Episode 114: When Creativity Feels Like Failure: The Lies We Tell Ourselves with Alexa Juanita Jordan CLC
Podcast
Episode 114: When Creativity Feels Like Failure: The Lies We Tell Ourselves with Alexa Juanita Jordan CLC
“Creativity is letting your mind and your heart be your playground and letting whoever wants visit the playground is it.” — Alexa Juanita Jordan
This episode is your invitation to reframe failure, creativity, and the sneaky lies we tell ourselves when things don’t go as planned. I’m joined by Alexa Juanita Jordan: Certified Life Coach, writer, performer, and author of The Nuance Diarieson Substack.
Alexa reminds us that creativity isn’t about perfection or performance. It’s about allowing yourself to be impacted by life, to follow your whims, and to share your expression without tying it to an outcome. Let this be your invitation back to your creative playground.
She opens up about her Holiday Survival Kit, the project she poured her heart into last year and ultimately returned to with compassion. Alexa shares how she shifted her mindset, the lies she stopped believing, and why she now celebrates the creative act itself, no matter what the response is.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform while you cook, clean, or create. Get the transcript below.
What’s in This Episode:
What’s in This Episode:
Creativity Is Engagement: Alexa defines creativity as a human capacity to engage with the world, let it have an impact, and use one’s mind and heart as a “playground.”
Facing Failure: Alexa reflects on her “Holiday Survival Kit” launch last year and how she perceived it as a failure.
Practice What You Preach: The importance and impact of using the tools you teach and share with others to support yourself when you need it most
Trying Again: Alexa shares how she moved through creative blocks and committed to trying again by revamping marketing, focusing on Pinterest, and clarifying her business messaging overall
Staying True To You: The importance of doing things that are personally fulfilling for you and that nourish your creativity, even when serving others.
Resources Mentioned:
Pinterest Toolkit with Meagan Williamson
Holiday Survival Kit by Alexa Juanita Jordan get 15% until Monday 12/1
Hit Send: Create, Complete, & Share Your Work starting Friday 12/5
Questions to Reflect On:
Sit with these questions: Journal, take them on a walk, create a voice note, chat with a friend, or sit with a cup of tea and reflect on them.
Leave a comment below or connect with us on Instagram @chefcarlacontreras & @alexajordancoaching to share your takeaway from the episode.
Is there a project that you can bring to the creative playground and release expectations around?
Have you defined something as a failure? Is there a reframe that you can give yourself around this?
PS: Join Cher Hale and me, inside Hit Send, It’s a three-week co-sprint container, starting December 5th for creatives and entrepreneurs who are done sitting on ideas and ready to share their work.
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) is a certified life coach, published author and playwright, native New Yorker, and lover of all things Wicked.
Her book of essays, The Start Of It All, is a 20 something’s guide to resilience, empowerment and authenticity at the dawn of adulthood.
Her plays have been performed at regional theaters across the country, and are also featured in multiple anthologies (including The Best Women’s Stage Monologues of 2022.)
She writes weekly essays for her Substack, The Nuance Diaries, discussing what sensitive and deeply feeling people are thinking but rarely say out loud (AKA the stuff that typically never leaves the group chat.)
She loves helping her clients figure out who they really are, and what they really want. Learn more on her website where you can grab The Holiday Survival Kit + the accompanying workbook, Make Your Own Survival Kit, and reach out to book a 1:1 session.
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, episode one 14 with repeat guest Alexa, Juanita Jordan. Last year we chatted about her holiday survival toolkit. This year we get into when creativity feels like failure, the lies we tell ourselves. I can't wait to hear what you think. I also want to share that I have hit send, create complete, and share your work. It's a three week coworking container for entrepreneurs and creatives who are ready to hit send on what they've created. It starts on Friday, December 5th with my cohost Cher Hale. Find out more information in today's show notes. Alexa, welcome to the podcast as a repeat guest. I am so grateful to have you here. Can you introduce yourself and how you serve your community?
Alexa (01:35):
Absolutely, and thank you for having me back. I'm so honored to be here. I am Alexa, Juanita Jordan. She her pronouns. I'm a native New Yorker. I'm a certified life coach, published author, bestselling log on Substack. I serve my community by helping people identify what they want and how to go get it. There's so much noise and so much shoulds and so much I have this and now I'm good and would give me the opportunity to have a really powerful prompt or conversation or reflection. There's so much inside of us that we're not letting out and we're not embracing the fullness of who we are. And I really just want to help people spend their one wild, precious life doing what they want. And when you do what you want, I think you actually end up serving your community better. So hopefully people that I serve ripples out and they end up being of service to new people as well.
