Episode Summary
What if the chaos and disruption happening right now aren’t roadblocks, but the greatest opportunity ever to build long-term wealth?
When the world feels uncertain, it’s easy to freeze, play it safe, or wait for things to calm down. But the entrepreneurs who are thriving now and will thrive in the years ahead are the ones reading the patterns of change and using them to their advantage. This episode reveals how to recognize those undercurrents before everyone else and turn disruption into strategic opportunity.
In this video, you will:
Discover how history shows us that the most profitable entrepreneurs in history didn’t just survive disruption, they built empires through it.
Understand how to read the undercurrents of human behavior during economic uncertainty—so your offers hit right where your audience is most ready to buy.
Hear how aligning with your true edge and emotional intelligence doesn’t just safeguard your business from automation—although that’s important!—but it actually makes your business indispensable in the AI era.
Press play now to uncover the five most game-changing concepts that will expand your thinking, simplify your path, and help you thrive on your own uncommon terms.
The Uncommon Way helps ambitious women entrepreneurs and leaders rewrite the rules of success with confidence and clarity. Hosted by top business coach Jenna Harrison, this podcast blends high-level strategy with deep mindset work so you can achieve more by doing less—without guilt, burnout, or compromise.
Each episode dives into topics like leadership for women, business growth strategy, time freedom, and mindset mastery, giving you practical tools and proven insights to simplify your path to success. You’ll learn how to create magnetic messaging, design offers that sell, and step fully into your authority as a visionary leader.
If you’re ready to scale your business sustainably, elevate your thinking, and finally experience spaciousness and flow while creating extraordinary results, you’re in the right place. The Uncommon Way is your roadmap to building a business and life that feel as good as they look—because training your mind to think uncommonly unlocks a whole new level of impact and possibility.
Work with Jenna
The 7-Week Reset — If you’re ready to trade the mindset block that’s been weighing on you for full-body lightness and excitement, this is for you.
The Clarity Accelerator Mastermind — If you want to be surrounded by other visionary entrepreneurs while rapidly aligning your business to the conditions and strategies that let you thrive and excel naturally, this intimate mastermind will stretch you into your next level. Schedule your call today here or visit this page to find out more.
Private Coaching — If you’re craving the highest level of support, strategy, and partnership to create all the freedom, impact, and success you’re designed for, this is the space for it. Schedule you call today at the link
Resources Mentioned
McKinsey report: “The Economic Potential of Generative AI: The Next Productivity Frontier” (June 2023).
Episodes Mentioned
167. Disruption Is the New Normal—Do This to Lead and Live Well During Chaos and Difficult Times
169. Greatest Hits: 5 Game-Changing Ideas Listeners Can’t Stop Talking About
Social Media
Find Jenna on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theuncommonway/
Full Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] In this episode, you'll discover how to strategically use the current disruption we're experiencing to make lots of money in 2026. Welcome to The Uncommon Way where high achieving women, entrepreneurs and leaders ditch the rule, book and design success on their own terms. I'm your host, Jenna Harrison, a top ranked business coach sharing business growth strategies of mindset, mastery, and power boost to help you attract ideal clients, leverage your unique genius and scale with freedom.
Let's dive in. Welcome. Welcome back to the Uncommon Way. A few episodes ago, I released one called Disruption is the New Normal. I've talked to so many women over the summer who were waiting for things to calm down and they just needed to get past this, and then they could, so there was so much craziness that they couldn't stop focusing on that.
And my point in that episode was things are not going to get any calmer. They're actually going to ha, we're going to see more and more change. Now that is sobering, but we are the kinds of women who are up to [00:01:00] the challenge, right? In fact, challenge and newness in certain angles can be really exciting. So today I thought we'd talk about how to use this disruption strategically to make money now, because people still are buying businesses, still are thriving.
We can have a little piece of that. Just yesterday, one of my clients came on our call smiling because she just had the highest month ever. And I have other clients who are also increasing their client load. People still need solutions. People are still happy to exchange money for those solutions, and you are a person who creates solutions.
So in this episode, you will discover how history shows us that the most profitable entrepreneurs in history didn't just survive disruption. They built empires through it. And you'll understand how to read the undercurrents of human behavior during economic uncertainty. So your [00:02:00] offers hit right where your audience is most ready to buy, and you'll hear how aligning with your true edge and emotional intelligence.
