From Survival to Thriving: Jennifer Wren Tolo's Path to Wellness Resilience

In this episode of Taking Healthcare by Storm, Quality Insights Medical Director Dr. Jean Storm speaks with Jennifer Wren Tolo, RN, a soul connector, transformational life coach, award-winning health and wellness educator, speaker, author, and the founder of Butterfly Family Wellness. 

Jennifer, “The Soul Connector”, shares how her own health struggles and two sons’ life-threatening illnesses led her to focus on nervous system regulation, stress management, and whole-person healing. She discusses how chronic stress contributes to disease, outlines her “six S” framework for reclaiming power (from self-awareness to self-reflection), reflects on using AI without losing intuition, and calls for a healthcare shift toward prevention, lifestyle medicine, and education.

If you have any topics or guests you'd like to see on future episodes, reach out to us on our website.

The views and opinions expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views, positions, or policies of Quality Insights. Publication number QI-092526-GK

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Welcome to "Taking Healthcare by Storm: Industry Insights," the podcast that delves into the captivating intersection of innovation, science, compassion, and care. 

In each episode, Quality Insights’ Medical Director Dr. Jean Storm will have the privilege of engaging with leading experts across diverse fields, including dieticians, pharmacists, and brave patients navigating their own healthcare journeys. 

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Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Taking Healthcare by Storm. I am Dr. Jean Storm, the medical director here at Quality and Sites. Today's guest is Jennifer Ren Tolo, also known as The Soul Connector. Jennifer is a registered nurse, award-winning health and wellness educator, transformational life coach, author, speaker, and founder of Butterfly Family Wellness. After years working as an ICU nurse, Jennifer's own health challenges and the life-threatening illnesses of two of her four sons completely transformed her understanding of healing. Those experiences inspired her to look beyond traditional healthcare and explore how stress, mindset, self-awareness, and holistic wellness influence our health and our lives. Today, Jen helps people move from survival mode to thriving through stress management, resilience, and what she calls soul-aligned living and When I just said that, I got goosebumps. It is a wonderful term. She teaches that some of the most powerful medicine begins with learning to pause, regulate our nervous systems, which we need to do more of with all of the current news and things that are going on in the world, and reconnect with ourselves. Today, we're gonna be talking about what critical care taught her about stress and chronic disease, the lessons she learned through her family's health challenges, whether we've embraced holistic wellness since the pandemic, is under debate, I think, and what healthcare could look like if prevention and whole-person wellness truly came first. Jen, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Jean. I'm excited for this conversation. Me too. As I said in the intro, you spent, years as an ICU nurse. Mm-hmm. That's so challenging. Such a challenging, traumatic environment. But it sounds like your own health challenges and then your children's illnesses really changed the direction of your life. Can you take us through that journey and, and how it led you to create Butterfly Family Wellness? Yeah. It's funny how it really takes being on the other side of healthcare to really see where the problems are. Even though, you know, when you're in it, we see problems, but we see it through a different lens when you're the receiver of healthcare. So, like you said, I was a critical care nurse. I struggled with... I always knew that I was a nurturer. I always wanted to help people. My mom was a nurse. My uncle was a surgeon. And I went to school and I went to University of Virginia, got my bachelor in nursing degree. And at first I was thinking I was gonna become a nurse practitioner. I had my first kind of foray, fun story here. I took care of Superman because, I don't know, for e- when I say this to my nursing students, they're like, "You mean, uh, Henry Cavill?" I'm like, "No, Christopher Reeves." And I remember he fell off his horse and was brought into the neuro ICU at UV, University of Virginia, where I worked back in 1995. And, I got really excited because I saw, you know, when I'm working in, in the ICU there, I loved the troubleshooting. I loved how everybody was on, and the nurses were empowered to kinda troubleshoot and work with the doctors. And it was chaotic, but at that point, I thought I was thriving in chaos. And so my first job once I became a registered nurse was in a cardiothoracic ICU in New York City. And let's just say it wasn't the most nurturing environment, but talk about stress and talk about people whose lives were stressful, impacting their cardiovascular health. This is something that I started to see and I started to experience