Episode Summary

If you have big, unconventional dreams and a restless sense that “there has to be more than this,” you might be a ninja — even if you feel stuck right now. In this episode of the Pocket Ninja Podcast, Jehanne introduces the four driving forces that make ninjas unique and powerful: daring dreamers, purposeful learners, courageous transformers, and bold action takers.

Through real-life stories of clients and her own journey, Jehanne shows how these forces shape the way ninjas think, grow, and move through the world. You’ll hear how recognizing your ninja wiring can explain why traditional advice and normal paths have never quite fit, and why you need a different approach to feel truly aligned, successful, and fulfilled.

This episode is both a framework and a mirror. It helps you see where you are in your own ninja journey and why understanding and activating your four driving forces is key to unlocking your potential in leadership, business, and life.

If you suspect you’re a ninja — or want language for what you’ve always felt inside — this conversation will give you clarity, validation, and a next-level way of understanding your growth.

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Transcript

Welcome to the Pocket Ninja Podcast, where big picture wisdom meets practical tools. If you have untapped potential, you know you have what it takes, but for some reason you’re not quite where you wanna be or you are already successful. But deep down, you feel like something’s missing, or that there’s more to life than what you’ve achieved, or maybe even you’re doing great. But you are about getting the most out of your personal and professional life.

Then this session is for you. In this podcast session, we’re diving into number one, the four driving forces that make ninjas unique and very powerful, and number two, why understanding these four forces matter and how they drive real growth and fulfillment. And I’m gonna give some examples and stories about myself and other ninjas so you can see what these look like in real life with real people.

So grab your notebook, but not if you’re driving, because understanding these four driving forces are key to you understanding yourself and unlocking all your potential.

If we haven’t met before, my name is Jehanne and I’m the founder of Pocket Ninja Strategies, where I exclusively coach and train ninjas. And I’m not talking about martial arts. I’m talking about people who are ninjas in their personal and professional life. And here at Pocket Ninja Strategies, we define ninjas as daring dreamers, purposeful learners, courageous transformers, and bold action takers. And if you’re here, that probably means you’re a ninja, even if you’re stuck in some places.

Okay, so let’s get into it.

What’s a ninja and why does it matter? As I mentioned previously, ninjas are wired differently. So for ninjas, that’s you, to actually realize your full potential and be well, having successful along the way, you need to understand exactly how you tick.

So first, let’s remind you what the four driving forces are.

Daring dreamers, purposeful learners, courageous transformers, and bold action takers. Now to understand the four driving forces, let’s start with an analogy.

Ninjas are like sports cars and sports cars are not built the same and they do not run the same. This engine that drives ninjas has four cylinders. In an engine, cylinders are where power is created. So the four driving forces are like the four cylinders of a sports car.

And you wanna unleash the power of each cylinder so you can enjoy the full potential of your sports car. Now I wanna note if some of the four driving forces resonate with you, but not all of them, or you’re interested but you don’t believe you’re this type, do not discount that you might be a ninja.

In the next podcast session that’s already out, I go over the three activation levels of being a ninja because you can be a ninja and just not be activated yet. And how do I know that? I was a ninja my whole life and I didn’t know it until I recognized my four driving forces and started to get them into gear.

So there’ll be more on that later.

Let’s dive into these four driving forces so you can understand them a little bit more. Driving force number one is daring dreams. So ninjas dare to dream. And that’s important, the fact that it’s dare to dream. Everyone has dreams, but ninjas are a little bit special and different in that they dare to dream differently.

Either they wanna do big things, or they wanna do many things, or maybe they wanna do things really differently. There’s like they wanna do success on their own terms. And the other thing about daring to dream is that ninjas have a sense of purpose and service. There’s this desire to make things better, an industry, a team.

People make opportunities for others. And daring dreamers are seeking fulfillment, not just success. They don’t wanna just achieve goals on the list, although that’s also important to them. They desire this sense of purpose and joy. So there’s a meaning behind the success. For example, I had a client, total ninjas, that is in an industry that is notorious for having small, really piecemeal contracts.

And this leads to lots of challenges in their business. It’s unpredictable cash flow. There’s a lot of management and staff issues with being overworked and underworked. The work is not satisfying ’cause you don’t get to look at the whole big picture.

You’re just always doing these little pieces. And so these clients had a totally different vision and business models that they developed. They decided instead of selling little piecemeal contracts, they were gonna sell a program that ran over six months, which created predictable revenue, predictable work.

And a much more purposeful experience. By the way, this is unheard of in their industry, and even though they’ve successfully done it, I still haven’t seen anyone else take this approach. And what’s even cooler about this is these ninjas wanted to do all this in four days a week. They wanted to have a four day work week, which by the way, they did.

They succeeded in many of their goals. They were profitable and they won many awards. So this is a great example of a ninja who dares to dream something different, something bigger, many things also being of service. Now I wanna give you another example. So sometimes being a daring dreamer isn’t always about having to be big or grand. Daring to dream can also be dreaming about less, simpler, smaller.

