We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Alex Dee. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Alex below.
Alex, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?
Through my faith and failures. I know that Christ has a purpose for me to love like He loves. And I strive to do this everyday as a husband and father in my vocation. And in this vocation, in my faith – I fail to fully live out my purpose. Failure is my biggest fear and my best teacher. And being open to failure is a painful necessity to success. Finding success almost always comes on the back of failures. And once successful, you have to find ways of taking smart risks that bring you closer to the edge of failure in order to keep growing. Finding purpose in this life is a primary component to success, but the road to it is not perfect. I have a knack for failing with my chin held up and that has been an immense gift in discovering and unpacking a better understanding of my potential and purpose.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I am the Director and Co-Founder of the Saints Alive Podcast, an audio drama series that brings the stories of the saints to life. I launched Saints Alive with my wife, Melissa, and my best friend, Tanner Kalina, in 2021. Our episodes are completely immersive with sound design, music, and 20-30 actors in each episode and after 3 years of production we have created 60 episodes and are ranked in top 0.5% of podcasts worldwide, Praise God! After running Saints Alive independently for almost two years, we merged with Hallow, the number one Catholic prayer app in the world.
After becoming a father it was very clear to me that if nothing changed in the media landscape my children would not only miss out on powerful, beautiful, and inspiring stories of virtue but also that their faith was going to be outright attacked and subverted. So I set out to tell the stories of the faith in ways that could compete on the level of storytelling at Pixar and Disney. Now, Saints Alive has fans all over the world, young and old alike.
My goal is to become a triple threat actor, producer and director of films that move hearts to Christ – and I fully believe that God has placed me here in the audio space to hone my storytelling skills. Each episode is a new challenge and every story is unique – there is no formula, no cutting corners, and no forgetting about the immense blessing it is to bring these incredible stories to life.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
1) Love of learning and self teaching: My love of learning runs deep. I don’t have a degree in anything I do today for my career but instead went out into the world to work with and learn from others who really knew a craft that I wanted to call my own.
2) Intense focus: If there is something I am inspired by I am immediately drawn to learn how to do it with an intense focus. This level of focus has served me well in storytelling – there isn’t a second of a story that I throw away – every moment counts.
3) The ability to dive into the deep end without panicking: Diving into the deep end is tied to both self teaching and intense focus. There always comes a point where you have honed a skill with focus and it’s time to take the leap. This always frightens me but I have learned the only way my storytelling will have any impact is to take that leap and go into the deep end without everything being perfect.
What do you do when you feel overwhelmed? Any advice or strategies?
Feeling overwhelmed is part of the process. There are deadlines, budgets, connections to make, movers and shakers to impress – the list goes on. I have learned to keep this as an accepted status quo. There isn’t a moment when I don’t feel overwhelmed in one way or another, but I have learned how to process and channel it pretty well.
One major way I process feeling overwhelmed is by talking to God in prayer. And yes – I want to call out and shamelessly promote an amazing tool that helps me do that, the Hallow app. Praying every day has been a necessity my entire life but even more so in my fatherhood. The Rosary is one of my favorite prayers and I end every day with it.
The other way I channel my stress is to focus on the challenges at hand and not fall into any sort of useless emotional response. Don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to feel those things, but you can’t be driven by them. There are always going to be challenges, but I always come back to what God is asking me to focus on in the moment. I can either focus on the overwhelming things OR I can focus on productive actions to help move forward through the storms that inevitably come.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://saintsalivepodcast.com
- Instagram: @saints.alive.pod / @alexjdee
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