Interview: Talia Jacqueline: "When it's time to shine and the spotlight's on you, it shines on everything"

In the latest FS interview, Talia Jacqueline talks about the Big Five negative emotions, how to liberate your feelings by feeling them deeply, the psychology of business communications, and lots more.

This is the latest in a regular series of longform, in-depth, Q&A-style interviews on Fee Sheet. If this is your first time here, check out this post about what this publication aims to do, and this one about pricing. All interviews are posted on a 50/50 system. The first half — often several thousand words — will be available for free. The rest, and most other content, is for paying subscribers.

Now, on with the interview!

Entrepreneur, speaker, investor and business psychology expert Talia Jacqueline is the Austin, Texas-based founder of Visceral, a company which helps businesses explore, understand and take advantage of the intimate connection between psychology and communication.

Visceral has worked with business leaders, executives and their sales teams for a cumulative 15,000 hours, helping their companies generate recognition, traction and growth.

Talia Jacqueline

In this wide-ranging interview, you will learn:

• How to liberate your feelings by feeling them at the deepest possible level

• How to be emotionally captivating in speaking about what you do

• Why you might benefit from saying you charge $300,000 a year

• How journaling can quell the big five negative emotions

• The journey to overcoming a scarcity mindset

• The positive stressors of a big commitment

• And lots more

Shane Breslin: 

Let’s do this backwards and start at the end. Visceral is your business, the business your professional life has led you to. So what’s Visceral? What is it that you do?

Talia Jacqueline:

I’ll start answering that by saying what drives me crazy! There’s a process I call the three P's. The first P is pain, or what pisses you off. The second P is the problem you solve. The third P is passion. The thing that pains me or pisses me off is that there are so many businesses, so many good professionals in general, who have good hearts, good intent, and have a lot of value to offer. But they talk like everyone else! They literally have all the jargon, all the corporate speak, the traditional elevator pitch. Everyone just copies each other, and it drives me crazy.

I work with a lot of quite technical businesses, super numbers-oriented, such as wealth management firms. I bring them this world of psychology and communication that gives them the language to talk about what they're doing in a way where people connect with them. They connect with them because they're speaking with feeling. They're not just word-vomiting.

SB:

Practically speaking, what’s the service you provide them with?

TJ:

There are two ways that I work with companies. The first is I work with the executive team and leadership team on how to apply those communication skills internally within the company. So literally learning how to speak with emotional intelligence, how to speak with real feelings in their internal communications, so that their culture is supportive of whatever they're trying to do in the business. 

Then the second way is externally. I work with their sales teams, or financial advisors, or anyone in any type of growth seat. And I will equip them with the same type of communication skills, just applied differently in the context of sales and growth. Talking to strangers or prospects or referrals about what your business does in a way that captivates the prospect, that can make a deep connection with them. And I don't just tell them what to do. I give them frameworks and some awesome resources to help them master the skills so that, at a certain point, they don't need me anymore.

SB:

I read on your LinkedIn that your mission with Visceral is to help business owners and teams “emotionally captivate the customers who need them the most”. How can you tell that’s working? How do you know when you’ve “emotionally captivated” somebody?

TJ:

I love that question so much! This is where I just light up! You know it based on the feedback you get live. So right now, I know if you’re with me or not, even over a screen, based on the micro-language of your body language, of your eyes, of your nods, the nonverbal feedback that you give me when we're face to face. When I teach this skill, I teach it to people and I encourage them to use it offline first, where you can get that type of direct feedback more easily.

That's the first thing in terms of how you know you're captivating somebody now. We know the role of emotion. It’s drilled into business and culture — the saying, “people buy with emotion and justify with logic”. So we know emotions are important, but what we don't realize is that when the spotlight is on you and it's your time to shine — you're leading a prospect call or you're standing up in front of a room of a networking group, and you're pitching or telling people what you do when it's your turn — that spotlight shines on everything. It shines on your anxiety. It shines on your scarcity. It shines on your sense of urgency. It shines on your passion or the lack thereof. You cannot fake it. 

I teach people how to access the real emotions that they have around what they do and why. And I give them tools to speak exactly about that. 

So when you get a chance to pitch yourself, or say what you do, come at it from this emotion. The emotions of passion and anger are very similar, and both of them get people’s attention. So speak about what pains you, and how you might solve that problem. It might not be the most eloquent sentence ever, but if you say it from a place of real feeling, people will listen. It becomes a conversation starter. It’s easier to say than to do sometimes, but we have to learn how to speak with feeling.

SB:

Rewinding a bit and getting into the origin story, let’s go back to the start. Who is Talia Jacqueline? Where did you grow up?

TJ:

Firstly, I get asked a lot whether I’m French. I’m not. Jacqueline is actually my middle name. I go by my first and middle name. I decided not to carry my last name when I was 18 or 19, because my father was quite abusive growing up. I've done so much healing around that, and he was a big part of why I am where I am now, in my early 30s. But I just didn't want to carry his name anymore.