It doesn't just safeguard your business from automation, although obviously that's really important, but it actually makes your business indispensable in the AI era. But first, a quick announcement. This is the last week to take advantage of the seven week reset, which is an offer where we release your most significant mindset block in order to clear the way for the next level that's calling you.
The goal is to really free you up to operate in the way you were born to with your right conditions. Now there will be something else taking the place of the seven week reset. I'll have more details for you about that soon, but it will not be this kind of intimate container with me where you and I are working possibly every day together, shooting notes, [00:03:00] back and forth, leaving each other voice messages.
Really having that one of a kind experience. So if you've been interested in it but just thought that you didn't have time or you were waiting for the right moment, this is the moment. This is your week. We'll put a link in the show notes for you. Alright, let's get down to it, shall we? The first key for making money in 2026 is don't freak out.
Seriously, there's been enough of that going around. Lots of people running around like a chicken with their heads cut off. Thinking about throwing in the towel, thinking about giving it all up. Now, look, I think it's really healthy for us to have those thoughts sometimes in order to reaffirm back into what we truly want, because sometimes we do want something different.
But down deep, down deep, are we really gonna stop being entrepreneurs? Come on. I have a feeling it's in your blood, in your DNA, like it's in mine. So it's [00:04:00] going to be completely counterproductive for you to buy into all of the fear and hype, even if it's your own fear and hype, because Lord knows I've done that to myself too.
But now more than ever, you need a grounded and responsive nervous system. Stick with me here. You might have heard me say it 20 times. I'm gonna say it once more because we all need to hear it, especially in. You know, scary activating times. We know how stress and activation leads to the most important parts of our brain shutting down.
And when I say most important, I don't necessarily mean the most important for survival. I mean the most important for entrepreneurship. If your nervous system gets activated and you're running from a tiger, you really don't need the analytical center to sit down and ponder all the best courses of action.
You just need to move. You need to feel very suspicious, very threatened by that threat, [00:05:00] and you really don't need to be very creative about how you get outta the situation. You just need to get outta the situation. Now, as I alluded to before, one of the biggest triggers for our nervous system is pre traumatic stress.
Which is the stress that you cause yourself. Just worrying about what might be traumatic in the future. And when I laugh, I'm laughing at myself too. I do a lot less of it nowadays than I used to, but like for instance, just this week I'm recording videos for some ads we're gonna be putting out and I looked at the video and then I, you know, you do a double take and you look closer and like one of my teeth was brown.
It was totally brown and it just reminded me how I'd kind of noticed that in the mirror, but I hadn't seen it. So start and right away I thought, oh my gosh. The tooth is dead. It's going to require root canal, and since it's right in front, I'm gonna have to get veneers and it's gonna be this whole process, and I won't be [00:06:00] able to be on camera for a while, so I won't be able to do any like zoom calls or interactions.
Everything will look so terrible, and I called the dentist and they fit me in. They were so kind. They fit me in the very next day. He took a little polish, polished it right off, and he's like, yeah, it was just a stain. I'm like, how could there be a stain on just one tooth? And we went into a whole conversation about what goes into staining teeth, which we don't need to talk about here, but we do need to talk about is that we all do this to ourselves at certain times.
We all create pre traumatic stress about certain things. But the truth is, like for me, I had all of that worry unnecessarily, and it took time out of my day to go back and see him for something that I really didn't need to do. And we know that This is just the tiniest little sliver, little humorous example of what can really happen when we start thinking this way.
This is what causes dreams to [00:07:00] die. This is what causes people to say, you know what? I just can't. I mean, have you ever broken up with someone or had someone break up with you because they're future thinking about what can go wrong? It's ridiculous, and yet these are the brains that we walk around with every day, but it's okay.
The point is just to recognize it, gain awareness, give ourselves a good shake, and get back to our tools where we reregulate and we choose on purpose to see the side of us that is not fragile. That is capable. That's really up for challenges. Challenges which may or may not occur. But given the state of the world, there's a high likelihood that there will be more and more challenges for us.
But even though we've got some serious problems, there is one version of you who is a victim to the things that are beyond your control. Maybe it's in your industry, you think nobody's spending [00:08:00] money or that things are so unsafe right now, but there's another version of you who's like, bring it. I've got my back.
