Jessyl and Alex Podcast

One missing water order turns into a bigger truth: travel days expose every crack in your systems, from packing too late to carrying suitcases you swore you would not bring. We record from Santo Domingo at the end of a long day, laugh at the chaos, and share what we are learning about moving as a family without burning out, including why packing while you are still living in a place almost guarant...

Culture is running your household whether you designed it or not, and that truth can feel equal parts freeing and confronting. We start with a simple question: what is culture, really? From there we connect the dots between family culture, leadership, values, and the mission statements we usually only associate with high-performing companies. When the culture is clear, decisions get easier. When i...

July is coming fast, and for our family that means one thing: everything we do in June either sets us up for a smooth landing or repeats the same stressful mistakes. We talk honestly about what it looks like to pack early after a previous “we’re still packing an hour before the airport” mess, why Jessyl refuses to live out of a suitcase for weeks, and how we plan for a season of movement without t...

Most couples don’t fall apart because they stop loving each other. They fall apart because life gets loud and the relationship becomes the leftover. We’re fresh off a week of travel, parenting shifts, and nonstop work, and we get real about what “marriage while building” looks like when you’re growing businesses and raising five kids at the same time. We talk through the unsexy but powerful stuff:...

A soccer game, a broken nose, and a flight to California should be enough for one week, but our family life rarely stays on one track. We’re closing out our time in the Dominican Republic, fresh off a gymnastics competition where the biggest highlight wasn’t a score, it was our daughter hopping off the balance beam and sprinting over to fist-bump the judge like they were old friends. That small mo...

You can hear the moment a dream turns into something real: a first digital product goes live, customers start buying, and the creator finally breathes. We share the unfiltered story behind Jessyl's new PDF guide, including the deadline pressure, the messy back-end setup, and the very real challenge of building while parenting five kids. If you’ve been searching for motivation to launch a digi...

The fastest way to stall your own growth is to win and then explain it away. We’ve been noticing that pattern in our home, in our friendships, and even in our community, so we sit down to talk about “upper limiting” and what it looks like when your beliefs quietly cap your success. From a business milestone to a personal best in the gym, we break down the moment your mind says, “Yeah, but…” and ho...

We’re going to say the quiet part out loud: a lot of our parenting choices are wildly unpopular, and we’ve made peace with that. From the start, we didn’t magically “know” how to do this. We had to learn, unlearn, argue, research, and then rebuild a family approach that actually fits our kids and our values. The big shift for us is simple but powerful: parenting is a skill, not a personality trait...

A year after losing Liam, we realize something simple and unsettling: the calendar moves on even when your body does not. We sit down to talk through the anniversary we didn’t fully name out loud at the time, and why bringing it back now matters for our family, our marriage, and our kids. This is a raw conversation about child loss, grief, and what remembrance looks like when you’re still parentin...

We started recording and realised we’d been muted for five minutes, so we left the mess in as the “entrance fee” and kept talking. What comes out of that moment is a real conversation about personal growth, slow living in the Dominican Republic, and the kind of clarity you can only get when life finally gets quiet. We share why the beach life is amazing, but also why we don’t want to live in slow...

We thought we had weeks left. Then December 30 showed up and rewrote the plan in about half an hour. We’re Jessyl and Alex, and we’re sharing the raw, funny, very real birth story of our son Leomar. It starts with a “due month” mindset and a family calendar that felt solid until contractions hit differently, shorter and deeper than the Braxton Hicks we’d been brushing off. Add a few days of being...

We disappeared for a few months, and the reason is simple: life got real. A new baby changed our pace, our sleep, and our priorities, and we had to rebuild our rhythm from the ground up. Now we’re back for season four with a candid catch up on postpartum life, getting back to the gym, and why “slow” seasons are not wasted seasons when you look at your family in years instead of weeks. We also shar...

