Messy Action: Jenna Monaco on Fear, Anxiety, and Not Waiting for Perfect
Introduction
Jenna Monaco, the Bay Area host of the Spark Intentions podcast and the creator of Messy Bun, Messy Action, recorded this episode with ZADAN while visiting friends in Los Angeles. What follows is about two and a half hours on fear, purpose, anxiety and the cost of waiting, told mostly through what each of them had lived.
Eleven years of waiting
Around 1:17:42, ZADAN asks why she does not just clock in and call it a day. Her answer: "I tried that for 11 years." She paid her way through school, finished a two-year associate program at a fashion institute in San Francisco, and worked retail, at one point as one of the youngest managers in her company. Afraid to explore other options, she stayed on the traditional route she was raised on. When she finally hit a wall, she hired a success coach, reasoning that "clearly like I need outside help." The podcast that came out of that work had passed 2,000 downloads in four or five months. Looking back, she puts it plainly: "I was waiting 11 years for perfect to start." The brand name is the fix: throw your hair up in a bun and do it.
Fear versus faith
Early on (around 9:37) ZADAN lays out the framework he keeps returning to. A plumber's real message might be making families feel safe, and the plumbing is only the vehicle. People who never act on their message, he says, are choosing fear over faith: fear that they cannot do it, and faith in someone else's ability to provide for them. Around 13:40 he uses himself as the example: in his first three months in California he paid rent by playing guitar at Huntington Beach, and playing because he had to made him start to hate the music. Jenna answers with a story from a Brendon Burchard talk. He asked a room to raise their hands if they had a goal or a dream, then to keep them up if their best friend knew what it was, and every hand went down. Her read: "we're so afraid to even want something because we're so afraid of not getting it."
Joy is a choice
Around 1:37:50 ZADAN separates two words most people use interchangeably. Happiness, in his telling, is a chemical reaction that can arrive or vanish without a cause, which is how he describes depression: feeling something terrible when "it's just Tuesday." Joy is different. "Joy is a choice. Happiness is a feeling." He ties it to a habit he calls living for the version of himself that wakes up in the morning: thanking past me, setting up the studio, writing, doing whatever makes tomorrow easier than today. Jenna says she had never separated joy and happiness that way, and connects it to The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.
Anxiety that shows up once things are calm
The most personal stretch starts around 1:57:41. Jenna says her panic attacks began about a year after her father died, at a point when she was in therapy, living in the safest home she had ever had, and felt fine. She would wake at 3am almost every night with a racing heart, sweating, sure she was dying. Blood tests came back normal. What finally helped was a novel: a character had the same symptoms, the book called them panic attacks, and once Jenna recognized hers, they stopped. They still come now and then, but she has learned to catch the triggers early. ZADAN describes a similar pattern from his office job, where anxiety showed up once the bills were paid and his life looked enviable from the outside, then fed on itself as anxiety about having anxiety. Jenna says she did not have the option of medication and does not think she personally needed it, while noting that for some people with a chemical imbalance it can help.
A request for parents
Near the end, around 2:19:42, Jenna talks about growing up as an only child and the peacemaker between her mother and father, sometimes hugging herself and saying she was okay because comfort had to come from herself. They close with a request to any parent listening: "there's a difference between informing your kids and sharing your problems with your kids." A child, they argue, is not equipped for adult problems and ends up picking sides.
Conclusion
Neither of them describes the work as finished. Jenna calls her anxiety a scar that can still "itch or burn" sometimes, and says the difference now is having "the tools to stop it before it gets out of hand." That is the plainest version of messy action in the episode: start before it is perfect, and keep the tools close.
Listen to the Related Episode
"Sparking Your Intentions, and Creating Messy Action" with Jenna Monaco