I can always find a way. I can always figure things out. In the episode I was referring to, the disruption is the new normal. I point out how Nelson Mandela spent years and years, decades in prison. Which many of us, I would think of as one of the worst things that we could endure as a human, but he chose to use that time as his mental training ground.
And I love that concept so much. I've experienced it in my own life where difficult times have really helped me grow and expand into who I am. And I've seen that pattern enough that now even when I'm in the difficult time, I can really sit in the knowledge of how I'm growing. So if we can take that perspective that every day for us, every new thing that comes up, that is our mental training ground.
You are not just helping yourself today, [00:09:00] but those are the exact traits you are going to need for the future. Becoming as a business leader, as a leader of any type, becoming comfortable with discomfort and expecting the unexpected. When my husband was in the military, they would literally play war games.
That was how they would prepare and for themselves to kind of think outside of the box, and there would be one team that was reacting to circumstances, and then there would be another team that was creating the circumstances that were purposely disruptive. They were purposely meant to throw the other team off their game, and my husband would be on that team frequently.
That was coming up with scenarios, right. Maybe all of a sudden there's like a cyber attack on satellites and GPS goes down. Okay, so how do the troops operate in that environment? Right? And they're scrambling. They're trying to figure it out. But this is a kind of thinking that we can take on for ourselves, and it allows us to be more comfortable with discomfort and with the unexpected.[00:10:00]
I think that's the way we need to be educating our children nowadays. Not for predictability, not for the way things have been done, but to think quickly on their feet and to find solutions quickly. We're looking to move Dylan to a new school for this very reason. And the good news, the thing that we can absolutely take solace in is that history shows us there is always high, high economic opportunity in times of upheaval.
Disruption doesn't destroy opportunity. It reveals it. Right? The entrepreneurs who thrive are the ones who learn to read the chaos. Like they learn to lean into the disruption and look around, right. And use it. And you know, I think when soldiers are on the battlefield, they don't have the luxury of being like, well, we're stuck.
We can't do anything. Now, the literal survival, and some of us, maybe our lives are just a little too comfortable. Where we stop recognizing our own [00:11:00] resourcefulness and now is a perfect opportunity to get back to that beautiful trait within you. I mean, join me in it, please, because I think we all need to be together doing it, finding these new ways of thinking and getting excited about things.
That would've absolutely, probably been devastating for our parents. I dunno, maybe that's a long shot, but. As I mentioned in the other episode as well, we were brought up to believe that things were going to become more and more stable, calmer and calmer, and now we're having to very quickly recalibrate.
So this is really the second key to making money in 2026. It is observing what's going on around you, right? You first need to be in a place where you actually have those powers of observation. You need to be in this calmer, watchful state. You also need to observe the deeper needs of people around you and look for the opportunity within that.
You know, when Andrew Carnegie was a a telegraph operator in the [00:12:00] 1850s, the United States was being totally reshaped. There were financial panics going on. The Civil War was becoming more and more imminent. Railroads were still experimental. There were people had to travel in horse-drawn carriages. Then industrialization came in and it just started creating chaos and most people were trying to hold on to what they knew right, to get things to the way they used to be.
But Carnegie really leaned into the change and he looked around and he noticed that steel. Was really the bottleneck for progress, right? This is what everything depended on now for railroads and everything that was being built in the industrial age, but it was really costly and it was produced really inefficiently at the time, but there was a new process on the way that showed that it might [00:13:00] become affordable.
It was something developed in England. Most American manufacturers were really skeptical of it, and they were really too cautious to like retool their factories in any way. But Carnegie could see it was a huge opportunity. He could see the real need was around growth and steel, and that if he could find a different, better way of providing that solution to people, he was guaranteed to make money.
So he invested every dollar he had into this technology, and because of it, he was years ahead of his competitors. When they finally caught on Carnegie finally sold his empire that he'd built to JP Morgan for an amount that would be about $17 billion nowadays. And obviously it made him one of the richest men in history.
And the lesson here is that he [00:14:00] didn't find that success despite the volatility. He didn't find a way to keep his steel company going even when things were crazy. He found the opportunity through the volatility. The volatility brought him the opportunity. Look, people are going to make lots of money in the coming years, lots and lots of money.
