UNTAMED TODAY  ·  FEATURE PROFILE

By UNTAMED TODAY Editorial  ·  2026

A note from the editor

I met Jen Gottlieb in Phoenix, Arizona, at the signing for her book, Be Seen. She was doing the thing she does, giving a stranger her entire attention for the length of a handshake and making it feel like the room had narrowed to two people. That kind of attention cannot be faked. I have spent twenty-five years reading bodies for a living, and I know the difference.

What came after is the reason this note exists. I enrolled in her stage speaker mastermind. I walked in wanting to be better on a stage. I walked out having started something else entirely.

Then came the sentence. She was talking about Taylor Swift, about how much of that career rests on the ability to fit an entire story inside a lyric. I heard it and thought, plainly and without ceremony, I can do that.

So I went home and started writing my stories down.

Growing up in the cult. Marriage. Fatherhood. Conversations with mom. Coming out. The four seasons with the chorus. The years on the table with my hands on people who could not yet say where it hurt. Finding Mike, loving him, and every adventure since. I even pulled songs out of my TEDx and DEBx talks, because once you learn a story can carry a melody, you stop letting anything go to waste.

My thinking was simple. I will get on the stage again. I know that. But I did not want to wait for a stage in order to be useful. If listening saves lives, the message can travel now, in music, in stories, in whatever form will carry it.

Her frameworks work, and thousands of people have the receipts to prove it. What she handed me was the thing no framework teaches. Permission. Permission is the only force that has ever moved me from having something to saying it out loud.

Watch her work a on social media or on stage, and you catch the sleight of hand. The light is never on her. She stands just off to the side, holding it steady on you, patient, until you finally turn and look at what it has been pointing at the whole time.

You will read about her ritual further down, the two words she says to herself before every stage. Be more Jenny. I have my own version now, and I would not have it without her.

It was an honor to meet her. It was a greater honor to sit in her room and let it change me.

Jesse James Ferrell, Editor in Chief, UNTAMED TODAY

And now Jen!

Some people walk into a room and change the air before they say a word. Jen Gottlieb does that.

Not because she demands the shift, but because she has settled, somewhere deep and irreversible, the question of whether she belongs there. The question is closed. You can feel it.

She wasn't always that person. And the distance between who she was and who she is now is the entire curriculum of what she teaches.

Jen Gottlieb is the co-founder of Super Connector Media, one of the most respected visibility and media training companies in the entrepreneurial world. She is the bestselling author of Be Seen. She has shared stages with Oprah, Gary Vaynerchuk, Ed Mylett, Barbara Corcoran, Martha Stewart, and Snoop Dogg. Her audiences don't just take notes. They leave different.

None of it was built from confidence. It was built from what she did when confidence wasn't there yet.

The dream that felt off

Before the brand, there was theater. Years of it, Broadway, the discipline of eight shows a week, the old law drilled into her body, that the show must go on. Then came the very nontraditional role that made her recognizable: five years as Miss Box of Junk on VH1's That Metal Show.

On paper, she was living the dream. Cameras, celebrities, rock stars performing for millions. And something felt off. She has said it that plainly. She was chasing the dream she thought she wanted, and slowly realizing it wasn't her purpose at all.

Behind the scenes, she got close enough to fame to see through it. Successful people, wealthy people, famous people, and so many of them, she would later say, seemed to be holding themselves together with duct tape. She counted herself among them. Successful on the outside. Unhappy where the camera couldn't reach.

That gap, between how it looked and how it felt, is the wound the whole methodology grew from. Not because she branded it. Because she lived inside it long enough to map the way out.

The rebuild nobody puts in the highlight reel

When the show ended, the dream ended with it, and she had to answer a harder question than how to get back on television. She had to answer who she was when nobody handed her the lines.

The answer took years and looked nothing like a montage. She built a personal training company. She co-founded a PR agency and sold it. She co-founded Super Connector Media with her husband, Chris Winfield, and built it into the standard the industry now measures itself against. She wrote the book. She hosted rooms of thousands of entrepreneurs.

And then, this is the part she loves to tell, she found herself back on stage. But this time, in her own words, instead of waiting for someone else to choose her lines, she was writing her own.

Same spotlight. Entirely different woman standing in it.

That is the actual credential. Not the TV years. The rebuild. She didn't teach her way out of invisibility. She worked her way out, and then turned around and handed everyone else the map.

