Episode 99: Staying Authentic During The Holiday Season with Alexa Juanita Jordan Founder of Wild Cozy Free
Podcast
Episode 99: How to Stay Authentic During The Holiday Season with Alexa Juanita Jordan Founder of Wild Cozy Free
“Creativity is what happens when you get curious about your authenticity.” — Alexa Juanita Jordan
This week’s episode is an invitation to show up this holiday season as the most authentic version of yourself. I’m joined by Alexa Juanita Jordan, a certified life coach, published author, and playwright.
Alexa takes us behind the scenes in creating her newest offering, Holiday Survival Kit, designed to support people through the holiday season’s rawest moments.
We peel back the layers of holiday expectations and get real about the support we deserve to give ourselves through one of the busiest (and most social) times of the year.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform while you cook, clean, or create. Get the full show notes & transcript here.
What’s in This Episode:
Alexa Juanita Jordan opens the episode with a grounding meditation to help you get into the energy that you want to embody this holiday season and shares her process of creating the Holiday Survival Kit.
She talks about the resources inside of the kit as tools that can hold people through the vulnerable moments that can often feel so isolating. Moments like being back in your childhood bedroom or navigating grief around the holidays when nobody knows the “right” thing to say to you.
As someone who loves to let ideas marinate for long periods of time, Alexa is a strong believer in not rushing or forcing the creative process. She shares how she can feel the energetic difference between a flow state vs. blocking off time in the calendar to “do it.”
Alexa tells us how she moves through creative blocks by identifying the root cause and shares a powerful cooking metaphor for helping us understand what is standing in our way.
Topics Covered:
Grounding meditation practice designed to support you this holiday season
Defining creativity as the truest and most authentic expression of yourself
Marinating on ideas and trusting the pieces will come together without force
Embracing the complexity of one's identity and experiences
Navigating the holiday season’s rawest moments with the Holiday Survival Kit
Previewing Carla’s favorite part of the kit with Alexa’s sneak peek into Hallmark vs Reality
Overcoming creative blocks by identifying the root cause and taking breaks when needed
How are you nourishing your authenticity this holiday season? Tag us on IG @chefcarlacontreras & @alexajordancoaching so we can celebrate you!
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Disclaimer: Always seek the counsel of a qualified medical practitioner or other healthcare provider for an individual consultation before making any significant changes to your health, lifestyle, or to answer questions about specific medical conditions. This podcast is for entertainment and information purposes only.
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About Alexa Juanita Jordan
Alexa Jordan (she/her) creates experiences for people to cultivate more authenticity, and create lives that feel as good as they look. She is passionate about telling stories that expand our understanding, perspectives, and capacity for compassion. She is a Native New Yorker now living in San Diego. She is a certified life coach, published author, and playwright.
Alexa also has years of experience working in marketing, fundraising, and consulting at nonprofits + in education, wellness, and arts and culture spaces (high-touch D2C companies to be exact!) She also started out as a New York Times featured actor before all that!
Beyond all of her titles, Alexa is a storyteller, creative problem solver, and entrepreneurial thinker. Her unique background offers her a deeply unique and holistic perspective. She’s curious about the business of being human; all of the nuanced details, emotions, and attributes that make up who we are. (All of them. Not just the shiny parts.) She thinks that authenticity is essential.
She writes about what it means to be authentic, vulnerable, nuanced, and often messy on her blog, Wild Cozy Free, and talks about those themes with guests on her podcast, What Authenticity Means to Me.
Find + Work With Alexa:
Full Transcript:
Carla (00:01):
Welcome to Nourishing Creativity. The cycle of the last few years has left you and me feeling mentally, physically, emotionally, and creatively drained, nourish your very full life through interviews with creatives and entrepreneurs about how they create and move through their creative blocks. If you don't know me, I'm Chef Carla Contreras, a food stylist and content strategist. You can find me Chef Carla Contreras, across all social media platforms and more information in today's show notes. Alexa, welcome to the podcast. I am so grateful to have you here. Can you share with us who you are and how you serve your community?
Alexa (00:49):
Absolutely. I'm so grateful to be here and just so excited. I'm Alexa Juanita Jordan, and I am a writer and certified life coach. Really, I am a storyteller who is very curious about the world and the business of being human. I tell stories through my plays. I've written about five or six plays through my personal blog while it's cozy free. I wrote a book this past fall, I'm sorry, spring the year is something called the start of it all About 20 somethings Journeys and how to authentically approach adulthood. And when it comes to coaching, I think that's also a form of drawing out someone else's story and figuring out how to tell more authentic stories about ourselves and get to the truth of who we are. So whether it's through a workshop or one-on-one or a group or discussion, I help people cultivate more authenticity so they can create lives that feel as good as they look.