So for example, I have several ninjas who have dared to dream about leaving their very prestigious professions. We’re talking lawyers. We’re talking surgeons for more fulfilling work and a more balanced lifestyle. So I’ve worked with a former surgeon who chose so bravely to leave that profession and also a long family history in that profession that basically had their life totally sorted out, all tied up in a bow in terms of the career world, if they stayed in that profession.

Decided to give all that, all the security, all the prestige, all the expectation of their family and the world to reinvent themselves and do a career that is more in line with what they truly want. I also have an example of another ninja who let go of their lawyerly ambitions and prefer to work part-time and really enjoy outdoor recreation.

And for both of these ninjas, these dreams were very daring. It took something to believe in these dreams, to even listen. It took something to acknowledge they had this dream, to listen and then to actually go get it. As we said earlier, ninjas are wired differently, and if you have some compelling dreams and goals that are big or you have many, like you’re a serial entrepreneur or hobbyist, or you have a vision for a life or a business or organization that feels very different than the obvious, and that’s what you prefer.

You are a daring dreamer and you are a ninja even if you aren’t acting on those dreams yet.

So let’s move on to driving force number two, purposeful learners. So ninjas, we’ve already established, are these daring dreamers, and therefore, because they have these daring dreams, they’re on this journey to find the wisdom that will help them make their dreams come true.

Because the dream is daring, regular old wisdom isn’t gonna work. They need more. And you know, because again, they wanna do big things, their own way, more things. They need the wisdom to do that. These purposeful learners, they have a mindset of being curious and self-reflective and deep and philosophical and energized by learning hacks and secrets.

So these are the kind of people that when you mention a book or a good podcast, they will be the ones who actually followed up and read the book or listened to the podcast.

For example, I meet and I work with ninjas all the time. And one sign of a ninja is I’ll mention a book or a podcast or YouTube video to a ninja. Then they’re off and gone and they’re reading and listening to it. They’re signing up for courses, they’re asking questions. They’re trying out recommendations because they’re trying to figure out how to master their inner world because they’re wired differently and they’re trying to figure out how to make those big daring dreams come true and get the most out of life.

So they’re seeking that wisdom. A great example of this is in my earlier years of Pocket Ninja. I had a client who signed up for some coaching, and in our very first session I asked him, well, why did you sign up? And he said he didn’t know exactly why, but he knew something was off and he wanted to address it. Then what was so cool is that in our first exercise on values,

where we develop a value system, this client immediately identified that one of the values had been stagnant and this is what was causing all the issues. And as soon as this ninja learned that, he was off to the races with this key information. So he quit his job.

He started a new business. He launched a consulting business to support the development of the startup, and then he became the CTO of one of his consulting clients. And this is because he was really seeking the learning. And as soon as he got that learning, he was able to use it, right? Purposeful learning.

So when I say ninjas are wired differently, ninjas are wired differently. They enthusiastically learn because they’re curious and they wanna make their dreams come true.

The third driving force is courageous transformers. This is what really distinguishes ninjas from not ninjas because lots of people have dreams and lots of people learn. But what you do with that makes all the difference. With these dreams and the wisdom, ninjas use that to transform themselves, to mold themselves, to redevelop themselves. They take that wisdom and they use it to advance themselves and be different. And this is where the ninja journey really starts to take shape. It’s where the sports car pulls ahead on the open road.

And the journey starts to become a little bit more joyful. To give an example, as I mentioned before, I had a client who was a surgeon and decided to change their career. So they were in a management role in charge of leading a team of 30 through a transition from an independent clinic to be part of a corporate entity.

And let me tell you, this is a very powerful ninja. So much capacity, so much success under their belt. But they found themselves struggling. They were like totally second guessing themselves. They knew there was this level of a leadership inside of them. They couldn’t get it out. They couldn’t find it.

They couldn’t harness it, and you have to think about what a struggle this is for someone who has done everything needed to become a surgeon, where they are capable, confident. In charge. Literally saving people’s lives, maybe making people’s lives better. And here they are in a moment of leadership where they feel confused, unsure, insecure, but there is this feeling that there is this leadership trying to get out.

Through purposeful learning, this ninja showed up to me and we did some work together on their values, their strengths. We learned a lot about feedback and leadership, and I witnessed this ninja take all this purposeful learning and use it to reorganize themselves from the inside out.

Ninjas will take information and they will internalize it into their bones, into their systems, into their mindsets, into their structures, and then they will reorganize anything that needs to be reorganized.

Any ideas about themselves or how things should be, or how it was in the past? They reorganize all of it from the inside out to become different from that learning. I watched this ninja reorganize themselves with the purposeful learning they received in our process together, and then they went out and they started figuring out every person they worked with differently from their new framework of their own values.

And this freed them up to positively challenge their team members. They were able to address management and the corporation so differently and so boldly through the transformation of that information into their being. I’m making it sound easy and powerful, but it’s not easy. It’s a process to go through, but this is what ninjas do. They take the learning and they use it to actually change and grow themselves.

So armed with their dreams and the needed learnings, ninjas will courageously transform. They’ll change and they’ll evolve dramatically to become more and more of who and what they want to be. Often, ninjas will grow in big spurts where they change a lot, and they also have several life reinventions.

