BONUS Podcast Takeover With Jenna Edwards

Today we are sharing a bonus episode, a behind the scenes conversation with one of my business bestie’s, Jenna Edwards.  We share how we know one another, spoiler, it's been decades.  And she shares how overcoming a massive trauma helped her find happiness. Tune in to this very special episode.  

 

Transcript:

Katie: Welcome to Everyday Happiness, where we create lasting happiness in about two minutes a day through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities),  happiness science, and musings about life. 

I'm your host, Katie Jefcoat, and today, I’m chatting with my business bestie, the person that breathes life and confidence into my space when it's hard for me to see it for myself. She is all about the concept that she created called “Aggressive Optimism®”  and she's one of the most favorite people in my world. You’re going to love her, I can not wait, Jenna, welcome to the show!

Jenna: Oh my gosh! I don’t even know what to say after that beautiful introduction Katie. Thank you! Thanks for having me, I’m so excited. 

Katie: We are going to have so much fun. I can not wait for whoever listens to this, to hear your magic, to just be a part of this world. So friends, we did not rehearse this. We have no idea what’s going to come out of our mouths for the next ten or so minutes. Just buckle up. I feel like that’s how it goes. 

Jenna: I’m really paying attention to the time because you and I can talk about happiness for hours and never get tired. So, ten minutes, got it. 

Katie: It’s going to be so much fun. So first, tell us a little bit about you. Like how this person came to be. All the goodness. 

Jenna: Oh my gosh, the audience would be like, how do you even do that in ten minutes? So in a nutshell, Katie and I met when we were in the 4th grade, which I love. Both of us moved to this small town in Minnesota and we lost touch after graduation and found each other again because of fate. I really do think it’s fate. I can’t believe we weren’t friends from the moment we met, but now that we are, I can’t imagine life without you. You bring me so much happiness. 

I’m so excited sitting in my living room at 6:00 in the morning and I feel this burst of giggle that I’m trying to stifle because Katie brings me so much joy and fills my cup so much.

In a nutshell, I grew up in a small town with Katie, moved to Los Angeles to be an actor, and was an actor for a second. And then a huge incident happened that you can read all about everywhere if you just Google me, which is where Aggressive Optimism® was formed. I had severe post traumatic stress disorder that left me stuttering when I talked, unable to read, couldn't write, and do all the things that you have to do as an actor.

And so I had to do some serious intentional margin work way before Intentional Margins® was created, and some serious Aggressive Optimism® work in order to overcome the PTSD and the darkness that was in my head on a regular basis.

And now I really want to get out there, that if you are struggling with something and people are saying you're going to struggle with it forever,  if you decide that you don't want to and you commit to doing the work, that doesn't have to be your reality.

I don't have PTSD anymore, and I was told that I was going to have it for the rest of my life.  Just recently I ran into somebody who was also told they were going to have PTSD for the rest of their life and they needed to hear that that wasn't the case.

So I'm sharing it with you because I’m moved to share it with you. Whatever your circumstances are, you can overcome them. It's just a matter of deciding and doing the work. And it's not easy, y'all, it's not easy.

Just hopefully that gives you a little bit of hope. But for me, it was surrounding myself with people like Katie and listening to podcasts like Everyday Happiness and yeah, that's my story in a nutshell. It's not really a good story, I suppose.

Katie:  Well, share with the listeners a little bit, if you can, about what this traumatic incident was, so they have a little bit of context into how this all started to shake out for you.

And if you can remember the year when this happened.

Jenna: It was back in 2003, if you can believe it. It’s called the Farmers Market crash, if you want to Google it. But in Santa Monica, California, they have a farmer's market every Wednesday and Saturday.

I was buying oranges at the farmers market on a Wednesday and this old man drove through the farmers market, four blocks, hitting over 60 of us and killing ten people. I saw three people die that day, and my brain just couldn’t handle it. I suffered, like I said earlier, from severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

This was something that was traumatic, right? There's no other way to say it. And so for context, that was it. And it took three and a half years before I didn't have a flashback again. So just to give you a little bit of time context, it was a long road.

Katie:   And then you decided, you and your husband, to go on a road trip in a teardrop trailer for an entire year. And I saw it on Facebook. So faith and Facebook really is what connected us again, not that long ago.

Jenna:  Yeah,  it was 2017, and it was crazy, like another traumatic thing had happened. It wasn't quite as traumatic as the farmers market crash for me, but something life changing. And we just decided life was too short.