myself. And I met my husband there. I was really stressed. It was a very kind of like a toxic work environment, and I realized that was challenging for me to really thrive in that environment. So I pivoted to surgical trauma nursing. And at the same time, I was going for my master's degree in nursing administration because I thought I was gonna help change and heal healthcare that way. And I liked the surgical trauma ICU, and I got my master's, we started talking about having kids. I knew my husband was gonna leave for his fellowship, so I became a nursing supervisor. And again, all of this was showing me where gaps in healthcare were. But it really wasn't until my kids, when I started to have my kids, that I realized even though I might be thriving in chaos at work, because I was sort of disconnected in a way from that, like I could go home and my life would change. But when I started having kids, I realized I was going from one stressful environment to another just being a mom. And then you add one of my sons had a massive neonatal stroke at birth, which rocked my world because I always thought if I do these things, if I eat healthy, if I take care of my body, if I do all these things, then I'm gonna have a healthy child, and I'm gonna be healthy myself. And that didn't necessarily play out because I had a scheduled C-section. My first was a s- emergency C-section. My second was a scheduled C-section, and I remember waking up in the hospital like, "Where's my baby?" And my baby wound up having trouble breathing. He was seizing, and I had him in a community hospital. He was whisked off to a teaching hospital in Boston. And, I was having a little bit of a pity party for myself, couldn't wrap my head around, even though I was a nurse, a critical care nurse, I couldn't wrap my head around what was going on. And then I remember signing myself out, saying, "I need to be with my baby." So I n- I-- with the C-section, they keep you in the hospital for four days, and I left after two days 'cause I'm like, "I gotta be with my child, and I have to be with my husband." And getting there, just so many cooks in the kitchen, so many different people following my son, but they weren't communicating. And I remember just thinking like, "Okay, I need to take charge here. I need to be grounded." I remember going to the hospital, my husband, who's a surgeon, laboring over neonatal intensive care and neonatal neurology books. And I remember thinking to him after kinda breathing and calming my own nervous system, realizing, you know what? We are not the caregivers here. We have to be the advocates for our son, but we have to be connected with our son. So that's where I really learned the importance of trusting myself as the person who knows my child and knows myself best, and really advocating so we can have everybody on the same page, so we can connect the dots and so we can have consistency of care. But this was really where I started to see the big gaps in healthcare. And then I became leaving, 'cause after my son was released from the hospital, we did follow a neurologist, but they just were like, "Yep, damage is done." But they really couldn't tell me anything about what to expect. What did he need? how was I supposed to treat him differently or how was I supposed... What was I supposed to do, right? Raising him, having this massive brain injury. You know, what could I expect? Nobody could tell me these things. And so I realized I had to connect with my son, and he would tell me what I-- what he needed. But in the meantime, I wanted to empower myself, with knowledge. So I became-- I got my first, nutrition certification. I had a dear friend of mine that was a Reiki master. She said, "He's gonna need Reiki to help him get grounded and to help him energetically." So I became a Reiki master. I learned about neuroplasticity, about the brain and the things that we can do to help the brain. I became a personal trainer because my son didn't move one side of his body, so I wanted to help him and understand movement and how I could help him with exercise. And all of this kind of led me to start Butterfly Family Wellness from a holistic lens. So I started Butterfly Family Wellness trying to help families, especially families of kids with special needs connect with their kids, learn to be present because when you-- nobody could tell me what was gonna happen in the future, but I couldn't control what was gonna happen in the future. I could only control the here and now and connect with my son and let him and let our relationship kind of un-unwind and tell me what it is that he needed and how I could best support him in the moment. And so this was what I was really focused on in my Butterfly Family Wellness, helping people connect to nutrition and the power of food, helping people connect to movement, helping people connect to clean living and things that are gonna impact brain health and all of that. And then through all of that, I-- my third son, same day I found out I was having my fourth son, my third son was diagnosed with leukemia And again, I remember being in the hospital with my second son, looking at the kids, you know, in wheelchairs with cerebral