It's okay for you to have a little peace. This is why everything we've been talking about here, this is why I love reinvention work. It teaches your brain how to get in the habit of thinking thoughts. It hasn't yet thought. It is such a critical skill for the future. We use it first for ourselves to think of ourselves and to grow in ways and to be something that we haven't been before, but that skill.
Ripples out into everything we do and everything we perceive and experience. So think about what [00:15:00] is it you're seeing when you look around? Maybe there is contraction in the industry, and you're noticing that what people really desire is safety, right? So then you can create an offer around safety that might take off like a house on fire.
Ask yourself, what do people truly want? What do my people truly want? And really getting close and ask them, talk to them. Ask people who could be ideal clients and people who just became clients because they're very close to it, right? What is their dominant buying motive? What is that thing pulling them forward?
Maybe your people have this feeling of like feeling so disconnected, like watching the events going on, and they just can't even believe that they're part of this world. They're feeling so isolated. What they really want is connection. Now what I'm saying here is not just for coaches, for instance, who [00:16:00] are creating, you know, coaching package offers.
Maybe you're a supermarket owner. So then you could design events at your store that provide that sense of connection. And don't let yourself at this time get too into your head about, should I, shouldn't I will. They won't. They just test your offer very, very quickly and easily. Low budget, test your offer, get proof of concept for that offer through actual sales.
That is what I did with the seven week reset. I felt the intuitive hit first, but it probably came from keenly observing the industry as, as I always am. I'm so curious about it, and then talking to real people, right? Really helping that kind of give form to my ideas and shape my ideas, and it worked well.
I sold a limited number of them, and I'm using that experience now to turn it into something else. I feel great about it. I feel like there's no way this can't make money. It is such an [00:17:00] amazing offer, and it speaks exactly to what women want and need right now, and it delivers. There's no better feeling than that.
When you really have your finger on the pulse, when you know who your people are, what they want, what they don't want, what makes them tick. It's like my client, Carly said, clarity gives you that confidence. You're no longer just putting things out there and hoping it lands. Really that sense of like conviction and feeling that leads us perfectly into point number three to make money in 2026, you are going to need to lean into emotion with your marketing.
There is so much noise and out there every day. There's twice as much noise, there's twice as much content. It's just being generated constantly. What really drives consumer attention and buying decisions is emotion. We've got to get through all that noise. Neuroscience, marketing studies, they've shown us [00:18:00] that emotions guide decision making long before logic arrives in many, many circumstances, like for example, people who are exposed to emotionally charged product designs or brand experiences.
They frequently commit to choices before their rational brain fully kicks in the brain scans reveal their emotional centers lighting up really early in those decisions. It's as if the logic just tags along to justify the decision they've made. And obviously, I hope, you know, when I'm talking about emotion, I'm not talking about fear and false scarcity, obviously.
I'm talking about connecting as a human right, telling stories, sharing how things felt and feel. Humans relate to humans. Humans need connection, and that is just becoming more and more true. As we interact with computers more and more often, we see the contrast with a real human. So you have a competitive advantage in that you [00:19:00] live and you breathe.
And you know what it is to feel emotion. So use that. Use that advantage in a world that's becoming increasingly automated, that humanity that you have, that is your strategy in a big way. This is something that I have been focusing on a lot more lately. I don't know if you've noticed, but you know me. I love thinking abstractly.
I love the world of ideas and concepts. That's my comfort zone. That's where my brain goes for its happy place. In fact, just last week I did an episode on like the top five concepts that we've created over the years of this podcast. And that place, it's easier for me because with storytelling, I need to remind myself, wait, wait, wait.
They weren't actually there, Jenna. Right? So you need to tell them how it felt. I just think we're all in this together. We're all experiencing the same thing. But no, what were my steps getting there? What was my thinking? And that's just not the way my brain is wired. [00:20:00] I shouldn't say wired. It's not the way I've trained it, right?
My brain by then usually has already moved on to 0.3, four, and five when my mouth or my fingers are typing out 0.1, so I'm reminding myself to pause, right? To get into my body at that time, or to my client's experience or whatever I'm sharing, and just paint that picture. Something that has really helped me is thinking about how this is a gift that we can give people.