So maybe they have many career or personal life chapters compared to non ninjas. Lastly, the fourth driving force is bold action taking. Again, ninjas have these dreams and then they wanna learn to make these dreams come true. And when they learn the things they need, they change on the inside, and then they take bold action. So they’re willing to take new and different actions.

The qualities we’ll see here is a lot of boldness and a lot of courage, and it’s really funny ’cause it often surprises themselves. They’re like, wow, I can’t believe I’m doing this, and I know this because this is true to my experience too. So they’re willing to get dirty, they’re willing to hurt, they’re willing to fail once the alignment arrives from the dreams and the learning and the growth.

I think one of the reasons I love working with ninjas so much, other than being one myself, is because when they get their dream clear and the learning that they were missing and go through the transformation, ninjas are on fire. They take aim at their target and they shoot. I’m often in awe of what a ninja will do in one week between sessions.

I’ve had a ninja client who went from wanting to sell their business to putting in major investment, buying inventory, signing new leases, hiring new people. I’ve had ninja clients quit the profession and go back to school. I’ve seen ninjas dissolve their business or reinvent it. I have found myself taking all sorts of bold actions when my dreams got clear and I did the internal change. So I’ll share a little example for myself. I started my MBA not knowing how I would pay for it, but I did it anyways. This was insanely bold for me at the time because before that I would’ve never done anything if I didn’t know how it would turn out.

Then while in my MBA, I walked into my boss’s office and had a very direct conversation that in three months I wanted to be out of marketing, and that if there was a job for me there in something else, that would be awesome. And if not, I was gonna start my own business.

And I was totally scared. There was a lot of hyperventilating, crying on this journey to that conversation. But once I started to understand my ninja self and align to that, I found myself doing all sorts of things that surprised me at the time and still surprise me now.

Even though I’ve grown so much since then, this still happens to me all the time where I struggle to own my dream or truth, and then I have to learn and change and grow a lot. But inevitably, I find myself doing all sorts of bold things. So if you’re a bold action taker, or if you really wish you could be, then you’re a ninja.

So that’s the overview of the four driving forces that fuel ninjas and make ninjas different.

Now, why does it matter if I know I’m a ninja or if I know about these four driving forces? Well, news flash, not everyone is like this. Ninjas can show up in three ways. They can feel like they have untapped potential. There’s this relentless feeling that there could be more, but we’re not getting there.

Or they’re moderately successful, but they feel conflicted trying to fit in and never feeling like they really do. They often feel very confused and frustrated internally that people aren’t seeing what they see or feeling what they feel.

Or number three, they’re very successful. They’ve checked lots of the boxes, but to quote Glennon Doyle, they feel like, but isn’t it supposed to be more beautiful than this? So here’s the thing, ninjas are wired differently. A lot of traditional advice and an ordinary approach won’t work for them.

That’s why my approach works for ninjas and why I created it.

Only once you recognize you’re different and start owning it will you start to feel good on the inside and will you take actions on the outside that align with that internal belief and feeling.

So recognizing and owning how you’re wired, how you work, is like starting to work with yourself instead of against yourself. Ninjas cannot do things the normal way and be well happy, successful, and fulfilled.

Ninjas need to align to their own compass, their own journey, their own way of doing things. As a ninja, you need to stop minimizing and shoving down your dreams. You need to stop being stuck in dreaming and wisdom seeking and learning.

You need to get clarity on your dreams. Start learning how to make and follow your own compass, and then you need to own those dreams and get the correct wisdom that will compel your transformation and your new actions.

So that’s a wrap for this session. I hope you’re starting to see that you are or might be a ninja. And before you leave today, I wanna ask you, what’s your one takeaway from this podcast session? Take a moment to identify one key learning that’s changed or expanded your mindset or given you a new tool or something to practice.

I want you to pause and really think about this ’cause this podcast is about helping you get clear and get moving so you can have real results in your life. I don’t want you to listen and move on. I want you to process and apply what you’re learning.

My takeaway for this episode is that this episode reminds me it can take a lot to realize and accept that you’re a ninja because I am reminded of how long it took me to come to that realization and actually how hard it was to own that and believe that that could be me.

But also how much more successful and happier I’ve been once I start embracing my true nature and working with my four driving forces. As I mentioned earlier, the next episode on activating your four driving forces and assessing your activation level is already out. This episode is great because it walks you through each of the four driving forces and looks at the different levels from idle to full activation. It’s very illuminating and a practical exercise you don’t wanna miss.

Thank you for tuning in to the Pocket Ninja Podcast, where big picture wisdom meets practical tools. If this episode has sparked something in you and you want to ignite your inner ninja in business, career, and personal life, go to PocketNinjaStrategies.com to book a complimentary clarity conversation. Your inner ninja will thank you later.

Disclaimer, this podcast is designed to help you unleash your inner ninja because we want you to experience wellbeing, happiness, and success all together. That said, the ideas and insights shared here are not customized to your unique circumstances, and therefore are not a substitute for personalized professional advice.

You are the expert in your own life, career, and business. So take what you learn here with your own discernment and discretion. Only you know what’s right for you, what feels empowering, and what risks you are ready to take on.