Going For It, Shifting Careers, & Manifestation with Christine Fiorentino of Beyond the Plate
Podcast
Episode 110: Going For It, Shifting Careers, & Manifestation with Christine Fiorentino of Beyond the Plate
“Just go for it, let it go, and live your life true to yourself.” — Christine Fiorentino
This week’s episode is a reminder that creativity asks you to trust your inner voice, even before you’re ready. I’m joined by Christine Fiorentino, writer, recipe developer, culinary storyteller, and host of the YouTube series Beyond the Plate.
From teaching in a classroom to sharing food stories on camera, Christine reminds you that creativity is more than what you create, it’s also who you become when you decide that you’re going to go for it!
If you’re craving change but feel afraid to begin or if you’re in the middle of a transition and wondering what’s next, this episode is for you. It’s also your reminder and affirmation to come back to when things get challenging.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or on your favorite podcast platform while you cook, clean, or create. Get the full show notes & transcript here.
What’s in This Episode:
Christine defines creativity as the method through which you express yourself most authentically and lean into the practices and places that connect you to your highest self.
She shares her personal manifestation ritual of writing letters to the universe, letting go of control, and how to be an active participant in the deliverance of your manifestations through aligned actions.
Christine tells her inspiring “I’m never coming back” story, and shares how saying goodbye to a 10-year teaching career opened the door to everything she wanted in her career (and life).
We also explore how spiritual tools like Reiki and grounding in nature have helped Christine reset her energy. Plus, how her fertility journey has deepened her relationship with flow, surrender, and self-trust.
Topics Covered:
Defining creativity as a return to your highest and truest self
Using manifestation practices to co-create your path
Transitioning from teaching to food media through intention and bold action
Integrating Reiki and spiritual tools into your creative process
Embracing uncertainty, letting go of perfectionism, and giving yourself permission to go for it
Question:
What’s one bold move your creativity is calling you to make? Tag us on IG @chefcarlacontreras & @christinefiorentinoto share your reflections.
xo Carla
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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 Christine Fiorentino
Christine Fiorentino is a writer, recipe developer, and culinary storyteller. She has been featured on Food Network, The Dr. Oz Show, and Martha Stewart Living, and contributes to publications such as Better Homes & Gardens, Southern Living, Allrecipes, EatingWell, Simply Recipes, Taste of Home, and more. She is the host of the YouTube series Beyond The Plate, which brings inspiring, passionate chefs together to share their journeys and explore how food is the great connector. Christine loves connecting with others and expressing love and creativity through food, cooking, and the power of storytelling.
FIND + WORK WITH CHRISTINE:
Beyond The Plate YouTube: @BeyondThePlateTV
Beyond The Plate Instagram: @beyondtheplate_tv
Personal Instagram: @christinefiorentino
Christine’s Work: Better Homes & Garden, EatingWell, and more!
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. Christine, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Can you introduce yourself and how you serve your community?
Christine (00:48):
Hi, Carla. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Christine Fiorentino. I am a writer, a recipe developer, and a culinary creative, and now also a host of a YouTube series.
Carla (01:03):
Oh my gosh. I can't wait to get into your YouTube series, but before we do that, I usually ask, what is your last meal? But I want to go beyond the plate with you.
Christine (01:15):
Cool.
Carla (01:16):
Can you tell me what that means?
Christine (01:19):
So going beyond the plate to me means digging deeper than the things that we see when we walk into a restaurant or read about a restaurant or sit down for a meal really anywhere, not even necessarily a restaurant. And what we're sitting and looking at before we even taste it. There is a story to that meal and everything that you cook, eat, experience from a food perspective has some sort of roots. And I'm very interested in knowing where that dish came from because I think that it's a way for people to connect to food more deeply, connect to the person who created that food on another level. And as far as restaurants, you're suddenly sitting in somebody's home and their history and culture and experiences as opposed to sitting at a table somewhere just eating a regular old meal.
Carla (02:19):
Beautiful. How do you define creativity?
