Hooray!!!
Finally.
FINALLY! After many delays and a learning curve much steeper than I anticipated, I am so thrilled to tell you that the podcast is up and running and ready to go!
Ep. 00 is an introduction to the podcast where you’ll hear my hopes and dreams and swirly visions for the future of the podcast and learn who will be co-hosting with me. I’ll also share more with you about myself including my five minute life story, the biggest challenges I am facing right now, and the thing I am ALWAYS talking about.
Thank you for listening!
Show Notes:
Former blog - SortaCrunchy
Spirit-Led Parenting book (affiliate link)
Find me on Facebook and Instagram, and sign up for the Sorta Awesome Mailing List
Progger! Thank you to Progger for allowing us to use the song Strut.
Find more of Progger’s incredible music on their website, at BandCamp, and on Facebook and Twitter!
Amazing, wonderful, sassy, brilliant co-hosts!
Rebekah of Simply Rebekah
Laura of Hollywood Housewife
Kelly of Love Well
TRANSCRIPT:
[00:00:00] Hi everyone, I'm Megan Tietz and this is the very first ever episode of Sorta Awesome.
Hi guys. Welcome to the show. I cannot tell you how excited I am to be introducing you to this brand new project today. Some of you are listening because you know me through my writing. Or maybe we've met each other through social media through the years, but some of you have maybe just stumbled across the show, maybe because you were attracted by the shiny gold glitter.
Um, or maybe the [00:01:00] word awesome, just really speaks to you. , and actually if you're here because of the glitter and the word, awesome, come sit by me because I have a feeling that we are going to be really good friends. However you found this show, welcome. I am truly so glad that you're here. To give you just a tiny bit of background on who I am, I spent the last eight years.
blogging@sortacrunchy.net. I blogged there from 2006 to the end of 2014. I closed my blog at the end of 2014 because I was feeling pretty burnt out on the medium of blogging, and I was really ready to start some new projects. And this project, this podcast is the first one that I am finally releasing into the.
So why the name sorta awesome. Well, first, the easier explanation is the word. Awesome and sadly, . That's just sort of one of my trademark words I've been using and overusing the word awesome. Going all the way back to high school. I probably should have outgrown that word [00:02:00] by now, but I haven't. And so here we are.
It is a word that I use all the time to describe all kinds of things. So Awesome. Was kind of, um, Well, it was, it was a good pick to describe what my plans are for this. Also because as an E N F P, those of you who are into Myers Briggs, uh, personality types, I'm an E N F P, and as such, I really genuinely believe that everyone has innate sense of awesomeness.
I see the best in people and I am passionate about helping people dig in and find the awesome that is already there within. Now what about the word sorta? Well, like I said, the name of my blog was sorta crunchy. That came from the fact that when I first started blogging, I was just starting to dip my toes into the world of crunchy or, um, natural living parenting practices.
Um, and I chose sorta [00:03:00] because, I really, truly believe in the freedom of doing stuff halfway , and I don't mean that in the negative sense at all. What I find in my life is that I have a tendency if I'm not careful to believe in doing things all or nothing, um, either doing something full on a hundred percent, totally all in or.
Giving up and not doing it at all. But when I embrace the freedom of sorta, then I realize that I can adopt things into my life that work for me and simply let go of the things that don't work for me. And that was where sorta crunchy came from, and I've really stuck with that sort of philosophy. And applied it to a lot of things in my life.
I know for some of you that might have a negative con connotation of doing things halfway, but for me it allows me the freedom to try new things and not worry about being perfect at it, not being worrying about being dogmatic about it, [00:04:00] just giving something a try and seeing where we go with it. Um, so instead of being full blast all the way on one extreme or doing something not at.
Where you miss out on lots of rewards if you just don't try and just give up early. Um, then sort of is, it's a great word and it's a great way to approach life. I really like the fact that the word sort of, for me, it honors the fact that all of us are in a journey. All of us are. Um, Sort of the SumTotal, I guess you could say, of our past experiences, the things that we've learned in our past, and combine that combined with what our dreams and hopes and our potentials for the future are from the day that we are born, from the time we take our first.
Breath. We've left the sort of the 0% part of the spectrum behind us. We are constantly learning and growing and engaging in the world around us, but none of us, not a single one of us, have [00:05:00] arrived to the point of being 100% perfect, all knowing, all knowledgeable in anything. And I really feel like the word sorta really honors.