We had always wanted to do this year-long-cross-country-roadtrip-live-in-a-camper type of scenario. And so we sold all of our stuff and packed up and went out on the road for a year. We were going through DC. And there's Katie, and I couldn't believe it. It was like it really was fate. It really was. 

Katie:  It's so fun. And we basically talked every day or every week since that meeting.

Jenna: Almost five years ago. That's mind blowing.

Katie:  And we think all the time. It's so interesting, you know, how people come into your life for seasons, reasons and lifetimes for different friendships and how this works. I just think it's so interesting for the listeners to think these people clearly are attracted to one another. We have a lot of the same values, yet were never friends in high school. We knew each other. We did not hang out at each other's house. We didn't go to dances together in groups. We just weren't friends.

But we knew of one another because we grew up in a small town of 2,006 people in the middle of a cornfield. Our high school graduating class wasn't that big, so we knew of one another. Somehow we said yes to a friend request when Facebook started, and then years later…

Jenna: Isn't that so funny? I mean, honestly, it's because you intimidated the bleep out of me in high school. Katie, let's be real. It's so interesting to think about our kid brains and teen brains because everything is so big. It's just life or death on a daily basis.

You did, and I knew you were, like, doing your thing. You had really clear goals. Even though we weren't friends, I knew your goals. It was a lot. And I had the same. I really didn't like the town we grew up in, and so I wanted to get out so badly to move to Los Angeles.

So I had my own thing and you had your own thing. And I'm so glad that our things crossed in the most beautiful way at the perfect time. We were both kind of, all of a sudden, on the same path, even though we live on opposite sides of the country.

You would think you would be on the same path when you live next door to each other, but no, it took moving on opposite sides of the country for us to really connect. Fascinating.

Katie:  And both of us doing really some in-depth work on what it means to be happy, you would say what it means to be optimistic after your trauma. I didn't necessarily have the same trauma, but was also on the path of what does happiness look like? How do we get more happiness? What is this?

And we both had been on really parallel paths since we were in high school on how do we create this happiness? But yet we were silently kind of doing it ourselves because maybe it wasn't a cool thing to do, or maybe we didn't know each other was doing it, but once we talked and we're like, wait, you do that too? You think about that?

We were like magic. All of the glitter and the sparkles and the magic just comes together, right? It's so interesting.

Jenna:  I feel like as you were talking, it reminded me of what they always say with romantic relationships. But I also think it's true for friendships and we don't talk about it often. You have to figure out how to be a whole person before you can be a half of a couple or part of a group and be an effective part of a group. And I think that's what you just described, it’s basically that, we had to go off and figure out who we were individually, otherwise you would have intimidated me still.

Do you know what I mean? And we couldn't be friends if I was intimidated by you. And so it's just by the way, Katie is the sweetest, most amazing, approachable human on the planet. My intimidation was 100%, my own, like, hang ups and issues and all of that kind of stuff, as, you know, because teens. But, it's exactly that, right?

You have to go off. You have to figure out who you are. You have to find you as a person and make a whole complete picture of yourself in order to be confident enough to be part of something bigger, which I think our friendship is like.

You encourage me to do the things that are so scary. I could never have taken that encouragement if I hadn't done all the self work. And I think that's important for people to hear.

Sometimes it's like we talk about it all the time.

Reason, season, lifetime. Sometimes your friends are there for a reason. Sometimes a season, sometimes a lifetime. Sometimes that lifetime is in spurts and chunks, and you're not the same person that you were when you were 16 years old. And so it's just fascinating to me. I love our friendship. The end. 

Katie: Well, that is a great place to transition because you are getting so much more of Jenna this week. All of the things that she brings to the table as an activist about the causes that she believes in and actor and film producer and an executive now, like working and doing the most amazing things, and leading teams.

She gets to do so much, and I can't wait for her to share with you some of her aggressive optimism and really, the way that she's framed happiness and what matters as she was going through trauma and other things in her life. So stay tuned for tomorrow when Jenna takes over Everyday Happiness. And until next time, remember, kindness is contagious.

About Jenna: 

Jenna is a small town girl (like Katie) living big dreams in Los Angeles.  Founder of Aggressive Optimism®, she’s excited to talk this week about all things good vibes.  She likes to hang out over on the ‘gram at https://www.instagram.com/jennaedwardslife/.

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