Connect with your inner SORCE with Jessica Corbin E64
October 18, 2022
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I had the honour to interview Jessica Corbin and it was a magical exchange about energy, the power of our heart and how we can tackle burnout on an individual and organizational level. You really don’t want to miss this episode!
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Get to know Jessica Corbin
As the Founder/CEO of SORCE, Jessica is dedicated to regenerating human energy, accelerating organizational consciousness and architecting a vital and sustainable future.
Recently named by the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center as one of their 2020 Milestone Makers and brought into StartUp Health’s portfolio of companies, SORCE is solving the $300 billion problem of stress and burnout through data-driven + human-centred technologies.
Connect with Jessica Corbin
Instagram: @iamjessicacorbin and @sorce
Can you share with us your story and how did it happen that you co-founded SORCE?
It all starts with my athletic career. I was in high school, a high performing, you know, an athlete. I was an all-American, so top 25 in the nation for cross country. I got into sport kind of accidentally. My good friend was in it and I wanted to be connected to her. And so I jumped in and I ended up being, you know, a pretty good runner. And it really kind of sparked my passion around human performance.
It sparked my passion around unlocking potential. I am a very competitive person by nature and I have a lot of fire inside my heart and so I just kind of got bit by the bug. I wanted to see how great I could be and I ended up having a lot of success.
But early on in my college career, I came up against a lot of injuries. My body was starting to give me feedback that it was all a bit too much, but I didn’t have any tools at that time. The only tool that I had was my will. To dig deep and push through.
Basically, destroy my body in pursuit of winning
And that ended up having some really significant ramifications. By the age of 30, I had extreme adrenal fatigue. I took all that fire, that drive, that passion and I put it into my career early on which was in live television. I was a TV host, producer, and executive producer.
And then I had a big family crisis. So my predisposition for burnout, my fiery constitution, my will, on top of all these adrenaline-inducing activities at 30, I had extreme adrenal fatigue and burnout, and the only place I could go to get relief was my acupuncturist.
And he would tell me all these incredible things about my system. He would say: Your chi is really wiry today. You need to do yoga. Your chi is really strong today. You can run hard. And that literally on the treatment bed of my acupuncturist.
That light bulb came on
And I was like: Wait a second. What are you assessing? Is that my pulse that’s giving you all this information? How can I do this for myself every single day? And that’s how Source was born.
All of a sudden my body became my biggest ally and I started to actually listen and honor my body because all along it was whispering to me exactly what I needed to do, but I didn’t have the right translation tool to interpret those body whispers.
And so *SORCE is literally like a body whisper. It’s an interpreter. The subtle but powerful frequency that we are all emitting. And it basically distils down where you sit on the spectrum of stress.
Looking at your multidimensionality, your physical, your mental, your emotional, your relational and it says: Listen, Jess, this is how much gas you have in the tank today, and this is what you need to do in light of that.
So we put it now into an app and your smartphones so that you all do not have to experience burnout.
Tell us a little bit more about HRV and what it actually is
At the beginning, it felt like a very mystical thing what the acupuncturist did. I was getting relief, but I didn’t understand. There was a mathematical equivalent and it had over 60 years of science behind it. HRV has been in cardiac medicine for a long time, and it’s known in cardiac medicine as the gold standard for well-being.
It has been used for many decades now to predict mortality. Heart Rate Variability, it’s not just your heart rate, it’s actually looking at your autonomic nervous system. It’s looking at these little variables in between the peaks of your EKG reading. And it’s telling you how much challenge and demand your body can handle.
That’s what it’s telling you. High sports performance athletes had been using it to determine training protocols because of all this early research. But it was cost-prohibited for the average consumer. I mean, these systems used to cost tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Hospitals and high-performance athletes that could spend a disproportionate amount of money on this assessment, of course. But now everybody can have it at a cost that is very, very affordable.
How can the data the *SORCE app measures help us lead a better life?
Upon being in the pit of burnout, I had to figure out why this was happening to me. I was so willing to do whatever it took to heal. The part that I didn’t understand is that stress in and of itself is actually really not bad.
If we look at the science of stress, it’s not a bad thing. You need stress in order to get stronger, get faster at anything that you’re trying to achieve. So too little stress leaves you in a very suboptimal state so it’s not good. If you start to effort a little bit more, then you start to create more progress for yourself in any goal that you’re trying to achieve.
