Why Wake Up, Sunshine? The Story Behind the Podcast

“Ready is a lie.”

Jenna says it toward the end of our first conversation, but it could almost be the reason Wake Up, Sunshine exists at all. This podcast had lived in her head for years before it became something real. When it finally did, it wasn’t because every piece had fallen perfectly into place. It was because a microphone showed up on Jenna’s vision board, Paige felt an unexpectedly loud nudge to join her, and we both decided to see what would happen if we stopped waiting.

In our first full episode of the Wake Up Sunshine podcast, we’re sharing where the idea came from. How two cousins who have known each other forever found our way back to each other as adults, and why this particular name came to mean so much more than we expected.

Why Wake Up, Sunshine Started With a Microphone

Jenna had been carrying the idea for years

The first spark for the podcast came to Jenna a few years ago at one of the retreats Paige co-hosts with her mom, Sarah, who is also Jenna’s aunt. During a cacao ceremony meant to make space for inspiration and creative energy, Jenna started thinking about the kind of work she wanted to do beyond being a family law attorney and mediator. She kept coming back to women’s stories of growth, healing, and transformation, partly because her own life had given her a very different relationship with those words.

Jenna’s divorce had been one of the biggest catalysts for change in her life. She knew people often heard “divorce” and immediately saw only the sadness of it, but that wasn’t the whole story for her. There had been pain, of course, but there had also been an enormous amount of growth on the other side. New places, new interests, and a deeper exploration of who she was outside of her marriage. She wanted to create a place where women could talk honestly about those kinds of transitions without reducing them to either tragedy or a perfectly wrapped-up success story.

The podcast idea stayed with her, but life kept moving around it. There were other transitions, including a move, and for a while the show remained something she wanted to create rather than something she had actually begun. Then, at a retreat in January, Jenna put a picture of a microphone on her vision board as a way of saying, mostly to herself, this is the year I’m finally doing it.

Paige saw the microphone and felt something she couldn’t ignore

When everyone shared their vision boards with the group, Paige saw Jenna’s microphone and immediately had a thought that felt strangely loud: You need to ask her if you can host the podcast with her. Her first response was much more practical. She didn’t have time for another project, and the whole idea felt a little ridiculous. Still, the thought kept coming back until she finally went to Jenna and asked, “How would you feel if we hosted it together?”

Jenna describes what happened next as a “big body yes.” Part of it was the excitement of getting to create something with Paige and spend more intentional time together. Part of it was realizing that the idea had been missing a partner, not only for accountability but because our personalities and skill sets fit together in ways that suddenly made the whole thing feel possible.

Paige’s work lives in photography, video production, YouTube, marketing, and the technical side of bringing ideas into the world. Jenna had been holding the original vision for the conversations and the stories she wanted to make space for. Once we decided to do it together, the energy around the podcast changed quickly. Conversations started happening, guests began coming together, and the thing that had sat still for years finally felt like it had somewhere to go.

We’ve Been Cousins Forever, but We’re Still Meeting New Versions of Each Other

Long before the podcast, there were magazines and membership cards

We’re cousins, 11 months apart, and we have known each other for Jenna’s entire life. We grew up in a close family where holidays meant everyone together, especially Thanksgiving, and even after Paige’s family started moving around the country, there was always a sense that everyone eventually made their way back. Some of our earliest memories together are also surprisingly creative, which makes the fact that we’re making a show together now feel a little less random.

As kids, we created our own version of the Mickey Mouse Club, complete with cards, IDs, and check-ins. We made a magazine, came up with a show called Sally Jessica, and had characters and alter egos that somehow remained fully alive in our imaginations even if we hadn’t seen each other for a year. When Paige moved away, Jenna would fly out during the summers to visit her in places like Kentucky, Washington, and Texas. We also apparently managed to have only one truly memorable fight, which involved Paige throwing a pencil box and her mom reminding us that we loved each other.

Adulthood created more distance than childhood ever had. There was college, marriage, children, careers, moves, relationships, and the very practical reality that holiday plane tickets are expensive. There were years when we still loved each other deeply but simply weren’t in each other’s day-to-day lives. More recently, family gatherings and the retreats brought us back together more consistently, and we started realizing that while we had been growing separately, some of the questions we were asking had become surprisingly similar.

We grew up with the same foundation and started exploring beyond it

Both of us grew up in a conservative Christian family. As adults, we each began exploring spirituality, healing, and different ways of understanding ourselves outside some of the frameworks we had grown up with. When we reconnected more deeply, there was a sense of recognition in discovering that the other person had been curious about some of the same things: yoga, meditation, energy, astrology, tarot, and other healing modalities we hadn’t necessarily grown up talking about.

That doesn’t mean we landed in exactly the same place. We don’t agree about everything, and we don’t expect to agree with every guest we bring onto the podcast. For Paige especially, that openness to different perspectives feels connected to another part of her story. She moved through seven states while growing up and attended 13 schools before graduating from high school, an experience she didn’t particularly enjoy at the time because every move meant starting over.

Looking back, though, she can see something those constant beginnings gave her. “I do feel that the gift that it gave me was the ability to sit with any person from any background in any place and actually be able to have a conversation with them.” That ability to stay curious about someone else’s life without needing it to look exactly like ours is part of what we hope to carry into Wake Up, Sunshine too.

