Changing jobs is easy. Changing the patterns you carry into the next job is harder. Jamie Wood learned that after climbing the corporate-finance ladder, burning out and discovering that a new environment did not automatically produce a new brain.

Jamie is the founder of AUTONOMIC, where she has been turning neuroscience into practical tools for attention, energy, stress, mood and sleep. In part one of our conversation, we get into the unlikely path from finance to brain science — and the client result that convinced her the method could become a self-directed product instead of another coaching dependency.

Transcript

Jamie: Before the rodeo I was climbing the corporate ladder. Burnt out terribly, but I grew up in a very corporate-driven finance family. Dinner table talk was that. It was a natural progression.

Pablos: Do you feel like you were pushed into it, or was it just the only thing you were exposed to. It seemed like the thing to do?

Jamie: I think it was a bit of both. I started working at my parents’ office when I was 14 or 15. You start with putting away the files and taking out the garbage.

Pablos: Do you think that exposure made you fluent and competent and comfortable with finance?

Jamie: No. It taught me how to work hard. My parents weren’t my parents in the office. That was very clear. At first it was a little hard to swallow: “Oh, I want the special treatment.”

Pablos: This is giving me some good ideas. Parenting.

Jamie: But it actually taught me a lot: you work hard to then be rewarded. Intrinsic motivation’s very important, but I learned about the extrinsic piece as well.

Pablos: You think your parents had the same relationship with corporate finance-related jobs that you did? Did they have an interest in it, or did they not ever think about whether it was interesting, it was their job?

Jamie: They lived, breathed, ate it. Even my brothers to this day are both involved.

Pablos: Do you think they actually like it? Their horizons are very limited and they don’t look elsewhere for things or they don’t look for the satisfaction in work that you do?

Jamie: No, my mom for sure loves it to this day. My stepfather who has passed, I think he really enjoyed making the money. Loved the industry until the industry started to have too many rules. Then he retired at 50. He didn’t like it and love it the same way my mom did. Which is interesting ’cause I was always viewed as the black sheep of the family. I wasn’t pushed into it. It was just kind of there.

Pablos: Easy and accessible and lucrative, and you had guides for getting into it and there’s a kind of developmental process for industries? And I remember my dad, he was in the oil industry. I grew up in Alaska, which is 100% oil. Everything in Alaska is oil, one way or another. I remember him being so proud. He loved doing it and the people he worked with, and he had a lot of respect for even the CEO and the executives of the company. These were guys who helped build the company and build the industry.

I don’t know, twenty years into his career, they started hiring these professional managers, people who’d never worked in the industry but had fancy degrees, and these people fucked everything up. And he had no respect for them. They didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t make good decisions. They didn’t learn about why things were the way they were. They didn’t have a respect or trust for the people who’d spent their careers and their jobs and knew what they were doing. It wasn’t this kind of union labor fight or whatever that you see on TV. It wasn’t that.

It was just that these people were being put in position from their credential and they had MBAs from Yale and shit, but they didn’t have a love for the industry. They didn’t have a relationship to it or the people in it. His whole perspective on his work, on his career, and everything changed at that point, and it never returned. What I’ve seen in the tech industry is kind of a progression.

In most industries, you might have had a period of decades like that. But the tech industry got so lucrative so fast that it attracted all these opportunists and this middle manager class, and they felt, I think, insecure in a way and wanted to act like a big grown-up company and get the respect that, I don’t know, Ford and General Electric had or something like that. They would hire these kinds of people. And so the big tech companies have all these layers

Of middle management and all kinds of bullshit so early in the industry. Unfortunately, I think it really hurt the tech. You did corporate finance and then started plotting your escape, or what happened?

Jamie: I certainly wanted to strive towards some sort of sense of security and some sort of career. Pretty normal. But I never really knew what that was. I never felt that deep connection to it. If I felt the way about finance that I feel the way I do now about applied neuroscience and Autonomic, the company that we’re building, I would have done really well. ‘Cause I would’ve been in the industry since I was 15. I would’ve been like this incredibly tuned-in learner and applying it all and away you go.

But it never landed for me that way, so I ended up moving down to Central America, to Costa Rica, and living there for near six years. Working for one of the largest developers in the country that actually built the only international marina at the time between Cabo and Panama. High net worth clients came down. I helped run their sales department as well as finance, really interesting experience to translate corporate into more of an adventure. But that’s where I actually burnt out. Different employee laws in Central America. They’re still doing amazing. You tried what you thought was a rational escape plan from finance, ended up halfway out.

It makes so much sense to go for the most successful industry you can get into, most lucrative job you can get into, the thing where you have connections, the thing that looks like the safest route.

Pablos: But man, I see so many people wasting away.

Jamie: Motivation was that safety. It wasn’t that they cared, they weren’t curious. You can’t do something well if you’re not interested in it.

Pablos: Back to neuroscience, the thing we know about brains now is that they’re only really useful at doing things they’re interested in. You can sort of beat them into doing other stuff occasionally, but it doesn’t last long. I think the people who are most successful at life are ones who find a way to only be doing things they’re interested in. You can trick yourself into being interested in things. That’s a really important life skill? And sometimes money is a way to do that.