Christine (02:23):
That's such a loaded question for creatives. First of all, I love that this means something so different for everyone, and I love that this can evolve so much for every single person as you go through life in different periods of life. But I would say overall, for me, creativity is there are the methods through which you express yourself most authentically and the places in which you feel free and the things that help you come home to yourself time and time again, no matter where you are, no matter what's going on, you can turn to those creative outlets and they bring you back to your balance. And I think that that is the way that we discover and cultivate our relationship to our highest self. And it's always evolving. So I don't have one definition of what creativity means to me, but I would say that that's the overall basis of what it is for me in my life.
Carla (03:19):
Let's get into your current relationship with creativity. I feel like that's going to unearth some things for us. Can you share with us what's going on behind the scenes of Beyond the Plate?
Christine (03:33):
Yeah. So right now I'm in a place of, I'm just going for it. I try to live my life there. I'm not always able to, but as far as beyond the plate, it's been this concept that's been brewing for years and I've always wanted my own food series and the team that we have fell together at the time that it was supposed to. And I would say, I'm in a place of, I'm going to have a baby soon. Things are going to change. Life is ever evolving. And I was like, you know what? The team came together. The concept evolved into something different than what it was, but it became this beautiful idea that I haven't seen anywhere before, and we were like, let's just go for it. So it's kind of like that pressure, not that the life ends when the baby comes in, but things are going to change for a bit.
(04:25)
So I'm just kind of trying to do everything that I can until that time comes. And I'm not saying no to things. If something scares me, I'm going for it. I'm getting out of my comfort zone and I'm finding that allowing myself to just release expectations or plans or what things we're supposed to look like for the series, just releasing all of that is turning it into the most beautiful creative process that I could have ever imagined. And I think that that fertility has kind of played into that as well as it's been a very long journey for me with fertility. This pregnancy happened after about three years of hell and it wasn't expected. And I think that the way that things happen when they're supposed to and if they're supposed to and how they're supposed to, and when it's kind of been this healing thing for me where I'm just like, listen, see what happened. See how this all went down, just go for it. Just let it go. And live your life true to yourself. Be authentic. Do what you love and it's all going to come back to you. So that for me right now is where I'm at creatively.
Carla (05:36):
And let's get into your creative process because before we hopped onto this podcast, we talked about a practice, and I'm not even going to share it, but I'm going to preface here. Then I also have a similar practice in my life, and I'm so grateful you brought this into creative conversation.
Christine (05:59):
So my creative process does depend on the project because if it's writing the way that I get into my groove with if I have writer's block, it depends on the topic. That can be one specific process. If it's something filming on the plate that can be kind of get your game face on process. There's a different pre-game to every creative process. But I will say, I think everybody should be doing this, and it sounds a little like woo woo, but I swear, I mean it works for me. So I had seen something probably about almost a year ago where I saw this practice that someone was sharing, I don't know, it might've been on Instagram. It was a manifestation practice. So what you do is you turn to your journal and you write a letter, you're writing it to the universe. You're just jotting down to the most ridiculous sounding extravagant goal of something you want.
(06:53)
So you're writing down word for word exactly what you want, how you want it to happen, what it's going to look like for you as though it is going to happen though you are writing as though it is happening, it is going to happen. So you write this letter and you either stay out loud or to yourself at the end that you're putting this out into the universe. I read the whole letter aloud because I do believe that there's just power in words. So I read it out loud and then I said out loud, I'm putting this into the universe and I'm completely releasing any control or expectations. But that's the thing, you really have to let it go. And I put it out into the universe and it might not come back when you think or how you think or how you expected many things in life.
(07:37)
When does life go the way we plan? But it's going to come back to you as long as you release it and just on your end, you do the work and you make the moves, it's going to come back to you. And I did this with my pregnancy, and this was after many, many losses. A lot of IVF just really at a rock bottom place of, I don't know if this is going to happen, but let's try this out. I found out two weeks later that I was pregnant, and now I can say at the end of this journey, almost every way in which this has gone down has been so true to exactly what I wrote that day. And I mean, after everything I've been through, how can I not believe that this works? After writing that down that day, genuinely for the first time, releasing controller expectation, and then finding out about two weeks later that I was pregnant.