palsy, thinking, "Well, at least I don't have that." And then looking at the kids that were bald, that were the cancer kids going through cancer and thinking, "Well, at least I don't have that." Because our ego is trying to, compare to help us feel better about our situation. Then fast-forward down the road, and I have that. I have a child with cancer. And it was really, I felt like-- And I really started to reconnect to my intuitive gifts, which everybody has. But as a kid, I remember having real intuitive energy, like understanding energy, underst- really getting vibes from people, being able to hear things, see things that I couldn't necessarily explain. Mm-hmm. Um, and it, it, this, this whole process helped me reconnect to that because that's what my kids needed, is that mom, that soul-connected mom, not the ego-driven mom. And so I- Used everything that I learned with my second son to help support my son going through cancer. I did Reiki on him every day. I really focused on good, clean nutrition cleaning up the environment of any toxins and chemicals, , really learning to be present and mindfulness, like being in the moment, not getting too caught up in the what-ifs because that's what would create the spin for me, the stress spin. And taking care of myself 'cause here I am growing another baby inside of me, I had to learn to nurture myself while I am nurturing my children. So all of this kind of was experiential learning and helped me on my journey with Butterfly Family Wellness. But I slowly started to shift from that holistic medical model where people were still coming to see me, wanting me to give them a prescription for living and wanting me to fix problems. I realized that stress was at the root cause of many of the issues, and that when you have a dysregulated mom, you have dysregulated children. And so I really started to shift away from focusing on the family to focusing on women and helping women reconnect to that soul self versus the fear-based ego that's driving a lot of our decision-making and behaviors- and disconnecting us from ourself, from trusting ourself, and from understanding our kids and what they need. So really this was became my-- I would say in the last maybe eight years, I started to pivot, really in the last five years, to really working with women and with stress management and resiliency. But that whole helping them reclaim their power because many times when things happen to us, we feel like we're powerless, like this is happening to us. But I believe that everything that I went through was all part of my character development to get me where my soul needed me to be, which is that to fulfill my purpose, right? So I really believe that when we, able to shift that mindset from victim to victor and using the life experiences to help us grow and help us hone the skills and help us practice some techniques to stay present and connected in our life, that's where we really find our true health and happiness. Yeah. Uh, definitely. And, you know, I just wanna kind of, I wanna touch on chronic health issues- Yeah. Yeah ... which are huge in this country. Oh, yeah. You say that stress- It's hard on our health, of course. Yeah Yeah. Stress is the root of all of, of many of these chronic health conditions. So during your years working in critical care, what did you learn about the relationship between chronic stress, nervous system, and then, and diseases that we just think of as, as purely physical? Right. And that's it. There are, in my training my holistic training, I have a couple of different certifications that I did, but one of the big messages is we are looking just at the physical health, and some people are even now looking at the the nutritional health But there are five aspects to health and healing, and sometimes more. And a lot of, like, lifestyle medicine incorporates this. Even my personal training, my ACE personal training, they incorporate this in health management. So it is physical health, nutritional health, emotional health, spiritual health, and environmental health. And so I think in the hospital setting, we are just looking at... I mean, think about it. I remember being in the hospital with my son, going through chemotherapy, pregnant, having to sleep, alongside my son, trying to get sleep, but then the night nurse is coming in and they have no idea that to them, they're awake. So they're talking, it's loud, and I'm like: Are you kidding me? Like, how are t- how are families supposed to sleep? How are patients supposed to sleep when you are not aware of the environment, right? And the environment plays a big role in healing. So that's an aspect that I think got overlooked and became stressful. So the environment that people are in, I think we're getting better about that. But and then what I was seeing is a lot of emotional stress , but spiritual stress, where people just were disconnected from the choices they were making from their lifestyle and the role that it played in their, , in their health. They were disconnected from you know, managing the stress that was really the root cause of some of those health issues that was maybe causing people to have behavior, like eat the things