert, turned skincare entrepreneur and the founder of Figgy Beauty and the Anxious Calm. So welcome, jean. Thanks for being part of the show.

Jeanne Retief: 1:31

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Carol Clegg: 1:35

This is wonderful. You might have noticed, listeners, that there might be a slight similarity in our accents, and Jean is also from South Africa and now residing in Portugal with her hubby, toddler and two dogs. And JeanJ and I this is the first time meeting, but we both share. I share a passion for Portugal as well, so it's just a wonderful coincidence that we're here together.

Carol Clegg: 2:00

So, jean, I know when I looked at some of the notes that had been shared with me. You were armed with a PhD in international criminal and humanitarian law and you presented all around the world and accumulated many, many years of experience in that field, and then a diagnosis in 2015 had a pivotal impact on your life. Can you just give us a quick insight to what that journey that you took after you got that diagnosis? Where did that take you?

Jeanne Retief: 2:34

Yeah, I think many times when people ask me about this, they have this idea in their mind that I was in this career that I really loved which is true and then this diagnosis hit out of nowhere and then my life changed. But what really happened is that I grew up with a lot of generational trauma. I had a lot of trauma that I had to work through myself, which I didn't do well, and I've always had an issue with anxiety. I've always been a super anxious person. My mom used to tell me I was an anxious baby and my hands were always in fists. So the diagnosis was more of a breaking for me because I in my family also have a long history of mental illness, which led to a lot of the many bizarre behaviors in my house. It was a breaking for me because it kind of solidified to me like oh no, me too. And it was almost like a confirmation of what I think I'd always known deep down that something isn't right and it's not normal to be this anxious and this stressed out about things. And combining that with everybody telling you you're not normal and something is not right, you know. So that's really how that diagnosis impacted me.

Jeanne Retief: 3:54

The thing that changed significantly after the diagnosis was that I think I was trying to deny and deny and deny and deny it and when I got to that point where I had my first big panic attack when I was traveling for one of my human rights jobs, I noticed that this is not something I can control anymore.

Jeanne Retief: 4:12

It's like my body took over for me and I had no control over it. I didn't have control over thinking that I was dying. I had no control over thinking that I was suffocating and shaking and feeling like I had a stroke, like everything was out of my control. And all of this that I've worked so hard to hide and so hard to avoid just came crashing down in the worst possible way. And I kind of patched it up, you know, with band-aids, and tried to continue, because I was in a mentorship space and I had really bad imposter syndrome because I felt how could I be mentoring people and trying to help them when I have anxiety? Just doesn't mesh well. And cut to a few years later, when we ended up in Portugal and it caught up with me again and it was just to such a degree that I couldn't function, my family couldn't function. I had no other choice. I had to make very difficult decisions.

Carol Clegg: 5:08

That is so, so hard and just thank you for sharing from your heart. I mean I think that there are others who will be listening who can relate to that. It's quite incredible how our body will actually eventually say no more, no more. We know we keep thinking we're very capable as, as women, we're very capable. You were obviously in quite a high-pressured career that you must have worked really hard to have obtained and achieved that, but look what a beautiful space it's brought you to now.

Jeanne Retief: 5:37

Yes, I have to say I'm grateful, but in that moment I wasn't because when, I started the consultancy, everybody thought I was crazy. Like you cannot build an entrepreneurial journey on human rights. This will never work, and I had tried to work for the United Nations so many times and all of these wonderful places that I always wish to go.

Jeanne Retief: 5:59

It didn't work out and I decided to do my own thing, so I really clawed my way through with this consultancy and it grew to this really globally respected thing and to have to take distance from that and make the choice to not do that anymore and losing kind of your sense of identity and reality that is attached to that, it was very, very hard. Now when I look back at it, I can see the blessing in it, but when you're in the thick of it it's very hard, yeah and you know, as you're sharing, that what comes.

Carol Clegg: 6:29

a word that comes to mind for me is grief. Yes, and so it's, um, it's grieving that, that dream, what you'd achieve, yeah, so, and I guess there's a process for that which one doesn't always recognize at first, and someone can come to you and go well, these are some grieving steps you could take, but then, as you say, you know where you are now. So, looking, I mean, you shared briefly, and I think this is probably part of your healing journey is recognizing those past traumas and the effect on your journey to you. Know, how did you take that and go okay, I know this is what's been in my past. I don't want that label, I don't want that to be part of my life that was.

Jeanne Retief: 7:10

I think I'm still kind of on that journey because there's just so much to make peace with and so much to kind of sort out in my mind. So I think it's more of a realization I came to that healing is a journey. It's not a goal or an endpoint. And the more I try and push towards this goal of being normal again and being healed, the worse it's going to get for me, because it's just not the way it works. You know there are always going to be. I call it the light and the dark. It's always the dark kind of drawing you back and the light beckoning you forward.