(08:28)
And I've done it several times with professional goals. I've done it with beyond the plate. I've got a lot of letters out there in the universe right now, and I believe it's all going to come back to me. And I think it's a beautiful practice. And I interviewed someone for beyond the plate a while back, and she said something so beautiful to me that I wrote down. She says, you have to participate in your own deliverance. So in other words, she's very religious. She goes to church every day, really has a very trusting relationship with God. That's her relationship with a higher power. But she says, you can't just pray and then hope it's going to fall down from the sky into your lap. You can do the prayers, you can talk to your higher power or talk to your higher self, talk to the universe, then you got to do the work. And I was saying to her, I want this so bad. This series just feels like something so special. I know there's something here. She was like, it's going to happen because you are participating in your own deliverance. And I think that's kind of the missing piece for people sometimes, is that they want something really badly from the universe, but you got to do the work.
Carla (09:33):
So putting it out there and doing the work is the practice
Christine (09:38):
And really releasing expectation and control and the idea of how you think it's supposed to look because life never looks the way you thought it was going to look. And very often it's much more beautiful that way. I would say more often than not, it ends up being even better.
Carla (09:56):
Christine, I want to dive just to touch into your spiritual practice because you and I both are Reiki practitioners, and I'd love to know how that moves through your creative process.
Christine (10:13):
Yeah. People are usually surprised to find out that I am a Reiki practitioner, but then they get to know how spiritual I am, then they're not surprised anymore. But the way that you can work through creative blocks and just feeling stuck with reiki is really beautiful. Whether you practice on yourself or you go to somebody, you kind of just sit with your thoughts, pause and shift the way that the energy is flowing through your body. So I either sit down with my journal or I sit down and light some Palo Santo. I kind of renourished myself in this way, which is something that I think is important for creatives to do because we're constantly in service of others and we love that, but we need to make sure we're not pouring from an empty cup. So to be able to sit down for even five minutes and reconnect to the balance in my body and shift the energies back to some sort of center is really important. And bonus if you can do that outside in nature and listen to the birds and be in the grass and feel the breeze on you, because it's kind of like this very natural organic reset. And it's something that's really helped me work through all types of creative blocks. You have to give yourself a minute sometimes, no matter how you do that.
Carla (11:33):
And there was an article of shifting your career. It said that I was an intern. Can you tell us about that?
Christine (11:40):
Yeah. My professional journey is untraditional, which I love. I'm very proud of that now. But in the beginning, the imposter syndrome was real, man. Oh my God. Imposter syndrome is no joke, crippling. So food media is my second career. I was a teacher before food media for a decade, five years early childhood, five years middle school. But again, back to creativity, what does it mean to me? My heart and soul and passion has always been kitchen, food, cooking since I was three years old, stood on a chair with my mom, started learning how to cook that day. That's where my creative outlet has always been. But I was afraid to take that leap into, I didn't know where I would go or how I would do it as a teacher. So I just started food blogging again, just start something somewhere. So I started food blogging back in 2012 and I loved it.
(12:36)
And I would have little events. I would have little networking things that I would do when I had the time I was at school on my lunch break, writing down recipe ideas for that day that I wanted to leave school and go pick up ingredients and go home and make recipes. So I started blogging back then. And then finally in 2019, yeah, it was 2018 because my 10th year in teaching, I was in a really bad mental place, and the only one who really knew how bad it was was my husband. And we had just gotten married that previous year. We were starting to talk about having a family. We both wanted a baby, but there was also this nagging pulling almost sick feeling inside of me that I don't want to be a teacher. I can't do this anymore. And when something is calling you so much that it actually makes you physically ill.
(13:32)
And I also was having a little bit of a hard time getting pregnant, so my stress levels were through the roof. I was just not in a good place. And it was almost like the depression of not doing what I loved was impacting the fertility and the struggle with the fertility was stressing me out about the job. My back was against the wall, about the career move, and my husband was the one who finally said to me in maybe October of that school year, just go for it. Just go try, just go. I remember this conversation with him because he was the one how lucky to have such a supportive partner to be. He was like, just go try. You can always go back, but you can't wonder forever. What if I didn't go try and I was like, oh my God, he's so supportive right now because it is a decision that you have to kind of make together.
(14:19)
And I was like, you know what? You're right. I can go back. Why am I acting like I'm stuck here? I have to stay and do this. What am I doing right now? We get into such a hamster wheel of life that we think that we can't evolve and change and then go back. If it doesn't work out, it's all good. You'll figure it out. So the next week I put my leave. I was going on leave. I was like, let me take a baby step out. I'm not going to quit. I'm going to take leave for a year for the rest of the school year. The plan was, I'm going to leave Christmas break and I'm going to go check this out and see what's up here. I'm not getting pregnant. Let me go focus on the career stuff, whatever, one thing at a time here.