With a little bit more effort, we start to really get into the sweet spot, that optimal stress level where we want people living every single day and it’s possible. We just need to educate people about how to do this.
But all too often, because of the old map and the old psychology, we dig deeper, push through. Everybody thinks that it’s like this never-ending path we need to be on. But that whole equation falls apart at a certain point.
The bell curve of stress
Meaning all of you have experienced that more effort at a certain point isn’t yielding more returns. You’re trying harder, but not getting further. So this is affecting you physically, mentally, emotionally, and relationally. So you start to go over the curve and you hit this zone of plateauing.
If you have any experience, let’s say running a marathon or any athletic endeavor, they talk a lot about plateaus. But plateaus exist in anything. More effort, not yielding, more return. And the real tricky spot is that some people take that plateau and they say: I’ll show you.
And they effort more. They start to overreach. And that’s where burnout is, at the bottom of the hill, the bottom of the bell curve.
Taking your Heart Rate Variability will help you find the sweet spot easily. And then in SORCE, we provide not just the data, but also the coaching. Because you need to know what to do. People just don’t know.
And a lot of times the key for most people, especially those that experience burnout, is rest and how to rest efficiently and effectively. And I would say it’s more than rest, it’s recovery. And we can go into talking about the difference between rest and recovery because there is a difference.
We are just sometimes quite bad at knowing what we really need. Right?
It’s actually a skill called Interoception that everybody is learning. So Interoception is the ability to feel your body and give it language. Like that tightness in my throat, the butterflies in my belly. Some people are brand new to actually feeling the sensations coming through. And it’s a skill that you can develop. Some people are born with it, other people have to develop it.
And wherever you’re beginning is great. The goal is to increase the amount of colors you’re coloring so you can make beautiful art in your life.
You can start to follow it all the way down to the root because all the information is right here. And your ability to interpret and discern grows exponentially. And again, anybody can look this up. It’s called Interoception. That’s a skill that we need to develop.
Everybody also should know that the body is the unconscious mind. Basically, 90% of our choices are coming from our unconscious mind. If you wanna see where the lion’s share of your choices is coming from, embodiment is essential, meaning in interception, the ability to feel.
That’s really important when we’re talking about the art of transformation.
Science and spirituality now become one, which is a fantastic time to be in. I just love it so much.
Me too. There was an author named Michael Dowd. The title of the book is Thank God for Evolution. And what I loved about this book is that a pastor and a Darwinist, they got married and they wrote a book about creation. And what was awesome was they were able to identify that they were talking about the same thing, the same awe, the same wonder.
One was written in this poetic way and he called it nighttime language. And that was actually spirituality. And the other was talking about it from a daytime language, which was science.
But the awe that they were experiencing was the same. That’s where it’s like when you talk about the intersect of science and spirituality. We want to honor both because they’re pointing at many times the same thing, just interpreted in these different languages.
It feels so much more full when it doesn’t have to be in either or, you know?
Let me ask you why is energy important to you. How is energy important for you in your life?
I had a really good run early in my life to achieve everything that I wanted and I kept thinking that these achievements would give me a sense of wholeness or fullness. And when I achieved those things it was just not and I was so quickly onto the next. When burnout happened, and I called burnout a sacred caldron, I lost my life. And it became so clear to me that my life was so blessed.
I kept thinking that more achievements would make it more blessed but all the blessings were right there for me to receive. And I was literally depleting myself trying to find something that I already had.
And then it became just a pursuit of vitality. I took that for granted early in my life. Because you’re young and you have youth on your side, but I literally, when you’re in burnout, you feel the life leaving you. The life has left you, and you realize, all I want is the energy back. None of the money or the whatever. The vitality is priceless.
That is the gold. And so that’s why energy is important to me because for so long I was using energy all my life to achieve something that wasn’t going to give me what I thought it would give me. And then it just became almost like a pursuit of learning how to cycle energy so I could just be in this life, appreciate my blessings and reduce my suffering. And life just became more.
I hope that makes sense, but that’s why energy is important to me. It is the prime currency.
That’s why we’re solving it at SORCE: Solving the human energy crisis. Too many of us reached that epidemic point where we bought in, we bought into a paradigm That paradigm doesn’t work. Maybe it worked for a time, maybe we needed that time. Now we’re moving into a new age.