What do you do when the year breaks your plans and your heart at the same time? We open up about losing our son, the quiet we needed to survive it, and the surprising ways our family, marriage, and work found new shape. This isn’t a highlight reel. It’s the slow rebuild: presence over performance, faith over certainty, and a daily choice to turn pain into something useful. We start with small scen...

What holds a family together when life gets hard? We open up about the messy middle; career success without self-leadership, parenting while grieving, and the moment we stopped outsourcing decisions at home and started building a steady, honest presence our kids could trust. We dig into the shift from numbing to noticing: why self-regulation beats quick fixes, how a simple “Do you want me to liste...

What happens when you stop auditioning for your life and step straight into it? We share the raw path from a stubborn vision board to a first-place win at a world-class speaking academy, and the exact practices that turned intention into momentum. This isn’t a highlight reel. It’s the messy funding, the nervous system rituals, the breathwork in hotel hallways, the mirror covered in Sharpie mantras...

A stranger told us we looked “too happy” to be grieving our son, and that offhand comment cracked open a much bigger conversation: who decides what grief should look like, and why do we treat joy as betrayal after loss? We open the door to our real process—private tears, unexpected waves, quiet days, and the slow return to things that make us feel alive. We talk about parenting four kids while hol...

Start with the truth: voice is medicine. We open up about why we share our story—military roots, marriage in the mess, a daughter’s healing, and the ache of losing our toddler son—and how integrity means speaking from lived experience while letting others hold their own versions of truth. From there, we turn toward the future, using practical tools to make what we want feel present in our bodies t...

What if a casual question on a deployment cracked open your origin story? We share the intimate, winding path from a rumor Alex heard as a kid to a blood-type clue in Afghanistan, a Facebook search that found a face with the same bones, and an Easter gathering where a single sentence redrew a family map. It’s a story about hard truths arriving late, the kind of love that stays even when it’s hurt,...

Grief doesn’t end; it changes shape. Eight months after losing our toddler, we open the door to where love and ache meet—and to a surprise that softens the edges: a scan that shows us what we are having. The moment lands like thunder and rain, making room for healing and hard questions all at once. We talk candidly about sharing loss online, the backlash that comes with visibility, and the quiet m...

The palm trees are real. So is the sweat, the power cuts, and the quiet tug to want more than a perfect beach day. We open up about moving our family to a Caribbean island after years of service, travel, and loss—and what “paradise” looks like when the highlight reel ends. The conversation goes beyond pretty postcards into the gritty details: life without living room AC, corrosion from salty air,...

"It's normal, but we can't explain it." That's how many women feel during pregnancy - experiencing profound bodily and emotional shifts they themselves don't fully understand, let alone communicate to their partners. In this raw conversation, Jessyl reveals how during boy pregnancies, she developed a physical aversion to her husband's smell and saliva - a common...

Family boundaries shouldn't be taboo; they're essential. When we first married, cultural assumptions led to uncomfortable jokes about green card marriages, despite my American citizenship. Later, our choice to raise bilingual children sparked resistance from family who feared our kids would never learn proper English. These moments taught us the delicate art of boundary-setting without r...

When life delivers its most devastating blows, do we crumble or transform? Alex and Jessyl explore this profound question through their own journey of facing seemingly insurmountable challenges from brain tumor diagnoses to the heart-shattering loss of their toddler son, Liam. Drawing from their raw experiences, they challenge the notion of "fake positivity" while offering a more authent...

Alex and Jessyl reunite on the podcast, exploring how their family adapts when one parent is away and the deeper lessons they've learned parenting four children. • Jessyl shares how she manages parenting solo while Alex was delivering a TEDx talk in Tampa • The importance of teaching children independence and responsibility from an early age • How their parenting approach differs with four ch...

Ever wondered if there's a different path for educating your children? One that doesn't involve desks, homework, or standardized testing? Join Jessyl and Alex as they pull back the curtain on their decade-long journey with unschooling – a learning approach that has allowed their four children to thrive while following their natural curiosities. This raw conversation dismantles common mis...