So that is how I came up with a name, um, sort of awesome for this project and for, um, a lot of the things that I'm going to be working on in the weeks and months to come. I have a very good friend who helped talk me through this process and I'm so thankful for her help that we could land on that. I truly believe that all of us are capable of noticing and experiencing and living all of the awesome things that are around.
and sorta is there to remind us that it's not all awesome all the time, that's for sure. But the potential for awesome is always there. I guess you could say that. That's the driving mission of this podcast to embrace the freedom of sorta in the pursuit of awesome. [00:06:00] So what can you expect from this show?
I'm planning for it to be a once a week. , um, for the most part, each episode after this will have a co-host. I've asked three friends of mine, Laura Tremaine of Hollywood housewife.com, Kelly Gordon of love well blog.com and Rebecca hoffer of simply rebecca.com. to join me and they're going to co-host on a rotating basis.
So there'll be one co-host per show. Now that leaves about one show a month, when either I'll have a guest co-host and I may even do a few shows solo. We'll see the start of each show. My co-host and I are each going to share with you all are awesome of the week. This is gonna be an an item that we've picked to share with you.
That could be anything from a book we're reading to a. , um, a song that we are really digging, a blog post that really spoke to us. A TV show or a TV [00:07:00] series, even something that happened to us in real life. Just something to share with you. Something that we hope will bring you something awesome to check out or think about or relate to.
Just something that, to bring into your life. In that way. And then, and most importantly, we each show will contain a question and answer segment where we take your questions and give our best shot at answering them. And I'm gonna talk more about that and at the end of the show,
And so today's show is all about introducing this show to you, all the listeners, and each of the three next episodes of the three upcoming episodes are going to be shows where I introduce you all to each of my co-hosts. And to do that, I'm going to ask them a series of three questions that will just give you an overview of who they are, what their background is, where they're coming from, and those types of things.
I thought, I figured it's only fair if I'm going to put them in the hot seat and grill them a little. About [00:08:00] themselves and, and who they are that I should do that as well. And this will give me an intro, intro, a chance to introduce me to you if you aren't familiar with who I am or what my background is.
And maybe even some of you who have been reading my blog or I've read my book are familiar with me. You might even learn a few new things about me as well. So the first hot seat question is the five minute life story. I am a huge believer in. Um, finding out the life story of people. In fact, I have been very guilty of this practice of when I, uh, become friends with somebody and meeting with somebody for the first time, or even just kind of grilling people at dinner parties at other social functions.
I love to dig deep and just find out from the beginning a little bit about each person's life story because I think that that helps us really shape. Our understanding of each other. So I'm going to be asking each of my co-hosts to share their five minute life story. So I'm going to dig in and give you a brief overview of my life story as well.[00:09:00]
I was born in June in Houston, Texas, in the middle of the heatwave and the air conditioner in my parents' apartment had gone out. Um, I totally and completely blamed that fact for the, uh, fact that I am a complete warm weather person. I cannot. Bear to be in cold weather, and I think it's because I came from such a hot and humid beginning, but, so I was born in 1977 in June in Houston, Texas.
I'll save you the math. I am 37, almost 38, and I'm a Gemini. I am also the oldest of four kids. I'm the oldest of four kids that who were born in the span of about six years. You can imagine that my parents, uh, stayed very busy for a very long. . I grew up all over Oklahoma in different small towns around Oklahoma.
I graduated from high school in 1995, and then I went to a small state school here in Oklahoma called East Central University. I went to East Central while all of my [00:10:00] friends, all of my friends, went off to the University of Oklahoma or other universities. I didn't know a single friend when I left for college.
In retrospect, now I have to say I highly recommend that starting over. With a brand new, fresh, clean slate at the age of 18 can be a very beautiful thing. So I went to school and, uh, majored in English with an emphasis in secondary education in the spring semester of my freshman year. I met a very cute and very funny football player named Kyle, and we started dating and, uh, Nine or 10 months later, we got engaged and we have been together ever since We got married the summer between our junior and senior year of college.
We stayed there in that, um, small town where our university was for a few years after because at that point Kyle had decided that he wanted to pursue college coaching. So even though I had graduated with my [00:11:00] degree in education, I decided to start my master's work and I started to do that. To get a master's in education in library media science.
However, I did not get to finish it because before either of us could finish our graduate work at East Central Kyle got a job as a graduate assistant at Texas Christian University or TCU in Fort Worth, and we moved to Fort Worth in 2001. Kyle started coaching at TCU and I got a job teaching high school.