Carol Clegg: 7:44

You know it's always this kind of dance you're having.

Jeanne Retief: 7:47

And you just have to kind of recognize where you are in that dance at the moment, like and what kind of steps you then need to take. And you said something interesting. You said how I adjusted to the label or how I didn't want to be labeled as this, and I think that was one of my biggest kind of things that helped me on this healing journey is just recognizing that you know I'm not broken.

Carol Clegg: 8:11

No wrong, no you know it's just.

Jeanne Retief: 8:15

I can also do high stress jobs. I can also achieve. I just do it differently and I just need to recognize my limitations in a different way and understand my manual. You know, nothing I do or say is going to change that. This is just the way I'm wired.

Carol Clegg: 8:31

Yeah, and you've got to accept the beautiful you, because that's what you are, and, in turn, your journey is going to inspire others because while you're searching and I think we're all searching always to you know, add things that make us happier, that help us to contribute to others, to be with that, jean, I'd love for you just to share, because we might have a few moms that are listening, and you spoke about, you know, helping to teach your toddler now about mental health. What are some of the things or the tools that you use for a young one, for a little?

Jeanne Retief: 9:08

one. So she's six now and I think the biggest mistake I made was to not tell her and to hide it from her, because kids are so much smarter than we think, they pick up so much more and I was stressing her out more to see me go through a panic attack. I obviously always try and hide it and always not, but sometimes you just cannot control when it happens. And I recognize that this is something that I have to be open and honest with her about and I just use the analogy of the monster in the closet. You know, all kids go through this phase where they're scared of the monster under the bed or in the closet or something. And she's now at the stage where she's very brave. It's like I know it's just make-believe, I know it's not true and I just told her, like mommy's brain sometimes thinks there's a monster in the closet, but her brain can't be as smart or as brave as you to think that it's not there. Her brain tells her it's true and that helped her a lot to kind of understand what's happening when it happens.

Jeanne Retief: 10:09

And we talk a lot about emotions. I love Deepak Chopra's. He has a book for small children that take them through all of that. There's a book today, I feel, which is also very explorative, and it's important for me because I also don't want her to fall into this belief system that Just because we have uncomfortable emotions in the normal human range of emotions doesn't make us anxious or mentally ill or something wrong with us. There are always going to be emotions that we don't want to deal with, like stress or aggravation or frustration, and those are normal. It's normal to stress. There's just sometimes something that happens to our bodies that make that go out of balance, and I really want her go out of balance, right, and I really want her to understand that balance.

Carol Clegg: 10:58

You know, that is so important because I think we are. We're taught as we grow up to suppress the negative emotions and only search for happiness and joy, and that's not realistic. So I think being curious about what these other emotions feel like is a beautiful thing and I have to share. I had a guest on my podcast a couple of episodes back and she has created a moody monster which is kind of a doll and you can pull off the pieces and do various things, and she talks a lot about emotions for children and just giving them some other words and exploring.

Carol Clegg: 11:34

So that's that's wonderful, but well, I have to ask you we're talking about Figgy and the anxious calm. Did the products come first?

Jeanne Retief: 11:44

I'd love to know the journey of your business so when I decided to do Figgy, it was when I had to decide to let go of my consultancy and and I just knew that whatever I do next, it has to be something that allows me to speak openly about my diagnosis, because this was a huge part of what was holding me back this shame and this guilt.

Jeanne Retief: 12:05

And one of the major symptoms of my anxiety disorder is very sensitive skin, and I had just moved to Portugal, so I didn't have access to my rooibos and ingredients. And I went down this journey where I started to recognize the things upsetting my skin and I completed my certification in cosmetic chemistry and I thought, okay, so this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to offer products for dry and sensitive skin, really for anxious souls, because a lot of skin sensitivity issues is caused by anxiety or aggravated by it, like eczema, psoriasis, shingles. You know, many times these are people that already have some kind of anxiety issue, or when they stress a lot, they get these flare ups, and that's how figgy was was born well, our bodies certainly are their barometers, aren't they?

Carol Clegg: 13:00

to our skin, um, and show so many things that I once had an experience with shingles and it was awful. I will never like to have that, ever again yeah, it's very, very unpleasant, it's not, that's not something you want. So, with the products, I want to just briefly just cover those. I'm guessing you've got some key ingredients that you put into the products to make them suitable for sensitive skin.

Jeanne Retief: 13:28

So when you have sensitive skin, it's really important to go back to the basics and cut out all the extras because you want to get your skin back to a good space. So it's a very minimalist routine. It's a double cleanse, so your two cleansers a day and a night cream. All of the products are infused with rooibos because, as you know, it's been scientifically proven over decades to be a really great anti-inflammatory. So it calms and soothes. It has antioxidant properties. It's a natural antimicrobial and antifungal.