that weren't necessarily supporting their health or drink or take substances or, you know, a lot of the things that the root cause is stress and it's a disconnection from yourself and from what you need, which is a spiritual stressor So this is one of the things that I was seeing is, yeah, we might, there might be a chronic event or these chronic health issues, and many of the chronic health issues lead to other chronic health issues. But it really comes down to personal accountability, lifestyle medicine, and I teach this in my... in a nursing school, I teach a course called Holistic and Complementary Approaches to Health and Healing. Mm-hmm. And the first unit we talk about is why are healthcare costs so high? What is the trends of healthcare? And so if you look at when, back in, you know, Hippocrates days and Greek medicine and, and if you look at Eastern medicine, they look at the internal and the external factors impacting health. They look at food and its impact on health. They look at... Back then, it was really about lifestyle management and lifestyle that was playing a role in health. And then eventually we got into kind of public health issues when we started increasing the, you know, the concentration of people and the health disease that came with that. And then we, when we started getting to pharmaceuticals, we started getting farther away from lifestyle management, and we started getting a pill for an ill, and we started disconnecting from that accountability piece to our maintaining our health. And I think that all of this, they, that's all a stressor. It's a nutritional stressor, our diet. It's a physical stressor as far as lack of exercise, a lot of sedentary behavior, right? A lot of spiritual and emotional disconnect and stress from feeling disconnected from others, from not feeling disconnected from ourself, not understanding what it is that we need. And you know, g- trying to follow other people's shoulds and, and keep up with everybody and the grind and the hustle culture that is creating that environmental and emotional stress. So I hope that answered your question, but that's what I started to see both as a nurse and then, on the other side of healthcare. And then that's something that I, I see now Yeah, it's huge. Yeah. But also- Yeah ... teaching in nursing school, the stress piece is something that a lot of people don't think about, but it is. They say like ninety percent of illness, the root cause is stress. Yeah. One of those five stressors. Yeah. Yeah. Or multiple. I, I agree. I'd like to get to your six S system for reclaiming your power. Can you give us kind of the elevator pitch for the six pillars? Yeah. Well, I think, a lot of people, especially in our society, are looking for a quick fix, like, "Just tell me what to do. Tell me..." But healing really is an inside job, and it comes from learning and understanding yourself. I call it radical self-awareness, like knowing who you are, knowing what you need, knowing who you are not, knowing what you don't need, right? And that's all a big foundation because stress often comes from, I call it the hidden stressors. There are three hidden stressors, and that's trying to please other people and that's expectations. We have expectations we put on ourselves or expectations we assume others put on us trying to control things that are not within our control. And then our distractibility. We're very distracted and disconnected from our lives because we... we're allowing ourselves to be distracted by other people's shoulds, by the outside noise. So healing is really an inside job where you have to reconnect to yourself so you can reclaim your power over your life and be the co-creator of your life. And to me, there are six major steps that need to happen consecutively, and for you to be successful in reclaiming your power. So those six S's, success, see what I did there? Our first step is self-awareness. You have to be aware of what's going on in your life. How are you reacting to things? W-what's out of balance and what do you need? And that's the first step because change can't happen without awareness. So That's the first pillar, and I've got all sorts of things that I do to work with people on that. The second one is self-regulation. Once you are aware of the fact that you're dysregulated or out of balance, you can take steps to regulate your nervous system, shift your mindset, regulate your mindset so you can start to slowly reclaim your power over your life. And then once you know what you need and you're, you're calm and you're present in your life, then you can start looking at what's draining your energy, right? What fills your energy and what's draining your energy. And then you can start setting some boundaries to help you preserve your time and energy. And when you do that, then you can show up your best self and your most empowered self and make the best decisions for yourself and the life you wanna lead. And then the next step is stress management. Once you have those other pieces, then you can start managing the stressors in your life, starting with those hidden stressors. Like, we all know what stress is, right? Stress is anything that causes