What she actually believes about fear

Ask the people in her rooms what changes them and they won't say the pitch templates, though the pitch templates work. They'll tell you about the moment she reframes fear itself.

Her teaching is almost disarmingly practical. Nerves and excitement are the same feeling in your body. Racing heart, quivering lips, electric hands, identical physiology. The only difference is the sentence you attach to it. Say I'm so nervous and your brain agrees. Say I'm so excited, and I am so ridiculously prepared, and the same energy becomes fuel.

This is not positive thinking. It is the hard-won physics of a woman who spent years performing radiance on command and now refuses to let fear own the definition of what her body is doing. She doesn't teach people to eliminate the fear before the stage. She teaches them the stage is how the fear gets smaller.

Clarity, she insists, comes from engagement, not from thinking about engaging. The pitch before you feel ready. The stage before the material is polished enough to hide the seams.

Jenny

Here is the moment that exists in none of the press materials, and it is the truest thing about her.

Before every stage, Jen Gottlieb has a ritual. Backstage, she doesn't rehearse. The rehearsing is long done. She connects with people. And then, right before she walks out, she gets quiet and says two things to herself.

The first is a prayer. God, speak to me and through me. A surrender. She has prepared so thoroughly that it is no longer up to her. She trusts that everything the room needs to hear is already in her, and she lets herself become the channel for it.

The second is two words. Be more Jenny.

Jenny is what they called her growing up. Jenny is the little girl who existed before the casting calls, before the camera, before anyone taught her that being seen was something you had to earn or perform. Jenny doesn't care what the room thinks. Jenny is already enough.

Every stage Jen Gottlieb owns, she owns by getting out of her own way and letting that little girl through. The woman who once performed a version of herself for a living now has one non-negotiable before every talk. Be the real one.

That is not a technique. That is a homecoming. And it is the exact homecoming she builds for everyone she teaches.

What she is actually selling

On the surface, the work inside Super Connector Media is operational. Media strategy. Pitch frameworks. The mechanics of helping serious work reach the audiences it has earned. She is exceptionally good at the mechanics, and thousands of founders, coaches, and creators have the results to prove it.

But mechanics are not what changes people in her rooms. Permission is.

Many of the people she works with arrive extraordinarily accomplished and carrying a story that no longer serves them, that wanting to be seen is different from wanting to serve. That the proper posture is to do excellent work quietly and trust the right people will find it.

She knows that story. She watched real work disappear into the void while its makers waited for permission that was never coming. And she is not willing to let it happen to the people she can reach.

So she tells them the thing the frameworks can't. Invisibility for serious work is not humility. It is abandonment. Claiming attention for something real is not a departure from your integrity, it is the completion of it. Become the recognized expert, not because your ego needs it, but because the people you were built to serve cannot be helped by someone they cannot find.

Why it matters right now

There is a professional disappearance happening in plain sight. Talented people. Real work. Years of depth and hard-earned expertise, and no one knows where to find them. Not because the work is lacking, but because doing the work and claiming the work are two separate acts, and nobody told them the second one is not optional.

The algorithm does not reward depth. It rewards volume and the performance of expertise over expertise itself. Jen Gottlieb is one of the rare people in this space who names that cost without softening it, and then, in the same breath, refuses to let you use it as a reason to stay hidden.

Because she has stood on both sides of the camera. She has been maximally visible and invisible to herself at the same time. She knows exactly what that costs, and she knows exactly how long the road back is, because she walked every step of it, through the ended show, the rebuilt career, the company, the book, and the stages she now writes her own lines for.

She did not build what she built despite what she went through. She built it because she finally understood that what she went through was the entire curriculum.

The woman who once performed someone else's script for a living now teaches thousands of people to stand up and tell the truth about their own. That is not a redemption arc. It is something rarer, and more durable.

It's Jenny, all grown up, holding the door open.

Seen. Documented. Undeniable.

GOT SOMETHING INSIDE YOU?

A story. A book. A song. A painting. A season of life you finally made it through. A business built from the wreckage. A truth you have been carrying long enough that it is ready to become something. UNTAMED TODAY was built for exactly that, for the voices that do not fit anywhere else and do not apologise for it.

Bring it to Untamed Talks, or DM Jesse James Ferrell.