Jamie: I’m really interested in this thing ’cause there’s a paycheck at the end of it. That can work. But I think one of the important life skills to learn is: how do you make sure that you’re either doing things you’re interested in or you’re getting interested in things? You have to be able to do some of both to really thrive. The word you used was curiosity. I think that is such a powerful driver towards anything.

Because you approach it with a desire to learn versus an expectation of an outcome or a position of, “I know.” And that ends up opening up such an interesting journey. Or stumbling path, which it always is anyway. Did you have to phone home and be like, “Mom, can I come back home?

Pablos: Costa Rica kicked my ass.” “They’re gonna tie me to a brick and drop me in the marina.”

Jamie: No. I’m very close with my family. I was very fortunate to have them eventually be spending more time in Costa Rica as well. Ended up getting a place, close by, and so I didn’t see them as much, but I certainly would see them a couple times a year. But I actually burnt out terribly down there. Our office was open seven days a week. We had two official days off on the books, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, and other than that, every day. There’s three people running this entire office.

One of them is living with the head developer. There’s two people. You’re working and we’re doing huge transactions. We have people flying down in their private jets to their 15, $20 million yachts. And so we were doing big business with a very small and mighty team. But I didn’t have any tools or awareness of what that meant to actually be held at that level for years. I burnt out really bad. I had a bout of self-harm, which I’d never experienced before.

That experience was the catalyst that completely redirected my entire career and focus because it was this moment of, “Whoa, I’m really messed up.” And then the curiosity came in. Were you the one to recognize it, or did other people have to? No, I hid it. It was a very short bout. But I hid it. It was actually that moment of, “Whoa, this is totally left field.” “What’s going on with my brain?” That was the curiosity piece. Then it came into, “Hey, wait, like, why do I wake up and not feel good every day?” “Why am I not driven? This is new.” Ultimately you can boil it down to just experiencing cognitive limitation and the symptoms of what that might mean based on being in a chronic stress response. We can add all these labels, and we can pull it all apart, but for me it was, “Wow, I’m really messed up.” This is new. We better look at this. This isn’t a good path.

I was 27 going on 28 at the time, and that literally was the catalyst into, hey, I wanna learn about my brain. I’ve never learned about my brain before. I’ve learned about finance, I’ve gone to college. But at no point in time have I had any training on my brain.

Pablos: Then what happened? You just stole a yacht?

Jamie: No, of course. I went back to work.

For another three to five months at least, ’cause you’re living in paradise.

But eventually I resigned. I still remember that day. I was riding my bike home, a whole new human, and moved back to Vancouver. Where you grew up, was Vancouver? No, I grew up in Kelowna in the Okanagan Valley.

Pablos: Can you just break it down?

Jamie: Nobody knows where that is. It’s a great town. I’m starting to understand that, especially being in New York. They’re like, “Oh, cool. Where?”

Pablos: I’m the only Alaskan anybody in New York has ever met.

Jamie: The only Alaskan anybody in New York has ever met. I’ve never met somebody that’s grown up in Alaska either. Alaska’s closer to me, technically. No, there aren’t very many of them. About four hours east inland from Vancouver. Beautiful area. I moved to Vancouver and worked on myself a little bit. I went and took a yoga teacher training in Costa Rica. Of course that’s gonna fix things.

For all of us people that are burnt out, go pay thousands of dollars.

Pottery classes, too, or is it just. No, just yoga. Oh, you’re all mind. I did that, and then moved back to Vancouver and got right back into the finance industry.

Pablos: You didn’t realize the problem was your relationship to finance. You thought Costa Rica was the problem?

Jamie: No weekends? I thought, “I can work on the other end. So why don’t I work for a mutual fund company?” Yoga and mutual funds. It’s like peanut butter and jelly.

Pablos: I think people doing yoga probably should smoke cigarettes at the same time, and you need balance.

Jamie: Of course. It’s called a holistic cigarette if you have a smoke after yoga class. I wasn’t aware it was a ritual. As long you put the name holistic on it, it’s fine. I worked for this mutual fund company, and it was actually pretty great. They allowed me to work from home. And I thought, “This is more balance.” I started doing that, but as the demand began to increase, the immediate triggers and stress response system was right there.

And I thought, “This is weird,” ’cause seven months ago I left what I considered a challenging toxic environment; literally moved five countries away. But that was the thing that really fascinated me. I changed the environment, changed the job, changed everything. I’m now taking care of myself a little bit more, and those patterns were still right there.

Pablos: Unfortunately, the one ingredient that has the problem is still in the mix.

Jamie: Even though my boss and everybody was great, it was ultimately burnout. There’s a great image online. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it kinda gives you the idea of what burnout’s like, and it’s a match. The match burns down slowly over time. A lot of people think burnout just happens. But ultimately what it is is a restructuring and reshaping of the brain and a reconditioning of the nervous system. That doesn’t just happen. We can have acute responses to things. But when somebody’s really going through a chronic stress experience that takes time. The thing that we don’t realize is it takes time to come back from that, too. There must be some positive version of that change process. It was becoming very apparent to me: I’m still not that great. That’s unfortunate, ’cause I thought I lined all the ducks up for this not to be this way, but this is still this way.