you to have to adapt. But we... When we have that tight grip of control, when we have these unrealistic expectations of ourselves and or we assume others have of us, we can take on more stress or give our power away to other people, which creates more stress in our lives. So once we have the awareness piece, the self-regulation piece, and the understanding of energy and where we need, maybe where we have more porous boundaries and where we might need better boundaries, then we can start really letting go of the things that no longer serve us and start managing the stressors. You can't eliminate stress, but you can certainly shift what you perceive to be a stressor and what you don't. Because stress is really about perception. And so when you can shift what you perceive to be stressful and no longer give it power, then you can start to really find, that you are more present, more purposeful, more peaceful in your life. And then the next step is self-care. Now, not a checkbox, "Oh, I did these things," but like truly connected self-care and self-connection. And with that is self-trust, where you start to really trust yourself to know what it is that you need instead of looking to others to tell you what to do and what you need. And then the final piece is a continual process of self-reflection, where you're continually checking in with yourself. You're continuating-- continually kind of reviewing, "All right, what's going on? What's working? What's not working? What do I need in this moment? What's out of balance?" That's the self-reflective piece that's continual, that becomes a part of your life, and that's how you sustain this empowerment. I love those. And that is-- I mean, that's like a solid plan. I mean, I don't know how, if people realize how solid this plan is, but it is just a, it is a plan for success. It is a blueprint for success. It is, but it's individualized, I will say, Jean, 'cause there's a lot of people out there that are saying, "Just do this. Just follow this." And the women I work with are busy, spread thin, high, you know, high achieving, and so they don't need another thing added to their do-to-do list. They need to take the strategies or the information they already have and create sustainable, simple strategies, simple aha moments that they can then apply and make theirs. So that's, that's kind of what I try to do with them in this process. It is a blueprint, but it's, it's adjusted to the individual Love it. Love it. I was fascinated and very curious when I saw the Soul Connector name- Mm ... on your website. It's a fascinating title. For someone hearing that phrase for the first time, what does it actually mean to be a soul connector? And how do you help someone move from simply surviving life, which I think maybe, I'm gonna say 90 to 95% of people are just surviving life- Well- To- Checking the boxes. Yep ... yes. To moving to reconnecting with who they really are. Yeah. Well, again, it took me a while to really embrace the soul connector piece because being a science-based person, it was a little woo woo, and I was like, "I can't use those titles." But the more I did the work with my kids, the more I helped heal my kids, the more I healed myself because my own health was suffering because I was in survival mode. I realized that there's the ego mind, and the ego mind's role is to keep us safe and to keep us important and relevant. And yet it also can often keep us stuck and can feed stress. Whereas the soul is the... And the ego's loud. It shouts, "You need, you should, you're supposed to." Right? What if? Those are the shouts of the ego versus the soul that are the subtle whispers that s- tells you, it's like your intuition, like this doesn't feel right. I feel. I know. I want. I believe. I trust." Those are the whispers of the soul, and our mind, our body, and our soul are always talking to us and always giving us information. Feelings, emotions are information, and yet the ego takes them as being threats because when we have certain emotions or certain feelings that are uncomfortable, the first thing we do is try to avoid them, get rid of them, or fix them, right? But when you learn that it's actually information from your soul, which is that inner being that the, the human being versus the ego is the human doing, right? And so when I realized that the more I connected with that soul, with my intuition, with those subtle signals, with the subtle whispers, and learned that language of the soul, then I started to really reclaim my life because I let that lead me. And the soul never leads you astray. It's for your greatest good. It's like your highest self is your soul self versus the ego is your performing self. So the soul connector is when I realized part, a big part of the work that I do is helping women understand what those subtle signals and subtle messages are, and pause long enough to hear them. Because when we're kind of so busy running around and we're looking to the next thing, we don't hear the whispers. We don't connect to, okay, what is this telling me? Because our ego gets triggered, we're in fear. We are like, "How do I get out of this? How do I distract myself from this? How do I escape