What kind of results you’ve been able to see when working with organizations?
The vision that I caught fire for was this idea that we can actually track the nervous system of culture in a way that keeps everybody’s privacy private. Why this grabbed my attention was if you can monitor the ebbs and flows of not just the organization, imagine the organization like an organism, which it is in many ways.
It’s like this living and breathing entity and inside this entity, there’s all these different teams and departments. Now some of these teams and departments, they’re experiencing loads much greater than other teams and departments, and yet many organizations are deploying one solution.
Sometimes it’s just a bandaid across the board and having everybody figure it out for themselves. And this is organizations literally doing the best that they can.
What SORCE is bringing to the table though, is this ability to monitor with precision. So instead of a blanket rollout, we can actually see, for example, the manager’s team baseline just dropped. And we’ve seen this in data. Not bad news that actually can unlock potential, but when that goes unchecked for too long now we objectively know that this team is susceptible to burnout.
So this data allows us to get upstream on all of this mismanaged workplace stress in a way that’s way more surgical than, let’s say, deploying a meditation app. By looking at the data, we’ve been able to see various things in organizations.
Ability to monitor well-being with precision
We can see when travel affects a team. Like we saw this whole team travel from the US over to Israel and it was really, really impactful on their nervous systems. It was a big, big load: time changes, the anticipation of having to go in and do a big presentation when you’re under-resourced.
We have seen when Covid spread through a team and we could see it in data. It would be like: boom, boom, boom. And we could see grief. Because people were losing people through Covid and it’s all imprinting on the nervous system.
We could see how vacation actually helps baseline rise. So we could watch one team that was in the UK, a leadership team, and then there was an operation team in India and they actually had different calendar years.
UK people take holidays a lot better than we do in the US. We could actually see how their baseline increased, and their levels of recovery, restoration, and rejuvenation increased. The team in India simultaneously had Covid hitting them and the baseline for the team was dropping.
What teams are prime for peak and what teams are susceptible to burnout?
This allows the organization to be a lot more responsive. Additionally, we work with the management on how to integrate these learnings into things like quarterly planning.
A lot of things are cyclical for organizations and every year the bottom is gonna drop out. What can we do to get in front of that? Like where is it dropping out and what can we do to prepare and fortify the system so that the bottom doesn’t drop out? These are the explorations that we are having in real-time, which is fascinating.
You know, what we are doing is a moonshot, I’m gonna be really honest. We are trying to solve the human energy crisis. This is a giant moonshot that we are taking, and we really believe that if we can give organizations the service that they need, that we have a better chance of achieving this moonshot.
Organizations are having an identity crisis
So that’s why we’re focused also on organizations. What organizations are up against, I have so much compassion for them. They’re having an identity crisis. Who are they? Their people? Before they used to be an employer and now they need to be so much more.
And they need to take care of their people. So they’re being tasked because they’re asking more. So, it needs to be reciprocal. If you’re gonna ask more of your people, you have to be willing to give more to your people. I know how hard it is to dismantle old patterns inside of myself.
Looking at an organization, I mean, these are conditions and patterns that are fixed. So we have to be patient with this process. It is not an overnight fix cuz we’re literally shifting a paradigm. We’re shifting from this mechanistic robotic one-speed way of living and working into a living system paradigm.
This could take the rest of my life at SORCE to see us make some serious gains.
What I take a stand for now though, is that it’s not about: Do we know what to do? I feel like the how is here. The how is HERE. What we really need to work towards is the willingness.
And that requires people to step into the unknown and a lot of scary stuff. And when you’re doing it at an organizational level and you have all these fiduciary responsibilities, again, I have compassion.
But wouldn’t you rather be on the bleeding edge, than somebody that is late to the party? I had a teacher that said: You pay now or you pay later. And if you’re saying, I don’t want to pay now, okay, the pain is going to increase.
So come and join the party at SORCE. Don’t miss out. There’s a path to feeling better, and that’s what we do at SORCE.
*The SORCE App is sadly not available anymore for direct end-users.
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You Might Also Like
- Checking in with my nervous system once per day Episode 70
- Stop the Push, Push, Push way of living and create balance Episode 74
- Not all days are PUSH days Episode 107
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