Carla (02:32):
Tell us about the last experience that sparked creativity.
Alexa (02:36):
As I mentioned a native New Yorker, and there was this amazing one woman show by an artist I love Dylan Mulvaney called the least Problematic Woman in the world. It was amazing and it was her journey of figuring out her life and that she's trans and a lot of backlash being a public figure. And at the end of the play, she discovered the word nuance. And my blog up until that moment of seeing the play was called Wild, cozy Free on Substack, but something about the word nuance just gripped on my brain and my heart. I was like nuance. The nuance report, the nuance status, the nuance diaries. And even though I had had no intentions of changing my blog title, I did not walk in there thinking that I was on my mind at all. I went home that night and played around with different word marks for the substack.
(03:29)
It just hit and it clicked and I felt so sure of it, and it was just a spark of creativity that I followed, and everyone has really loved that so far, and it's helped me clarify what I do. And I think there's been nuance there all along. And I just love when you're sitting in a black theater open-hearted enough to just have something that someone else had in their journey speak right to your soul. And so in that way, Dylan Mulvaney inspired my new Substack title change. I got to tell her that at the show.
Carla (04:03):
That is amazing. Can you tell us how you define creativity when it comes to your life and your work?
Alexa (04:12):
Big question. I think that we're all creative people. There's not just the creatives and the artists and the actors and the financiers and the sciences and all that. We're all creative. Similar to that story I just told, I have to define creativity by meeting life as who I am in this moment and really sitting into the truth of who I am right now. Because as the world goes on and swirls around us and there's so much that can take us from our creativity, what I do have is this moment right now and the way I can engage with the world and the way I let the world impact me. So I think honestly, I define creativity in my life as letting the world impact me, letting myself impact me. And that takes a lot of compassion, honestly. Sometimes you wake up and you're feeling awful and sometimes the world is confusing and I think you just take all of it and put it in your little, one of my best friends and I were going through misunderstanding and I thought we weren't going to talk ever again.
(05:19)
And I was really sad and we're fine now because I let myself feel that I ended up writing this song called Today I Unfriended Your Mom on Facebook. I imagined what it would be like to of your friends anymore and to keep seeing her mom's Facebook posts and how painful that would be to me. I just went into this whole imagined scenario and people would think, oh, you're overthinking Alexa, I like the song. And now we're totally fine. I define creativity as following your whims and fancy is creativity is letting your mind and your heart be your playground and letting whoever wants to visit the playground. Is it,
Carla (05:53):
What is your current relationship with creativity?
Alexa (05:54):
My current relationship involves a lot of compassion. Last time I was here, we talked about my holiday survival kit kind of toolkit of sorts. And so you have an idea, right? And you have their own playground. And then a lot of our creatives we're for a living we're artists. And just like a kid on the playground, when what you're making doesn't turn out and have the reaction that you wanted, that really hurts. So I ended the holiday rival kit last year, and I had all these grand ya's visions of millions and trillions of people doing it and it being this whole viral big thing within a month of my making it, I was really hard on myself. And as I told you, it was a friend of mine. I only only had 10 people come to the live parties and I was crushed.
(06:47)
And I saw it as a failure in this Instagram world. People saying how I made $6 million in two days and all this stuff, you like a failure. And I really just put it down and walked away from all this hard work that I did and all of these creative ideas that I had and this whole big organism. And I just thought failure because of this one number. I think I really let the outside world and the output stamp a big F. And again, I go back to that playground metaphor, I think about a little child's canning in their beautiful abstract drawing and nobody liking it and them deciding, oh, it's awful, and how much that crushes me. And here I am now back doing it again, it's holiday season and putting it back into the world. And I hadn't even looked at in a year.
(07:33)
I was like, well, it sucks. Everything sucks and you suck. And I watched it. I kept to you again, my fellow creative and good friend, I was like, oh, this is actually kind of good. I'm actually kind of proud of myself. You actually did a pretty good job. And now I can look at it in a different way. And so I hope that that's the equivalent of a little child sitting out with their parent being like, Hey, it doesn't really matter if Jimmy and Priscilla and Katie liked it, you do this really great thing in order, put it on the fridge and I'm so proud of you. And so I think in a way, my current relationship with creativity involves taking my inner child by the hand, little Alexa and being like, no, look what you did. I know you mentioned talking with your clients a lot, being proud of the tangible things. 10 people enjoyed it, and I don't know what the ripple effect in their life was like 10 people. So my relationship with creativity is being proud of what happens on the playground and what happens in my mind when I put into the world regardless of the outcome, knowing that I've put what I want into the world and that I had a good heart when I did it, and that I really ultimately can control who is going to resonate with it and who is not.