this feeling?" Where the soul is like, "Nope, I'm telling you something. I'm guiding you." And so when I learned this, this language, I realized, wow, this is... And with my intuitive, you know, I connect to messages of, I, of guides and angels. And when I learned that I can actually help women learn this language, I can connect them to these subtle signals and help them learn to trust these signals to guide them, that's where the empowerment came. Because they were more present in their life, more connected to themselves. And so I didn't have to fix them because even though maybe I'm translating the language of the soul in the beginning, I'm teaching them the language so they can understand and get these subtle messages from their mind, their body, and their soul, and know what it is that they need in the moment, and then they don't need me anymore. That's the empowerment piece. Yes. empowerment is... Funny, I was doing a presentation this morning about staffing in nursing homes and you know, really engaging certified nursing assistants, so CNAs, and that was empowerment. I don't know how many times I, I listed that in the presentation. Yeah. I mean, it's huge, right? Right. Empowering people is the way. This is the way. I wanted to briefly touch on artificial intelligence. I bring up AI in all of my podcasts. It's becoming nearly... it's becoming part of nearly every aspect of healthcare and daily life. Yeah. You know, everybody's using ChatGPT. Do you think that AI has the potential to help us become more self-aware and healthier, or do you worry that it pulls us even farther away from our intuition and our connection to ourselves? Uh, it, I use AI and I struggled with using AI in the beginning. I, to be honest, I believe that it has the potential to disconnect us from the int- our intuition and our our ability to think, to be creative. I think it really depends on how we are using it. If we use it in a passive way to make us more productive, I think that's a slippery slope. But if we use it in an active, integrated way where we, like the way I use it is to kind of plug in ideas and fine-tune and refine my thoughts and to streamline things, but the original thoughts are mine. The original ideas are mine, right? And so I, and then I look at it, and then I will continue to refine. That's an active role that I'm playing, where I'm not giving my power away to this AI to do my work, which I think a lot of people are doing to be more productive. Right? Or to be to maybe be more streamlined. And so I think that it's something that we really need to maintain our connection with what we're doing. We need to maintain ourselves as the authority and the experts using AI as a tool for remi- refinement, not as the replacement for ideas. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Yes Yeah. In order to maintain that intuition and that, connection. 'Cause there have been times I've plugged something in AI. Um, you know, I use it sometimes too for my my social media posts. I use it for programming to kinda streamline, to make sure I'm not being redundant, to kind of tighten up phrasing. But the ideas are all mine, and there are times where I'll plug something in and I'll read it back and I'm, me, my voice, my soul, the... what makes me, me, and what makes my messaging mine gets lost. And that's really important for me, is my voice and my, my integrity through it. Yeah. I don't think people realize that there is something about AI and there's something about that written communication that, it's like something you can't put into words, like a quality, you know, that- Mm-hmm you know when it's human that, that you can tell- ... it's a human. But when there's AI it's like something's not quite right. Well, think about when we're... how many times have you or your listeners, tried to call customer service about something? You're having a problem with something. And it's a bot, and they're like, "Just tell me this," but they're n- they're missing kind of the subtle, 'cause it's not... They're... The trigger are catchphrases, but if you're not saying it exactly the way that they hear it to understand what you're asking, it's missed. Yeah. And it becomes this long process. It becomes frustrating. It's like... And I'm-- I mean, how many times have you yelled, "Representative!" "Representative!" Right? And, I mean, I even think about this with scheduling. I mean, there's so many things that I think AI is taking over, but it... you still need a human interface there. You still need somebody to fine-tune and, and because not everything is so cut and dry, right? Yeah. So I, I think that, yeah, I think that nothing replaces humanity and that human connection. And I think when we start trying to replace it, it, to me, it's a little scary to see a world like that. