Daily Inspiration: Meet Joy Parrish

Today we’d like to introduce you to Joy Parrish.

Joy, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I’m a licensed behavioral health therapist by day and have always been passionate about health and physical fitness as a hobby. Over my lifetime, I’ve tried every fitness craze and eventually fell into the Crossfit space. At the time, I was writing a blog and found a fellow blogger/Crossfitter, Claire, who went to my gym. One day while I was listening to a male-hosted Crossfit podcast, I thought, “why aren’t there women voices in the podcasting space talking about this?” I texted Claire, ‘hey do you want to start a podcast?’ and she said, “sure!”, and here we are eight years later. That was 2013 and we’ve been recording weekly ever since.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The road has been fairly smooth. We did not set out for this to be our full-time job and in a way, I think this contributes to the success of the show. We aren’t stressed out about how much money we make from sponsors and we aren’t controlled by anyone telling us which content we need to create. There are days when I wonder how much more we could grow if we did put more energy into it, and sometimes I get caught up in “are we growing the way we should be growing?” Our growth has been very slow and steady.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
In the podcasting world, I’m the proudest of the community we’ve created. Claire and I have traveled the world with listeners, we’ve hosted live shows, and have developed lifelong friendships because of the podcast. What makes us stand out is our dynamic; there is something about the relationship we have when the microphone turns on that cannot be duplicated. We will always be unique in this way, even though there are a million podcasts in the world now.

Where we are in life is often partly because of others. Who/what else deserves credit for how your story turned out?
Our listeners are amazing. They share their lives and stories with us, and they devote time to step into our world. We also would be nowhere without our lawyer who we lovely refer to on the show as “mom sandy”. Sandy Shepard wrangles our podcast contracts and is our podcast mom, we randomly met her on Twitter one day when she wouldn’t stop tweeting us and then donated $250 to a breast cancer fundraiser we were doing at the time. We were like, “WHO is this lady??” and before we knew it she was our best friend and lawyer. I’m not sure where we would be without her.

Contact Info:

• Email: thisisjoyandclaire@gmail.com
• Website: www.joyandclaire.com
• Instagram: joyandclaire_, https://www.instagram.com/joyandclaire_/channel/?hl=en

Image Credits
Andrea Flanagan Photography, and Megan Sweeney of Big Heart FIim