I was born and raised in Los Angeles but never in one place. We moved probably 15 times or so within LA before I went away for college. Constantly moving homes for really no good reason. But I grew up in LA and went to very Jewish Orthodox schools. We were never a very religious family growing up, but for some reason, my mom specifically decided to put us in Jewish private schools. Through middle school, it was pretty relaxed, very modern, not crazy religious or orthodox. But then I went to an extremely, extremely orthodox high school. If you've ever watched the Netflix show, Unorthodox, that was pretty much it. Before I got into this high school I had to sign a contract that I wouldn't read non-Jewish books, listen to non-Jewish music, go on the internet or talk to boys — that high school was probably a huge part of how I developed, because everything later was mostly out of rebellion!

SB:

You’ve already mentioned a little of your upbringing and the relationship with your father. Did you guys talk much about money and finance in your family. What was the atmosphere around that at home?

TJ:

I’ve been reflecting on this a lot recently. My father was very successful — he had a custom furniture business in Los Angeles and did a lot of celebrity homes. So we always lived in very nice houses and I guess, from the outside, it probably looked like we had a lot of money. Unfortunately, though, he was also a big gambler, and a huge addict. He was making a lot of money, but spending it just as fast. When I was 12, our parents got divorced and my whole world changed. My father moved all of his money out of the country.

My mother was a single mother, raising four of us, and he didn’t provide any child support. So we went from living in nice houses to just scraping by. Mom worked three to four jobs just to keep food on the table, and we didn’t always have food on the table. One time when we were in high school, we were living in this condo and we were evicted. I'll never forget walking through the house after we had to move out very suddenly. Seeing the dishwasher ripped out of the kitchen. It was very traumatizing for me at that age. I was a teenager by then. But money was always extremely scarce. It just felt unavailable. 

SB:

Did you talk about it much, or was it something that was avoided?

TJ:

I disconnected from my dad when I was 15 but when he was in my life, money was very conditional. When our parents got divorced, I was the only one of the four children (I was second oldest) who was given a cell phone. Like a favoritism thing. If I wasn't meeting his standards or giving him what he wanted he wouldn’t pay the phone bill. Because of that, I developed a very conditional relationship with money. The belief system I learned from him was I could buy love with money. Throughout high school I would pay for my friends — I would give any money I had away, just to keep their friendship. 

Then, my mother’s struggles and the traumatic experiences we had around money developed a lot of scarcity for me. She would do this thing — she’d count what she had in the bank all the time. So we'd go to the grocery store and she'd say, ‘I only have $100’. Then on the way home, she'd do the math, ‘we spent this on the groceries and now I have this much left’. She was always externally processing how much she had in the bank.

As a kid, that created this dynamic where I was afraid to ask for the basics. If I needed new shoes for school, it was hard to communicate that. My mother grew up in an environment, with her parents, where no one talked about money. It was all a secret. I think she did the opposite — she talked about it all the time — but not in a healthy way. 

So yeah, the way we talked about and dealt with money was twofold. One, I was afraid of it, because it was always a source of manipulation and always conditional. And later, two, we never had money available, which created a lot of scarcity which I had to work hard to overcome later.

SB:

I think a lot of people will relate to that sense of scarcity. What impact did that have later?

TJ:

I know many people when they grow up in scarcity, you can become a victim — never having enough, or never feeling like you can make money. Honestly it wasn’t like that for me. I was 14 or 15 the first time I ever made money. I was a camp counselor at my elementary school. I made something like $1,000 that summer. Then my dad asked me for it, I had to give it to him, and I never got it back. Next summer I was a camp counselor again, I made another $1,000. He asked me for it again but this time I refused to give it to him. That was close to the end of our relationship. Call it stubbornness, call it teenage rage, whatever, but I’d reached a point where I just couldn’t give away what I had earned. That started to formulate a belief in me that what I earned was mine. When I was 18 I created my own summer camp instead of just being a counselor at somebody else's. I reached out to people in our community, and rented space from our rabbi’s wife's house. I only made a couple grand that summer and I didn't get to keep much of it, but it made me so determined to figure out a way to provide for myself and to get out of scarcity.

“I remember thinking I was crazy for saying yes to this crazy challenge! So 30 minutes into the call, I said it. I said my rate was $300k for the year.

And they were like, ‘Did you say $300k?’” 

When I moved to New York for college was the first time I was on my own. And I had nothing. Literally no money at all. I learned how to find babysitting jobs and nannying. Then in my third year of college, that’s when things really changed.

SB:

I read one of your posts on X and I think it was about this time in your life? You were 21 or so, and you committed to a $30,000 training program that you knew was going to change your life, but when you committed you had no idea how you were going to pay for it?

TJ:

Yeah, it was a crazy time. Let me give some context. All that trauma I experienced as a kid went very deep. Honestly, it felt like lifetimes of shit to work through. One day in my sophomore year I woke up to the realization that I just really needed help. I was suffering so much internally and I felt so lost. My mom gave me a referral to a life coach who happened to live in New York so I went and met him.

I'll be super open about this, because it was a really crazy dynamic. I was his client, he was my coach, he was quite a bit older than me, but at one point early on in the relationship he initiated a romantic relationship with me that lasted about nine months, and then at the end of those nine months he pulled the plug and was like, ‘We should just be friends.’ My worlds just came crashing down. I felt like I had lost my coach and therapist, my best friend, my boyfriend in some way. I really felt like I’d hit rock bottom and that I needed to frickin heal! I knew I needed help. 