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I agree. Yeah. The, the last question is one that I ask a- almost all of my podcast guests, and I am very interested to hear your answer to this question. If you were suddenly put in charge of healthcare in the United States tomorrow, what is the very first change that you would make to help create a healthier nation? I would really-- okay, there's a couple of changes that I would make, a lot of changes I would make. But I would say putting emphasis back on preventive health and lifestyle and personal accountability, instead of the pill for an ill, really focusing on the preventative piece, the education piece on the front end of healthcare, and really integrating that education across communities educational, schools from, grade school to med school, nursing school. But really weaving that in and making it become a, a lifestyle and become sort of this is what we do and this is, this is just how we do it. Instead of kind of looking to families to create that for their kids, we need... They need more support, and I think they need... So it needs to be with families, I believe families first, but I also think that we need to incorporate community support, incorporate education and educational support, and really from a preventative model so we can lower the chronic health disease. And part of that is working with the food industry to clean up our food and to, decrease the addictions that we're creating i-in our food industry. And I think, working with getting more complementary alternative modalities out there and people trained in it and really integrating healthcare with All the different practices with prevention, lifestyle management, nutrition stress management, whether you like Reiki or acupuncture or something to understand energy in the body because there's more and more research about energy. Bruce Lipton is a big, you know, researcher of biology belief and mindset and everything. So, I mean, that's more than one thing that I would do. But I would-- I think focusing on education and prevention would be one of the first shifts, 'cause I think we've gotten away from that, and we're really more in, disease management, which I think is creating more disease and more chronic disease, which is increasing healthcare costs, which is, flooding the system and overwhelming the system and which is further disconnecting people from their own, , choices and how the roles that their choices play on healthcare. So yeah. And that, you know, then that gets into the whole insurance models and, uh, incentives for, you know, wellness and wellbeing. There's a lot of different things that I think we can do, and I think it's interesting is when I talk to my students about, you know, healthcare, a lot of them believe in universal healthcare. And I was just talking to a couple of clients of mine. I have a lot of clients, for some reason, in Canada and, you know, that's a universal healthcare system, but it's a system flooded, and people don't have access to that system. They wait for a long time to be seen. And so, you know, there's-- it's not just about money. It's about I think education, access, prevention because if you put more emphasis on prevention, then you have less disease, I believe. It makes total sense. Yeah. Yeah, right? I mean, definitely. And, and I hope, I really hope you get your wish because- ... yeah, prevention isn't- Let me get my magic wand. Yeah. Prevention isn't incentivized, so, you know, let's hope someday that it is. Well, exactly. I was talking to... I t- I use this example for my students. Mm-hmm. My father is 85 years old, not one chronic disease. The man walks four miles a day. He still is completely independent, takes care of my mom, who's got some chronic diseases. But he is the pillar of health. And you look at, he cannot get a lot of the, testing or, You know, he wants to know kind of what are his markers, and he wants to make sure everything's normal and all that, and, and they won't do some of the testing on him. But when I look at him and then I look at somebody that I know that's in their 40s, has multiple chronic diseases. They smoke, they drink a lot of alcohol, they have a very sedentary job. They eat a lot of junk food, not a lot of fruits and vegetables. And I think I ask my students which one of those people, the 40-year-old with multiple chronic diseases or the 85-year-old with no chronic diseases, which one is utilizing the most amount of healthcare resources? It's the 40-year-old. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Scary things. Yeah. If, if people want to find out more about you and your innovative work, how can they do that? They can go to my website, jenniferwren, W-R-E-N, tolo.com. Or they can follow me on Instagram at Jen, J-E-N, Wren, W-R-E-N, Tolo, T-O-L-O. Or they can follow me on Instagram. Um, but those are probably the best places to find me, follow me. I have a bunch of different programs. I'm currently doing a free master class, which is called Permission to Pause, which is just about you know, many of us don't give ourselves permission to pause because we're so focused on productivity and doing the next thing and keeping up. But there's a lot of power in the pause, so this is one of my favorite things to talk about and to help people, just with that, those first steps of my success system, which is self-awareness and self-regulation. Yeah. Amazing. Jen Tolo, I loved this conversation. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me, Jean. ​

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