(14:58)
So I remember walking out of the school that day and it was, I remember the door swinging open and I felt like I was walking into this whole new world of possibility and opportunity and the weight that lifted off of me. It was like the sun came back to my life again. The sunshine came and my spark came back and I was so invigorated, and I knew in my head I know then, and I knew now I'm never coming back here. I'm not coming back. This is going to happen. I'm making it happen. I don't know how. I don't know when I'm going to figure this out. I started cold emailing the next day. The next day I was just sending emails out, stalking people down, DMing people, trying to get internships, trying to get assistant jobs. I'll do it. I'm paid. I have to get my foot in this door.
(15:44)
And it was the best move I ever made. It took some time. I was doing a little freelance work. I was trying to do food photography for people, just trying to get, I was taking classes at ice, like digital media classes. I was just trying to get my skill level up a little bit because I was technically starting late in this career. And eventually the first food media gig that I got was, it was a food and wine two day food stylist assistant job. And I had sent out about at least 100 emails at this point, maybe got, and that's one thing that I would say to people, don't just send a few emails out. You need to stalk people down, swallow your pride. There are people out there that want to help you. You just have to find them. For every 50 emails that I sent, I probably got two back, three back.
(16:32)
So finally I heard back from Judy Kim, who is a very well-known food stylist who I adore. I tell her this every time I see her now, and I don't even think she realizes how much this meant to me and how much it affected my life. She was in a pinch. She wrote back to me, I have a two day shoot at Food and Wine with Gail Simmons. I need an extra assistance. Somebody just backed out. I was like, cool, when is it? She was like, tomorrow. It's like, cool. I'm in. Let's do it now. For the first thing to be food and wine with Judy, Kim and Gail sent. These are big names. I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to go for it. Fake it till you make it right. What do I have to
Carla (17:09):
Lose? This is why I left teaching.
Christine (17:13):
It wound up being such an impactful two days. Judy and I are still friends today. I adore her. Shout out to her for even paying me any attention because I mean, she did not need to answer me. She's huge. And that was such a confidence booster for me. And it was like another step of me being like, I'm never going back into that classroom. I'm never going back again. I'm making it happen. And then about a month later, I finally heard back from a food media company who needed an intern. I was a highly respected educator in my fields this point. I was 10 years into a career. I was 32 years old. And then none of that matters if you are going to go for what you love. And I was going to be a 3-year-old intern making not much money at all. I was happy that it was paid because a lot of internships aren't even paid.
(18:06)
And it was kind of starting from the bottom again. And I was okay with that because it was an opportunity to just put my nose to the grind and learn. I'm coachable. I'm not above anything. I just want to learn and try to do a good job. So I go to my first day and can you imagine? My doctor calls me while I'm training in the morning, getting onboarded with everything. My fertility doctor, I think I called her during lunch or at the end of the day, as soon as I left, found out I was pregnant.
Carla (18:40):
Oh, wow.
Christine (18:41):
Which I was not expecting at all because it was not happening. And I was just kind of like, I'm going to go focus on the career stuff. Found out the first day of this new career that I was also going to be having a baby. And I was like, again, I'm just going for it. It's a lot at once, but it's all good things and it's all good things I want and prayed for and worked for. So I'm just going to figure it out. And I did,
Carla (19:09):
And this is a perfect example where I ask people how they move through creative blocks, but this whole conversation was you continuously moving through, moving through, moving through. And I can't wait to see how you move through. And I'm just going to put this into the universe the next few years and what's in store for you, your family, and beyond the plate. This has been beautiful to chat with you. Can you share with us how we can support you, how we can find you, how we can work with you?
Christine (19:47):
Follow me on Instagram. That's where you can get to know me the best and always reach out to me. I love making new friends out there. It's just my name, Christine Fiorentino underscore, and then definitely check out beyond the plate. Subscribe to the show, share it, comment, send your feedback. We're really excited to hear back from people what they think or what restaurants they want us to go to next, or some ideas for what they think could make the show even better. It's about bringing this stories to the world.
Carla (20:19):
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.