Jeanne Retief: 13:59

And the cleansers that we put together our clients I always have to remind them it's not a moisturizer, because they always think they're trying a moisturizer after they take it off because it's really so gentle. We really formulated it with the most gentle cleansing ingredients. The day cream we've replaced your antioxidants, so no vitamin C, which can be upsetting to sensitive skin. It's rather rooibos with vitamin E and algae, and then a little bit of niacinamide at a sensitive percentage for your dark spots and your uneven skin tone. And the night cream is like your super replenishment with your tripeptides, refinelines, wrinkles, elasticity and then your healing ingredients like provitamin B5, rooibos, and it really just restores and replenishes. Oh, now you have me curious. I have to ask you are you shipping worldwide? Not yet, but we are shipping to the US and Canada.

Jeanne Retief: 14:54

Our stores, our online stores are in the US and we're on Amazon as well. Okay, wonderful, and then in Europe, available or not, as yet. We're hoping to be in the UK by the end of October, and Figgy is a European brand. So we first launched in Europe and expanded to the US, but now all of our efforts have become so kind of intense in the US we just take it easy.

Carol Clegg: 15:19

Lovely. Well, that's good for me, but then tell me, when I get to Portugal, am I going to be able to find the product?

Jeanne Retief: 15:25

Yes, you can buy it from me. Oh, that sounds fantastic, that's wonderful.

Carol Clegg: 15:30

So now I know that you're venturing into a new project after the wonderful, the beauty line that you've just shared with us, the anxious calm. So tell us a little more about that.

Jeanne Retief: 15:42

Yeah. So one of the things that really upset me about my human rights career is like I was very good at developing projects and programs and having it have a practical outcome to really help those that needed to help. But so many of my projects I would have so many hours and hours and hours of work invested in it and I wouldn't go through or fall through because of politics and diplomacy and red tape. And it was so frustrating and although I created Figgy Beauty, I still felt very alone in my journey and like I have a great support system but your support system also get kind of caregiver fatigue. You know you need somebody that you can relate to, that understands what you're going through, and we don't have that for people that are kind of further along in their anxiety journey. And I just thought, well, I have all of this knowledge, I know how to make these programs work. I don't need to be beholden to anybody anymore for their opinions or politics or what wouldn't look well or Right, you know.

Carol Clegg: 16:46

I do it.

Jeanne Retief: 16:47

Yeah, exactly, and help who I want to help. And so I formed the anxious calm for sensitive souls like me, and we're just trying to peacefully coexist with our wiring. We're tired of self-help and everything telling us we're wrong. Yeah, it's okay not to be okay. That's really all it is.

Carol Clegg: 17:09

Yeah, that's fantastic. Now you mentioned that one can access this online and that you then have an app coming out in a few months' time, which is really exciting, and perhaps by the time this goes live, it might well be really close to that. So how does one find out more about both your products and this new app that's coming out?

Jeanne Retief: 17:31

So if you want to know more about the Actuscom and the online courses I offer and I will just say the online courses are based on my personal experience, so it's really from a patient to a patient, like what happened to me after I left the therapist's office, what happened to me in the moments between doctor's visits and I was alone with my anxiety. How do you work through all of that? So if you want to know more about that or join the community, you can go to doc gene, so D O C gene J E A N N Ecom and it will take you directly to the anxious calm. You can also send me a mail at hello at doc genecom and just tell me that you want access to the anxious calm and I'll give you 30 day access if you, if you quote carol, click all right, fantastic.

Carol Clegg: 18:21

So I'll make sure to have that in the show notes and let you know. Just put carol click, and that you've been listening to this episode on connect inspire create, and then I know if you'd like to connect, and that you've been listening to this episode on connect, inspire create, and then I know if you'd like to connect with jean, you can find her on linkedin and instagram, so I'll make sure that those two links are also available in the show notes. So, jean, thank you for sharing your story, and I'm excited about this app that you've produced, and I'm also very curious to go check out the product, so I definitely will be taking a look into that.

Jeanne Retief: 18:53

So, once again, thanks for being my guest. Thank you so much for having me.

Carol Clegg: 18:57

So those that are listening. I hope that our conversation has just sparked a little touch of inspiration for you, and perhaps somebody came to mind that you think they need to listen to this episode. So I invite you to share that, and I also encourage you to embrace your own unique way of connecting, inspiring and creating this week. Hence the name of my show Connect, Inspire, Create. Let it bring a sense of ease and flow into your world. In my role as a mindset and accountability coach, I work with women coaches in midlife to find solutions to attain balance in their business endeavors and nurture a positive mindset. By blending personalized accountability and mindset coaching with the powerful positive intelligence program, you'll gain lifelong tools to elevate your overall happiness and peace in life. So feel free to reach out if you would like to know more, because I'm here to support you on your journey, along with my wonderful guests. So thanks again for listening. Until the next time, take care.