I. Junior and senior English at Burleson High School. Best known as being the home, um, and alma Mater of Kelly Clarkson of American Idol Fame. In fact, I was teaching at Burleson during that season when she won American Idol. It was all very exciting. . So I taught there for three years, junior and senior English.
I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And then in the spring of 2004, Kyle got a job as an assistant coach at Texas State University in San Marcos. And so I finished out teaching that spring semester and then I moved down, um, to [00:12:00] San Marcos with him. And I never went back to teaching because right before I finished the school year, uh, we found out we were expecting our first.
and so I just never went back to the classroom after that. Um, Daisy, our oldest was born in January of 2005, and while we were still in San Marcos at Texas State, our second daughter, Eliza Joy, was born in September of 2007. . After our second daughter came along, it became pretty clear to Kyle and I that although we loved being part of the collegiate coaching community, and Kyle was fantastic at what he did, he loved coaching, loved being around the kids.
It just became very clear that coaching is, um, it's an exciting. Career and it's an exciting profession to be in, but it's pretty hard on family life. There was a lot of time, a lot of time spent at the office and on the field and traveling for recruiting. And so after lots of prayer and thought, um, Kyle left coaching and became an a financial advisor.
Another [00:13:00] reason for Kyle leaving coaching was that we lived very far away from our families at that time. And you know how it is once children come along, um, sometimes there's that part of you that just wants to be back close to, um, close to your own parents and your siblings and really get to enjoy, um, your, your, your raising kids near your folks.
Not everybody does that, of course, but it was important to Kyle and I to do that so, He became a financial advisor, the firm he was working for moved us back to Oklahoma. We lived in a, um, beautiful small town out to the west of Oklahoma. for four years, and that is where I did a lot, a lot of my online work, a lot of my blogging happened there, my writing for other blogs.
Also, while I was there, a friend and I, uh, my friend Laura Oyer and I signed a contract to write a book. Um, and we did, we wrote that book , and it was released in April of 2012. That book is called Spirit Led Parenting From Fear [00:14:00] to Freedom in Baby's First Year. And basically it's in a nutshell, it's a baby book that says you don't need any baby books to know how to make the best decisions.
For your new baby that you can trust the work of the Holy Spirit moving in your heart to know how to make the best decisions as a new parent. So, um, let's see. Also, so that was in April of 2012, when that book came out in May of 2012, our family moved to Oklahoma City where we live now. Kyle transferred to a different financial advising.
and a month later we found out we were pregnant again. I had just turned 35 and we thought we would just give it a try and see what would happen if we added one more kiddo to our family. Um, to our surprise that one more kiddo came with an identical twin brother, and in February of 2013, our third and fourth children were.
John, Kyle and Mack are our twin toddlers. So that is my family, and that's where we [00:15:00] are right now. I think that kind of catches us up on my life story. Um, again, I spent many years being a writer and a blogger. Um, but towards the end of 2014, I just began to really, really have the, just kind of gnawing, um, I don't know how to say it.
Idea. I just couldn't, couldn't shake the idea that there was something else out there that I wanted to do other than writing. I've been writing in one way or another through creative writing, through school, through college for a long time, since I was in elementary school, and I just really was ready to, to take on something new to grow, to really push myself to explore something new.
And so that's why I closed my blog at the end of 2014. and it just, all of the signs we're pointing towards starting a podcast as taking that on as the next big project. And so that brings us to the second hot seat question I'll be asking my [00:16:00] co-hosts, and that is, what current challenges are you facing in life?
So to answer that myself, there is no doubt that the biggest challenge I feel like, that I'm grappling with every. Is how to continue to pursue creative pursuits, how to create content, how to pursue what I feel like is a driving mission for my life and a purpose for my life. In the midst of every day, mothering with four children, 50% of whom are toddlers, , I don't have very much free time at all.
So that is something that I'm continually working on, um, refining and tweaking my daily schedule to create time and then to protect that time as time that is for me where I can engage these pursuits that bring fulfillment and bring direction to my life. It's something, like I said, I feel like every single day I'm.
How am I gonna [00:17:00] make this work? Just yesterday, I had so much that I, uh, work that I had wanted to get done on the podcast, and of course, that would be a day when both boys skip their naps. Nap time has been for a while now, the time that I spend working on. my stuff. And so when they both skip naps, then it's becomes a challenge to figure out how that's going to work, uh, how I'm gonna sort of change plans and work around it.