Carla (08:48):
And through that lens, how are you nourishing your creativity through this process? I think
Alexa (08:56):
It's so funny. We were just talking and I did not plan this playground metaphor. I'm just sticking with it. That's creativity right there. I think I'm nourishing my creativity again, I feel like a broken record, but compassion, compassion, compassion or so hard in ourselves and being kind to myself throughout this process of revamping and sort of putting the holiday rival put together in a slightly different way. My first creative endeavor in life was being an actor, which is very much like the audience really matters there, but I think in anything you have to nourish what's for the audience and what's for you. Like this is what I'm doing with the College Survival Kit. I'm serving other people and my only goal is people can have a little less stress and a little more fun, a better conversation with your uncle, a better Thanksgiving. It's all I want for you.
(09:50)
And then sometimes I think, oh, we have to talk about diet culture yet I want to talk about that. And I think creativity is believing that thread of I think that's good. There's somebody else in the world that also thinks that and will also see that. So there's the part where you're serving and you're always serving, right? But part of serving is nourishing what's inside of you without a constant, constant question of what's everybody else going to think. Again, back to that little child, you don't want to her be in the art studio and be like, well, what color is everybody else? I like red and I'm going to make this whole painting red and I'm going to trust that there is somebody else out there who loves red. And that's sort of a little bit what we have to do in Broadway shows. It's really funny.
(10:37)
Sometimes the ensemble, if you look close enough, you can see the ensemble in the back of a show doing their stuff, and no one is always watching that because watching the lease and doing all the scenes, but you can see all of them happen on stage. You look closely enough and you have it for the audience stage dynamic, but also they have their own little fun stuff they're doing to make the show entertaining eight times a week and nourishing creativity. You got to have stuff that's for you even when you're serving other people. And if you're lucky, that stuff that's for you ends up resonating with people like you. So I think the truest creativity is when you're being true to yourself and you find people who want that.
Carla (11:16):
And let's talk about creative blocks because we talked a lot about mindset, we talked a lot about compassion, but I also want to go deeper into for a whole year you have thought this wasn't great, this was a failure, this was an F. And I'm curious because of the toolkit, and maybe we can talk a little bit about more what the toolkit does, but also through the lens of your own work that you do with clients. How did you shift?
Alexa (11:48):
So I guess to give people who are doing my work, little overview of the holidays revival kit. It's not a course, but it probably would remind you of one you've taken on course before. It's a series of videos. There's also going to be an audio component. I know you love where I'm basically your bestie during the holiday season. If you're having a tough time at Thanksgiving and you're hiding in the bathroom video for that, you're figuring out what to buy for your niece, who's impossible to shop for, who always turns your stuff. There's video for that. You're in the car on the way to a holiday party and you're like, do I really want to go? There's video for that. I think it's all about naming the tough stuff. And even in the title, just admitting the holiday season is something to survive. It's not all goody yay hallmark Glennon Doyle always says it's not the most wonder time of the year.
(12:39)
It's just the most joy, the most anger, the most stress, most sadness. The busiest mean you're a mom, my God, the tiny humans, the Christmas list, they submit December 24th as if I can go to the toy store and go grab that exclusive Barbie for you on Christmas Eve, let me just run out and caps it on the shoulder. That's a little more about the holiday travel kit. And of course comes with different tools and resources and there's a workbook you can do and I'm really proud of it. It's the kind of thing that I would've wanted with the mindset shift, it was hard enough to just go back and look at it. I got to give myself some credit again just for sitting down and I hate watching myself. I was like, I went into it thinking, oh, but there's a question that I love to ask my clients, and they always grumble a bit.
(13:28)
They know that I'm right. I always say, is that factually true? If you say to me, I'm not really good at public speaking, or I walk into a room and nobody likes me. And I'm like, is that true? And they're like, yeah. And I'm like, so cool. It's a hundred percent true. There's no doubts factually. This is actually true. And I think that there was that mindset inside of me a bit when I was watching and just thinking, oh, did nobody buy? Is that what's happened? No, 10 people bought it. And it's actually a bit disrespectful to those people for me to be like, oh, nobody did it. Those 10 people did. And is it true that it not being a viral success meant it was bad also? No, I think we just love to tell ourselves something and run away with a lie. We're so good lying to ourselves.