I remember I closed my eyes and prayed. I was sitting in my single dorm room, by myself, crying on my bed. And a thought came to me that the only thing I can trust is whatever comes to my mind. If I see some random YouTube video of somebody sharing a story similar to mine, I'm going to reach out to them and ask them what they did to heal. Suddenly, that was my compass. Whatever came to my mind, I had to trust that there was a reason for it. And I went down this crazy road of following the dots, trying to connect them, just being extremely vulnerable and open with what I was looking for when it came to the trauma therapy and the healing I needed. 

“I sat down and wrote down every single negative belief, every single negative experience, every single negative memory around money that I had. The stress forced me to look at them. And one by one, to work through them.”

And all that led me, through a crazy way, to a company out in Vancouver that was teaching specific trauma therapy techniques for professionals. I get a call from the CEO of this business, who I’d met before. I'm talking to him, sharing my story and what I'm looking for. And he said that he'd accept me as a participant of this “mastermind”, where I would not only receive the therapy techniques myself, but also learn them if I ever wanted to help other people in the future. I was studying psychology anyway, and hadn’t got what I needed from traditional therapy, so I was interested. Then he dropped the price. $30,000 for the year!

I just remember sinking. ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ I felt like I’d gone through a whole merry-go-round of people and things and this finally feels like what that I've been looking for. And it's 30 grand, and I’ve got just a couple hundred bucks to my name.

SB:

Well, I already know that you made it happen! But how? What happened next?

TJ:

I called my grandmother in London, my mom's mom, who I was really close to, and I just talked to her about it.

I called her Safta — that means grandmother in Hebrew — and I said, ‘Safta, I'm going to end up in jail if I say yes to this. What if I can't keep my word?’ She said to me,

“You can do anything if you put your mind to it. If you put your mind to it, you can do it. You can do it if you really commit to it.”

I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but there was something in my soul, some sort of an intuition, that I could not say no to this. I called the guy back and asked if he would give me a payment plan. He agreed and said I would have to pay $2k on the first of every month, and pay everything in full within six months. This was in December 2014, and I committed. Signed a contract. January 1st was my first payment of $2,000 — and I had from the first week of December until December 31st to figure out how the hell I was going to make $2,000. 

SB:

So what did you do?

TJ:

Everything I possibly could! Looking back, it was monumental. But there's something that happens when you accept a risk that big. I knew I had to get my mind working right around it, so I printed out affirmations, I made makeshift $30,000 bills. Every morning and every night, I was in survival mode. I took more babysitting jobs and I started to come up with ideas to work with kids in groups versus one-on-one, to try to scale my time. 

I was getting a lot of cash and a lot of checks, and because I was so afraid I wasn't going to have enough I didn't count them. I just stashed them in my dorm room drawer, and told myself that on New Year's Eve I would look at it and count it. Then, on December 31st, 2014, I sat down and I counted it. And it was more than $2400. I just remember bawling my eyes out. Like, ‘Holy God, maybe I can do this.’ 

“The very thing that you had this emotional void around, this one vital need that wasn't met emotionally — this is actually the thing you're here to give to the world.”

It was hard month after month because it made me pull so much out of myself. It also — and here’s the interesting thing — really screwed up what I was trying to heal! Because I was going through this trauma therapy and simultaneously not sleeping at night, riddled with fear that I wasn't going to be able to keep my word and make the payments.

A very stressful time, but it did change my life. Making the commitment, and being able to follow through on it completely, changed my beliefs around what I was capable of. The decision alone to commit to it and then figure it out, it created a totally new normal. It completely changed my worldview of what was possible.

SB:

So you didn't just have to raise the $2000 per month for six months — plus I'm assuming a balloon payment after those six — you also had to raise money for living costs and for travel, right?

TJ:

Yes. 100%. But that first payment alone changed my belief system. I realised I could do it. It didn't change the anxiety and the stress I had every day every month, but it changed my belief system. I knew I had to get really smart about this to make those payments monthly. So instead of asking for $20 from somebody to watch their kid, I made it $100 because we're also going to do a learning session, or a dance session. There was a dance studio that let me rent their studio by the hour. I had kids rugs and toys, you name it. And I would drag that stuff from 29th Park to 27th, go up the stairs to the dance studio and set up this after-school program. If I'm doing more with your kid, then I’ll be justified in charging you more. I even did that with babysitting jobs. I was working with one family every week and I said to them,

‘Hey, if I can do yoga lessons with your kids, would you pay me an extra $20 for the hour? If I do an art session, will you pay me this for the hour in addition to my base fee?’

That was just the level of creativity that was required.

SB:

You mentioned that great faith you had that this one-year program was going to help you heal from the trauma that you brought into it, but the stress of paying for it was in some ways offsetting a little bit of the progress you made. Were there ways, do you think, that the stress was actually helpful? That the healing was assisted by the stress? Or is that over-egging it a bit?