And so that brings us to the last hot seat question that I'm gonna be asking my co-hosts as I introduce them to you. And that question is, what is the thing that you are always talking about? What is the topic that you are just so interested in that you find yourself bringing it up in conversation to friends and family.
In fact, friends and family might be getting a little tired of you bringing it up all the time. . As I think about the answer to that question, one thing is abundantly clear. I am super, super into personality types. I alluded to this earlier. I'm [00:18:00] very into the Myers-Briggs system. I discovered it, gosh, probably five or six years ago, maybe.
It's been longer now, and I, I checked it out because I recognized that my husband and. Extremely different personalities, extremely different, and yet we've been married for, um, almost 17 years. We have navigated ways to get along to understand each other, but through Myers Briggs, I really wanted to dig deep to understand myself better and to understand him better so that I could kind of figure out, I see things this way because my brain works this way, yet his brain works this way.
And so he responds to information This. . I really love Myers Briggs because it helps us understand on a cognitive level, , how we understand the information that we're taking in, into our brains, into all of our senses, how we respond to it and why. And I think that's kind of, um, a trait of ENFPs. We overall are a type who really like to get [00:19:00] to know people.
We like to make connections. We like to solve the puzzles of people and how they work, why they do what they do. So personality stuff is something that you will always find me talking about. Um, I, I. Try to slip it into conversation with friends. My closest friends, I've figured out their types or I've basically twisted their arms until they've taken a, um, an internet version of the Myers Briggs, uh, test.
And once I know their type, then I can, and I can and do often, uh, say, well, you know, because you're this type, then you are seeing it this way, and those types of things. So personality stuff, that's something that's going to. Quite a bit. I can almost promise you on this sort of awesome podcast. So that brings us to the end of me talking about myself.
Thank goodness. Let's wrap this part up. And I just wanna say again, thank you so much for checking out, sort of awesome. I'm so glad that you're here. And as I mentioned towards the beginning of the show, the heart and the soul [00:20:00] of the show sorta awesome is going to be a q and A segment where you all, as listeners, submit questions to us and we basically just take a stab at giving you our best answer.
Um, We wanna cover all kinds of topics. Everything from parenting and marriage, all kinds of family life issues to personality stuff like I just mentioned. Um, pop culture things, movie recommendations, book recommendations. Um, Gosh, you name it. We want to cover it in the q and a segment of the show. This won't work if we don't get any questions.
So what I wanna do is direct you to where you can submit your questions to sorta awesome so that we can take a stab at answering them for you. If you will go to, it's going to, I'm gonna take you to Tumblr. Some of you may be pro Tumblr, some of you maybe have never even clicked on the site, but this is gonna be super easy.
Whether you're a pro or a novice at Tumblr, I'm gonna send you to sorta awesome Megan. So it's [00:21:00] sorta s o r t a, awesome Megan, m e g a n, dot tumblr.com. Once you click on. Page and it's very, we're we're bare bones operating. It's sort awesome Megan, right now. Um, there's not a lot there, but you will see, um, a place where you can click on the link that says, ask us.
That will take you to a question box and you just type in your question. There's even an option for you to ask the question anonymously. You can check that box. If it's a question that's a little bit sensitive, maybe you don't wanna reveal. Who you are in asking the question, that's totally fine. You can check that box and that will submit the question to us and we will take your question on in an upcoming show.
Again. That's sorta awesome, Megan. Dot tumblr.com. If you are good at tumbling or if you just like to follow blogs in general, you can follow my Tumblr there. Either follow it through your Tumblr dashboard or if you subscribe to blogs through service like Feedly or Blog Levin, you can subscribe to sort of [00:22:00] awesome Megan as well.
Other places you can find me, you can find me on Facebook for now at facebook.com/sort of crunchy. Hopefully in the future we'll be switching that name over to sort of awesome. But for. You can find me, it's sort of crunchy. On Facebook, on Instagram, I'm Megan underscore tees. That's m e g a n underscore, t i e, tz.
And if you would like to sign up to get updates on the show when each new show comes out, other things happening for sorta awesome, you can go to tiny letter.com/sorta. Awesome. And sign up for my mailing list there. I'll include links to all of those in today's show. And finally, I want to say thank you so very much to the band Proger for allowing us to use their incredibly amazing song Strut as our in and out music on sort of Austin.
I'll get you some more information about Proger also in today's show notes, and I think we're gonna go ahead and wrap it up. I will meet you back here next time as we explore, [00:23:00] discover, and discuss all the things that make life sorta amazingly awesome.