That’s what threw me into self-directed study. I read tons of papers, primarily on how the brain operates under constant demand and fatigue. Because that to me represented the corporate finance environment. If you wanna distill it down, it’s a constant demand and fatiguing environment. But your mom wouldn’t describe it that way. Maybe constant demand, but not fatigue, ’cause she likes it. She’s interested in it. She’s into it.

And so I would agree with you. It doesn’t cause her fatigue probably, or certainly not. She wouldn’t characterize her job as chronic stress.

Pablos: Maybe when she was building her book of business?

Jamie: I think that you would get that response.

Pablos: You would assume that because our view is: it’s a lot of hard work.

Jamie: If you like it, and you’re optimistic about it, and you can see that you’re making progress, you could be stressed out: “Am I gonna close this client?” That’s stress, but you wouldn’t call that chronic stress, right? What you’re talking about is intrinsic motivation, because you are highly emotionally attached to an outcome. My mom loves what she’s doing. She used to have her clients come over to our home for Thanksgiving, Christmas. They were invested in the entire experience of their clients, their clients’ families, their clients’ dreams. Real intrinsic motivation. When we have intrinsic motivation and you’re highly emotionally attached to a goal or an outcome, the brain downgrades the severity of what it takes to reach that goal. I always like to use the example of you and I standing at the base of the mountain. You wanna get to the top because it’s something you wanted to do. You wanna spread some ashes.

You wanna put a flag. It’s something important.

I’m there ’cause I’m your friend. You look at the mountain: “Let’s go. This is so great.” I look at it: “This is Everest, and holy crap.”

Pablos: I get it. That’s a great analogy.

My early startups were entirely people who I coerced into doing it with me, who had no actual interest in computers. They were my friends.

Jamie: I look back: “What were those people doing with me?” They were the wrong people. But I didn’t have anyone around who was as into it as I was. Fatigue became apparent and obvious. This doesn’t just apply to me. This can be applied across all nervous systems.

We have differentiators in how the brain functions, and that’s for other specialists. But generally we all share the same design when it comes to how the brain operates under constant demand and fatigue. That became interesting to me: “Why aren’t we learning this?” This could be applied to everyone. I ended up getting involved in research, then meeting some phenomenal neuroscientists, and was gonna go back to school, then got encouraged not to go back to school and start a business.

At first I was like, “I’m interested in learning this stuff.” Right now people are talking more about brain health and stress. We’re inundated with solutions, pills we can pop, and nootropics. Yay, right? But at the time when I was getting into it, it was still taboo to talk about work stressing you out because it was a sign of weakness or ineffectiveness.

You set the bar high.

We’re the generation that actually worked. Works hard. Get up in the morning. I thought maybe what I could do initially is build this neuroscience based executive training program. My entire life experience in the workforce is in the corporate landscape, so I thought, “This would be great in the finance world.” Of course it was not at all. It was laughed out of there. I was told, “We pay people to be stressed. If they can’t handle it, there’s 10 other people behind them.”

Pablos: There you go.

Jamie: Why would we allocate any budget?

Pablos: How close did you get to this conversation?

Jamie: This for sure happened.

Great presentation. I knew my target audience. Nobody wants to talk about self-care and awareness, important things. They wanna know the science behind the why. That was a foundation of this entire training.

Pablos: Could you pitch it: “Your employees suck because they’re stressed out and don’t know how to handle the stress. We can help teach them how to handle the stress so they don’t suck as bad.” If you frame the pitch in a way where nobody has to admit to being a wuss, then you could possibly get in there.

Jamie: I think you’re bang on. The craft has become better. We’re talking almost 10 years ago now. It wasn’t landing, but it started to get some great traction in the tech industry back in BC. Deploying the training there and making it repeatable, we were working with SaaS companies. We had people saying, “This is really great.” They would buy it for their executive teams, leadership teams.

We were using Google Forms, super glue, and Popsicle sticks as this version of delivering information, iterating, customizing, getting feedback. I remember clearly, this one founder said to me, “You should really consider turning this into SaaS.” I was like, “What’s SaaS?” No clue. I started to look into it. There’s that accountability. Good thing to explore and understand before you go building.

We did a bunch of research. We started to interject more tech, placing the screen between things and making it asynchronous. The breakthrough happened: we were starting to push out this MVP thing. A client in New York—I just forgot to check in on him.

I was busy running around with all these other clients, and it was three weeks. I got this email. I remember seeing his name: “Crap. I’ve dropped the ball.” He’s like, “This is amazing.”

I love the awareness this is building. He kept going.

Pablos: With no supervision.

Jamie: I remember that’s when we made the decision.

Pablos: If you leave me alone at home with a box of Bon Bons, I’ll send you the same email. But no, so the thing was actually something that he could continue on a self-directed basis, and he found value in it.

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Recorded on January 16, 2025