Carla (01:49):
I'm taking a deep breath. It's just so much that you do and so much that you create in the world.
Alexa (01:57):
Oh, thank you so much. I think as a big journey in my life has been embracing all of who I am and not trying to reduce it into a simple sentence for a cocktail party because then beyond that, I've been a New York Times featured actor. I've been in operations and development. I used to lead a nonprofit. Someone once said, I've led a lot of lives and I feel that. And so a lot of my work, other people has been very healing for me to embrace the fullness of who I am and the complexity of Alexa White. Jordan,
Carla (02:30):
Can you share with us your last meal? I'm a trained chef and I'm very curious.
Alexa (02:36):
I love your chefing. I'm a fan girl. I had the second to last slice of my Costco pumpkin pie that I got from Costco. You can get a whole large pumpkin pie at Costco for like $5, and I think that's so important. And so I always warm it. You must warm it. And I always, when I have a slice of pumpkin pie, eat the filling first and then the crust. That's just how I do it. And it was delicious breakfast.
Carla (03:05):
I love the process that's involved in eating it.
Alexa (03:08):
I just think you can't really taste it separately. You need to really respect the filling on the crust.
Carla (03:15):
Alexa, before we get into creativity, I would love you to share a grounding practice. You have this inside of your holiday toolkit party, and I feel like anyone listening to this, especially, let's preface this with being safe. So this is not for driving, but I really enjoyed this moment when I was watching the recording of you setting the space for the holidays.
Alexa (03:50):
Yeah,
Carla (03:51):
Can you share that with us?
Alexa (03:52):
Absolutely. I would love to. And yes, do be safe driving, but I think yes, you could just with your eyes open, if you're driving, don't close your eyes on the road. My friend and I always joke, there's just carry under wood song. You just take the wheel and do not let you take the wheel. You hold onto that wheel. So yeah, wherever you are, I always say if it feels good to close your eyes, go ahead. But if it doesn't, like you said, being safe physically and emotionally is good. So if for whatever reason closing your eyes is not good, if you're on a walk, if you're just not wanting to close your eyes, just go clean yourself. Point on the wall coming on the path, and sorry to take some deep breaths. Really fill your body any tension, just noticing without judgment. You can do a neck roll or a shimmy, maybe whatever you need. Shake out your legs, any sounds you want to make, whatever feels comfortable.
(04:55)
And really asking yourself what you might need in this moment and where you are. Maybe you're getting ready for a holiday dinner. Maybe you're listening to them on the way to a holiday party or on the way to an airport or on a walk to take a break from all the festivities outside of all the outside noise and everything going on around you. How are you feeling? What's going on in your body? Can you feel some gratitude that you're even taking some time for yourself? Can you identify anything you might need in this moment? We can't control everything but in what you can control, what do you need?
(05:59)
What would make the experience you're about to have or reenter a little more authentic for you? And when that need comes up, can you also not judge that? Just sitting with yourself and non-judgment, having compassion, remembering that your needs are worth meeting and above all, that you deserve to enjoy this moment, this evening, this day, this travel journey. And can you commit to coming back to this need, your authentic needs, your authentic self in the midst of all that might occur outside of us, you can always come back to this practice and take these deep breaths. You can rewind and come back to this part of the podcast and chat with us. You can connect to your authentic self, your authentic self is so important and so worthy. And stay here for as long as you need. If you're not done reflecting yet, hit the pause button. It's all good. But Carla and I are going to open our eyes and you chatting,
Carla (07:29):
That was amazing. Thank you,
Alexa (07:31):
Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me to have that moment with everyone. So special.
Carla (07:37):
I would love to ask you about creativity and how you define creativity, but I'm curious here, because we mentioned this as a thread in our meditation practice, authenticity.
Alexa (07:52):
Yes.
Carla (07:53):
And how does that connect to creativity?