How often have you as a woman gonna have a conversation with someone or needed to ask someone a question and you kind of preface it with, oh, I'm sure you're so busy, but Right. And you really don't wanna take so much of their time. 'cause I'm sure you're busy. I'm just stopping by. Or just a quick question.
No, no, no. And then for me, I don't know about you, but I actually bring that into my content as well, where I'm, as you know, a gift to my audience, trying to make it as concise and clear as possible. That has been a wonderful skill for me to build. And [00:21:00] also I noticed that when people, you know, the way that people relax is they'll watch tv.
They'll watch a movie, like they love to be transported through stories. And so I've started reframing my thoughts about this to be, to say that no, these, you know, when I do tell stories, when I do take more time, it's allowing you to like have a pleasurable experience. And I know on the receiving end, I love hearing stories.
I love being caught up in, in the emotion. I love emotional marketing and I love thinking of that as a gift that we give people. It rests, it actually rests their brain, right? This is what we do. We go to social media to scroll. And to rest our brain from all the stressors and whatever it is that we're working on.
We rest our brain through emotion, through storytelling, through cute cat videos, through feelings, feeling good, feeling [00:22:00] charged, feeling, whatever it is. It's nice to give our people and experience of emotion, of true emotion, true connection, and like I said, it's something we've got that no computer has.
Alright, let's talk about the fourth and final point. You'll need to reground into your edge and the value you bring, there is no room to just muddle through it anymore. There are too many offers. There's too many possibilities. In just a few years, McKinsey predicts that half of today's work activities will be automated.
Half of them, I'll link to the study, but the only thing that's gonna make you stand out. Is that thing that makes you stand out? You right? It's what you were put here on earth to do, delivered in your way with your unique perspective. Never has this work been more critical. I remember when I started coaching, before I really started selling, but I was really in the world of it [00:23:00] already.
People could just put out anything and people would buy it. Nowadays it consumers have become much more sophisticated. You don't get people's. Purchasing decisions just because you're a coach or just because you're a supermarket or just because you're an analyst or just because you're an interior designer, we need your edge.
I recommend you approach that challenge with exhilaration. I mean, isn't it exhilarating to know that with these challenges, we are being guided and gifted an opportunity by the universe to rediscover the gifts that we have already been given and that there's a big payoff for us on the other side of that, you know, in the old days, you could get by with hiding, with being undiscovered, right?
With being humble. That's what we used to call it when we shunned our own gifts and downplayed them and said, oh, that thing I was given, it's not that big a deal. I could have spent my entire [00:24:00] life sitting in an office on Union Square with a fluorescent lights sucking my soul and my two weeks of vacation a year, and the world around me would've said I was doing the right thing, that I had found success.
But those office workers, they can't expect those jobs to be around for much longer. Nowadays, our path to impact and abundance lies in aligning with our gifts and actually being able to call them out, identify them, and own them instead of all that forcing and that shape-shifting that we've been brought up to do as women.
Now, this can be very uncomfortable for us because of how we're conditioned. To really, really own it. It's much scarier than just coloring in the lines, but it's also far more fulfilling and potentially far, far, far more lucrative. The question is, are you up for it? Alright, my friend. In this episode, you discovered how to strategically use the current disruption we're [00:25:00] experiencing to make money in 2026.
You discovered how history shows us that the most profitable entrepreneurs didn't just survive disruption. They built their empires because of it. You understand now how to read the undercurrents of human behavior so that your offers hit where your audience wants to buy. And you hear how aligning with your true edge and your emotional intelligence, it's not just a form of safeguarding.
It's what makes your business indispensable. It's what makes it stand out In this new era, we talked about how important it is to not freak out and use this time as your mental training ground. We talked about how to observe those deeper needs of people around you and how to create proof of concept so that you can really lean into your offers.
Just like Carnegie really leaned into his steel production. We talked about leaning into emotion. Connection and seeing your humanity as [00:26:00] a competitive advantage. And we talked about the importance of regrounding into your edge, what you do so, so well that no one else can do in quite the same way you do.
If you think a friend of yours needs to hear this, please share it with her today. And remember, training your mind to think in uncommon ways unlocks whole new levels of impact and possibility. Let's talk again on Tuesday.