Taking the Next Move, with Jana Arellano – TPW257

Jana Arellano has made more than one big move in her life. Her next move is helping other women develop the confidence to make their next move. How she makes it happen is the subject of our conversation.



Systems help Jana make her next move

Jana is a healthcare professional with over 15 years in Radiation Oncology. She created her organization “Her Move Now” as a platform for women to learn from the experiences of other women, build relationships and confidence to make their next move. Jana currently holds a position as Administrative Director for a healthcare organization. She is a Co-treasurer for the Greater Riverside Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and serves in several positions for the local Toastmasters organization, and she is working on her second Master's Degree in Healthcare Informatics. She is a mom to 3 children and a grandmother to two beautiful girls.

As Jana progressed in her career, she realized public speaking was a weakness, to the detriment of her career. At a manager's meeting in Las Vegas, Jana was given an opportunity to speak in front of the audience. She was so nervous that her knees literally started to shake, to the point where people in the audience noticed it.

She came home and went to a Toastmasters meeting because she was determined to work on this skill of public speaking, and this effort has changed her life. She not only learned public speaking skills but began to build the confidence to speak up in different aspects of her life.

With that newfound confidence, she began to train and teach healthcare organizations on leadership. From there, her next move was to launch her organization, "Her Move Now," where she brings in women to learn from other women

A typical day

Once Jana is up in the morning, she gets herself and her child ready to leave for work and school. After dropping off her child, she'll spend the rest of the day working, and reverse the order once her workday is over.

Along the way, she created systems to make things efficient in her life. She would ask herself questions regarding her lifestyle so she could build her life around her answers. She took her training and experience with standardization systems and efficiencies in radiation oncology and transferred it into her life.

Because Jana's son is autistic, Jana had to become accustomed to using checklists and doing things the same way every single day. Working with her son's therapist, she taught her son how to get ready and get things done. It really is about doing the same things in a standardized way every single day because one change in her son's routine will result in him having a complete meltdown. So her son knows the sequence of activities he must do to get ready for school each morning.

Jana has routines in place to make each week easier. She will pack a week's worth of lunches on Sunday nights, and choose outfits for each day of the week and hang them on hangers so she can just grab and go rather than spend time figuring it out each morning.

Pre-planning is another method Jana learned to implement in her life when she changed her career completely and went through a steep learning curve. She chose a job that was in alignment with what she was doing at "Her Move Now." Instead of having to learn a completely new set of skills, she took stock of what skillsets she would need to learn to make "Her Move Now" successful and took a job where she could learn those skills and carry them over to her own business. She incorporated a lot of the tools she uses in her business, such as the Join Me App or Smartsheet, a project planning tool, into her personal life as well so that she could streamline the ways she man...