Alexa (07:56):
I mean, you're reading my mind because they're so interwoven For me, I think that creativity is what happens when you get curious about your authenticity. To me, creativity, no matter what it is in cooking and artistic expression and any part of your life, because we're all creative beings, it is the rawest, truest, authentic expression that only you can bring to the world. It's what happens when we're in the meditation, getting rid of the outside noise, which you can be inspired by. But that freeing of judgment, and it's really what's coming from the inside of you. I was thinking about creativity and of course listening to all of the incredible guests you've had on here who I'm just so honored to be in community with. And I am a musical theater girl. I started off in theater and this quote from Ashai Musical Sunday in the park, George says, anything you do, let it come from you, then it will be new. And it's so simple, but it's so true. Let it come from you. And so my blog is called, like I mentioned, wild, cozy, free. And that's how I experience creativity in myself and in others. It feels wild, cozy, and free. It feels kind of like, oh my God, that's so original. But also it feels something you can just connect with and it's magic.
Carla (09:25):
What is your current relationship with creativity?
Alexa (09:28):
So my current relationship, creativity is about, again, leaning away from that outside noise. And I'm a recovering perfectionist for life. And all of the voices that tell me, you should do this and it should be this way versus the I really want this, or, oh, that sounds so cool coming back to that part of me because that's the voice of creativity, the nitpicking and shoulding all over myself as people would say. And getting so obsessively focused on something, being right is how I know I've strayed from that. And so I think that in my current relationship with creativity, I try really hard to not try so hard, quite frankly. And when I'm in that place where I don't care if it's right, unquote, I don't care what people are going to think about it, and I can really just create it. My current relationship with creativity is trying to just do what I can to get in that flow. And then we're both a rest leader.
Carla (10:34):
How do you nourish your creativity? And I'm going to put parentheses, what's your creative process?
Alexa (10:41):
Yeah, so going back to that flow with the survival kit, I really am very committed to not forcing my process. And as a writer, as an actor, as a coach, as a person that just created a lot of things. I know myself well enough to know the difference between the flows of like, let's just, let's do it. Let's do it. And this is what it's, and so that's not always fun scheduling wise because I often joke I can block off three hours on my calendar for creative work. And then the idea comes to me when I'm stepping on a subway between the platform and the train and I'm like, oh my God, thank you so much for showing up. Bad scheduling though. And so yeah, I have a history of marinating one idea for a while, and then it all comes together. And I think that it sounds a little out there, but my creative muse knows me well enough to know that when it comes, I will listen.
(11:33)
There's this really great story about Lemon Miranda who wrote Hamilton of course, on the way to a friend's birthday party. And the idea clicked together for one of the songs, satisfied maybe, and he went to his friend's birthday party, gave him the gift, turned right around, went home and wrote the song. I love that commitment. So with the holidays Rival Kit, I wrote some essays on my blog last year about some thoughts around the holidays, and both were really successful and just super authentic to me. And I had the idea pretty quickly of like, yeah, shouldn't nail off for the holidays. And I didn't really work on that here. I just sort of let it stew and marinate and everything influence it. And then it really only came together, I want to say a couple of weeks before I started promoting and getting things out there with the live workshops and now with the on demand recording.
(12:24)
So it is like I look at the pieces for a really long time and then one day the puzzle piece is actually fit. It's just about waiting until it feels really authentic. If I force it and I try to do it too early, then it is something generic like pen tips for less holiday stress and whatever, and this, and I don't want to tell people what to do. I just want to be able to create experiences that help you get to your inner knowing. And so I feel like I'm a hypocrite if I'm creating that from anything less than the most authentic place that I can. And with this, I wanted something people could listen to in their childhood bedroom when it losing in their minds when they're trying to figure out if they should go to the fifth holiday party this week, if they're mourning the loss of a loved one, but no one seems to understand how to deal with them.
(13:18)
I wanted to just create a space where everyone could feel really held to the extent that I can hold them. And then also have the resources. We have my friend who's an incredible grief coach, her resources are in there. My friend who lost her wife has an incredible blog called Good Gay Grief that's in there. There are so many fun content creators. There's clips I use about hostess stress and catch phrases for people who are saying the most absurd shit to you at a party. And just I wanted it to feel really comprehensive and authentic, and that's where it all came together. And I'm so grateful that it's all come together in this way and that it really feels like the most authentic offering I've ever put out.
Carla (14:07):
And we're going to give people my favorite part. Can you share a two second glimpse of this?
Alexa (14:16):
Yeah. So there's a part where I talk about Hallmark versus reality because I love holiday movies. I'll even tell you right now, just last night, I watched the most unrealistic movie I've ever seen, which is saying a lot because I've seen a lot of unrealistic ones. And so I go through too and give a little summary and people are really resonating with it. Carla Levite, which I'm so grateful for. And so one of them is the Princess Switch. I'm not ruining this for you guys. Don't think it's a spoiler because this becomes apparent five seconds into the movie. So we have Vanessa Hudgins playing two people in the following movie. She'll play three people. Where is her? Emmy? I don't know. Where's the Oscar? Good question. And essentially she goes to a made up European country called Belgravia and Elvia something Lavia and realizes that she looks just like the princess and she's there for a big competition.