The Growth We’re Talking About Is the Growth We’re Living

Paige is finding another layer of letting go

Paige now lives in Arizona with her husband, Alex, their two teenage daughters, three cats, and two dogs. Her professional life has gone through its own transformations. She coached cheerleading for 17 years and owned a cheer gym for 12 before moving into work that now includes photography, video production, YouTube production and management, marketing, and teaching people how to become more visible online. There are entire future conversations inside that reinvention alone.

In this season, though, one of the things Paige feels life teaching her is another layer of letting go of perfectionism. The previous year had been unusually slow in her business, and she remembers wanting things to happen so badly that she felt as though she might actually be pushing them further away. Then this year arrived and, almost all at once, some of her favorite clients came to her with projects she genuinely wanted to say yes to.

The abundance was welcome, but it created a different challenge. Paige has always had very high standards for her work, and suddenly she had to look closely at where those standards were serving the project and where she might simply be spending too long perfecting details no one else would ever notice. If something would normally take six hours and she only had three, she had to figure out what mattered most and what she could release.

Jenna summed it up during the conversation as, “Do your best and let it go.” Paige immediately translated that into her own language: “Bless and release.” For someone who has described herself as a recovering perfectionist for years, it feels less like a brand-new lesson and more like another layer of the same one showing up when she’s finally ready to see it differently.

“Ready Is a Lie”: Jenna Is Learning to Begin Anyway

Jenna lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her dog, Charlie, and works as a family law attorney and mediator. Her work focuses on helping people resolve divorces without litigation, particularly when they have children and want to preserve as much respect as possible in their relationship moving forward. She also practices and teaches yoga, loves running and hiking, speaks French, loves to travel, and would eventually like to visit all of the national parks.

Her own marriage ended after about 10 years, and the years afterward became a period of significant change. Jenna moved to Santa Barbara and later to Northern California to be closer to her mom, siblings, and nieces, but some of the bigger changes were internal. She describes this phase of her life as one of exploring parts of herself she feels she lost during her marriag. She’s trying to understand what she wants now, rather than automatically following the life she once thought she would have.

The podcast became part of that process because it forced her to look directly at how long she could hold herself back while waiting to feel ready. The idea had existed for years, but so had the belief that maybe she needed the timing to be perfect or needed to know where the whole thing was going before she could begin. In this season, she has started questioning that assumption.

“Ready is a lie,” she says. What Jenna is practicing for herself is letting something begin before she knows the outcome. Doing it a little messier than she might have once allowed. And trusting that the next part can become clearer after she takes the first step. As she points out in the episode, even when we think we know exactly how something will unfold, life rarely follows the plan anyway.

Why Wake Up, Sunshine?

We wanted a name that could hold both light and growth

Naming the podcast took longer than we expected because we knew what we wanted it to feel like before we knew what to call it. We kept circling around the idea of waking up. Becoming more aware of ourselves, recognizing old narratives and beliefs, and staying open to the ways we continue changing through life. Jenna also kept saying she wanted the podcast to feel like a light, somewhere people could hear honest stories and feel a little less alone in whatever season they were living through.

Eventually, we stopped trying so hard to find the perfect name and went back to the simplest version of those ideas. Paige started thinking about what feels warm and what creates light. The answer was obvious: the sun. From there came the phrase we already say so naturally, “Good morning, sunshine,” and then the name that suddenly seemed to hold everything we had been trying to describe: Wake Up, Sunshine.

For Jenna, the meaning lives in the tension between being enough as we are and still being invited to grow. “We are all sunshine. We are all perfect, exactly where we need to be, worthy of love, deserving, whole, and we are invited to continually grow and wake up to different layers and lessons that we’re learning through life.” She loved that the name didn’t require choosing between acceptance and becoming. In her experience, both could be true at the same time.

Paige saw another layer in the metaphor. The sun is always there, even when clouds or storms make it impossible to see. Sometimes it’s nighttime and we’re asleep, but the sun itself hasn’t disappeared. That image became one of the clearest answers to the question of why Wake Up, Sunshine felt like the right name for a podcast about the different seasons in which we lose sight of ourselves, find ourselves again, and keep changing.

Wake Up, Sunshine Is About Becoming More of Ourselves

There are a lot of places we already know these conversations will take us: spirituality, purpose, health, relationships, community, heartbreak, reinvention, meditation, energy, movement, breathwork, psychedelics, grief, loss, and addiction. Some of those stories will come from our own lives, while others will belong to guests who have lived through experiences we haven’t. We don’t expect every conversation to be light, and we definitely don’t expect everyone who sits down with us to see the world exactly the way we do.

What we do want is room for honesty. Paige is still noticing where perfectionism asks her to hold on too tightly. Jenna is experimenting with what happens when she stops waiting to feel completely ready. We’re both still exploring what we believe, what has changed us, and which parts of ourselves we want to carry forward.

Maybe that is the simplest answer to why Wake Up, Sunshine? It isn’t a podcast about arriving at some finished version of ourselves. It’s two cousins who once spent their childhood creating magazines, clubs, shows, and imaginary characters sitting down together again. This time to talk about the real stories behind who we’ve been and who we’re still becoming.

Listen to the full episode: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube