TURNING PERSONAL HARDSHIP INTO PURPOSE & RESILIENT LEADERSHIP
Writer / Renée Larr
For Jennifer “Jiff ” Chapman, years of professional achievement meant President’s Club recognition, a successful 18-year sales career, and the kind of drive that comes naturally to high achievers. But beneath the accomplishments was grief, pressure and a growing realization that she had lost touch with who she was beyond her career.
Today, Chapman is using that experience to help other women find their way back to themselves.
As the founder of Just Jiff, Chapman is an Indianapolis-based speaker, author and certified mindset coach who works with high-achieving women executives through one-on-one coaching. She also works with organizations and teams on resilient leadership and workplace culture. Her approach is built around four phases: Awareness, Understanding, Acceptance and Embodied Self-Leadership, designed to help women move beyond simply checking another goal off their list.
“I never set out to become a coach,” Chapman says. “The hardest chapters of my life led me there.”
That life-changing push began with adversity. Chapman lost her mother when she was young, and years later, at age 34, the same age her mother was when she died, Chapman suffered a stroke. The experience forced her to confront something she had spent years outrunning: the parts of herself she had never stopped to process.
“With a lot of help and support from family, friends, and a coach, I came out the other side of that with a perspective on life I never had before, and it’s become my mission to share it,” she says.
A life coach had already begun changing Chapman’s perspective after her health scare, helping her understand that she was grieving a version of herself she needed to release. In 2021, Chapman made the bold decision to leave her corporate career and build her own business, determined to offer other women the kind of support that had helped her.
Her years in sales became an unexpected asset in her new chapter. Chapman learned that leadership isn’t simply about performance. It’s about relationships, trust and showing up consistently.
“Trust and follow-through aren’t extras,” she says. “They’re the whole foundation.”
That belief runs through Just Jiff. Chapman often speaks about the “invisible backpack” many women carry, filled with grief, expectations and experiences that can quietly shape their decisions, relationships and careers.
“I want to help people put down the weight that no longer serves them, and to know they’re not carrying it alone,” she says.
For Chapman, authentic leadership begins with understanding yourself. She encourages women to distinguish between what they truly want and what they believe they are supposed to want, particularly when the life or career they once envisioned no longer fits.
Her work is resonating well beyond individual coaching. Chapman has worked with organizations including Natera, WebMD, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, SHRM, Sikich, OneCause and Steel Dynamics, helping leaders recognize that resilient people and healthy cultures are essential to organizational success.
And she’s just getting started. Chapman is expanding her speaking work around resilient leadership and the invisible burdens women carry, recently launched the Depletion Index and is writing her first book, scheduled for August 2027, exploring grief, identity and turning hardship into purpose.
Her message to women navigating a transition is both simple and powerful: begin by being willing to believe that it can feel different than it does right now and being ready to look in the mirror.
“Start smaller than you think,” Chapman says. “You don’t need a five-year plan or a complete life overhaul. You need one honest moment, one courageous question and one small step forward.”
For Chapman, that moment of honesty marked the beginning of choosing herself differently. Today, through Just Jiff, she helps other women do the same—letting go of what their lives were “supposed” to look like and creating a next chapter that feels true to who they are now
For more information visit, justjiff.com.