(15:08)
She has shit to do, but the princess is like, it would be really cool though. Let's switch places. I want to be normal, and you can just chill in the palace. And so they do that. But Princess has a fiance, and so Vanessa Hudgins Baker character has to be with the fiance and the other ones over here with the other family. And of course they fall in love with the Rec of Men. And these men fall in love with these women without realizing they are literally different women. And it's just hilarious and not real life. And I've also realized that there is always an element of deception in a holiday movie. And so I really like I need someone to write a thesis on that for me. But I love that part, and so I'm so happy it resonates with people. And so we go through that one. And another one, and maybe I'll even add in this new movie that I've been watching too,
Carla (15:59):
Can you share with us how you move through creative blocks?
Alexa (16:04):
Yes, absolutely. So the thing is, I need to know what kind of block it is before we know what we're moving through. I was trying to think about how I wanted to talk about this, and I love a good metaphor, and I'm really good at making metaphors for things that I actually am not as familiar with. But let's say that you're about to cook a really cool meal is the block that you're like, I dunno if I can do this. And you're not even in the kitchen yet because you're worried about it, or is the block I am in the middle of this meal and something is not tasting. Those are very different blocks. To me, that's the block of I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I am having a self-worth issue versus I'm in the middle of the project.
(16:48)
And so another example in coaching, I was certified the Life Institute founded by Fern Goran who has the self discovery process. There's this question there, what would you do if you knew you could not fail? And if you don't know what you would do and you're like, oh, good question, that's a block. Or if you're like, I can't imagine not failing, that's the block that really often gets people. And so my job as a coach and then also my job myself, and I have self-worth issues because Lord knows I've had them, is to really dig into it and try to understand the way that this concept of failure is woven inside of me. We can't figure out, we want authentically and how to figure out this dish in the kitchen and our failures and are these, if we're so caught up in the idea of what if I can't do this?
(17:43)
And so I try to help my clients around that and myself around that of approaching the question differently and approaching the entry there. So instead of what would you do if you could not fail? What if you could have whatever you wanted, however you wanted it, shifting into the positivity like way we asked things. I'm Awards Girls a writer. And then also, what if you couldn't mess it up? What if I told you that no matter what you cook, everyone's going to love it. They already love it. I look into the future and I already know what's going to happen. And you're getting a James Beat Award. Congratulations. Getting to the mindset where we get a little less sticky. And so that's kind of the worthiness thing. But for myself, creatively, going back to the idea of how I made the holiday survival kit, it's if I'm in the flow and I believe I can do it and I feel really good about it, but it's not flowing, I think I'll have your path. Let's talk about this too. Take a break, take a second. I really am a very big fan of not forcing it and actually taking that break and then going back into it. So yeah, those are my two. Kind of identify the block. If it's the worthiness, you can move through it. And if it's just like, I don't know what I'm doing right now, okay, maybe you don't have the solution because it's not accessible to you yet.
Carla (18:57):
I love the way that you presented this because it gives a concrete example of what those blocks may be and how people can picture themselves moving through. Or I love your invitation of taking a break, which many of the podcast guests have said
Alexa (19:20):
Yes. Yes, they have.
Carla (19:22):
Alexa, how can we find you? How can we work with you? How can we support you?
Alexa (19:27):
The hub of it all, I know you'll have a link for this in the podcast notes is alexa juanita jordan.com. That's where you can find more about me, my writing, my plays, all the stuff. The Holiday survival kit, of course is out now, and I say it's a course, but it's really just like this long FaceTime Zoom chat with your friend that gets it, and that's available on my website through the end of the year. If you want some specific personalized support, I'm offering some 30 minute strategy sessions. I'm calling them Tinsel and Tactics because I'm so cute. We can discuss ongoing support. My book makes a great holiday gift for a 20 something or recent grad in your life. And I've also been told that it's great for not 20 somethings and it's also readable. It's like people finish it in a day, which is so cool. There's my podcast, what 50 Means to me.
Carla (20:20):
Thanks so much for tuning in to Nourishing Creativity. You can find me Chef Carla Contreras across all social media platforms and more information in today's show notes. While you have your phone out, please leave a review on iTunes or Spotify. This is how others find this show. I really appreciate your support sending you and yours so much love.