(14:21)
Somebody told me recently that in a day, I think it's like 85% of our thoughts are negative. We make stories up. We're just waiting for these things. So I really think with those blocks, you have to push back on yourself. Yes, go to your internal playground, your mind, your creativity. Believe that. But the part of your brain that's saying that you're a failure and you fucked up and all this stuff like, excuse me, kids, that's never true. It's never true. And even if you have messed up in some way, sure, let's say you ruin the painting somehow you rip paper and get more paper. You just have to not believe the part of your brain that tells you you've messed things up forever. And I'm really good at doing that for all that I do for my clients and all that stuff. I'm really good at telling myself that I have messed up and I'm not perfect. And if I had done this and this and that, and you've got to find ways, whether it's through people, whether it's through friends, whether it's through your coach, whether it's through prompts. You've got to find ways to dig yourself out of the hole that says, I have messed this up beyond repair. And I think that's my biggest block when I sense a whiff of imperfection, I'm like, well, you messed it up. Leave and see you later. As a creative, we can't afford to give up every time we think we've made irreparable mistake.
Carla (15:44):
Let's talk about the shift this year with Pinterest, because you and I have had so many texts and correspondence around what you're doing differently to promote this year.
Alexa (15:58):
Yeah. Oh my God, yes. I was hoping we thought about Pinterest, shout out to Megan. So you had Pinterest expert Megan on your podcast, and I just knew better from your world. And I'd heard about Pinterest and I really didn't get it. I think I was still thinking about Pinterest as the thing from middle school people pinned their quotes on. But last year I did some fast and furious marketing and I was like, let's do a paid ad here and an add here and let's reject people here. And again, in fear of compassion, proud of myself, I put a lot out there, but it was very much like go, go without really reflecting as I want. And I really didn't treat Pinterest. I think it's the one engine that I did not use in a way specific to its engine. I know TikTok, I know Instagram and Facebook, so I made content for those things.
(16:49)
Pinterest, I just put the TikTok content on there, the video there, and it did absolutely nothing. And so you recommended beginner course that Megan does, and I thought, you know what? Why not? I have a slight aversion to courses. Sometimes I see a lot of them, and I've done some too that I've wasted money on. I've just been like, why did I pay too much for this? I don't know what I'm learning. But immediately I texted to do two videos and it's so different, and I've learned so much about Pinterest so far. She knows what she's doing in every single way she should. They should be giving her commission somehow a Pinterest. She is the real deal in every single way, just so smart and so informed. I feel like I'm spending the evening with her when I'm doing these. I have a date. So over our board descriptions, I've got to do this.
(17:37)
But also I've learned a lot about my own business, and I've had to really clarify my own messaging through how specific she is making me think. It's really not just about Pinterest, it's about my marketing, my messaging. I even made some edits to the course based on things that I really admire through her course to my toolkit. All the videos are very bite-sized. I love, and there's a lot of them. I thought, oh, this actually is a student. It makes me feel like I can digest this differently. I like this. And so I didn't take this course to figure out how to edit my actual kid, but I saw another entrepreneur in this thing and I thought, oh, I like this. And I don't know if we're always taught to think that way mindset wise, to learn from our colleagues and things like that. So I've just really loved it.
(18:26)
I haven't even finished it yet. And I have so much to do and I'm so excited. And I think with marketing, you have to just accept that the online landscape is always changing and let marketing push you to get more and more and more specific. And who are you selling this to? What is the benefit? And that can make you feel, I think if you feel confident walking into a room and saying, Hey, I have this. It's going to help you do this. You should try it because of this, then you can do anything online with your marketing. But if you can't, sometimes marketing will show you those holes. It's okay. And you just figure them out. And I've really been able to do that with Megan Megan's guidance, and I feel very supported in that journey. It's the best course I've ever taken. It's the best course I've ever taken in my life and I haven't even finished it. And I want to write a testimonial for her at every single stage and just flood the website. I love her so much.
Carla (19:21):
This is so magical. I'm so grateful that you received so much support from this course. I'm such a fan of Megan too. I can't wait for people to check out the holiday toolkit. Can you tell us how we can find you, how we can work with you? How can we support you?
Alexa (19:39):
Absolutely everything. The hub of everything is l jordan.com and it'll be in the show notes. You also can find the link to the nuance diaries. Do substack.com there, which is where I do my weekly or most twice weekly essays that I call what Sensitive Deeply Feeling People are Thinking, but not saying like your group chat, but out loud.
Carla (20:03):
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.