Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dayna Altman. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Dayna, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you get your first job in the field that you practice in today?
I like to believe that my first day of being an entrepreneur, took place on my 8th birthday. With all of my friends in my basement after a sleepover party, I covered my walls with poster paper to plan the creation of a theater troupe called “The Not So Off Broadway Players”. This theater troupe traveled to senior centers and hospitals performing songs and dance numbers to give back to the community. The troupe only performed for a few years, but that entrepreneurial spark never disappeared.
Over the years since the Not So Off Broadway Players there have been events, fundraisers, fashion shows and presentations. In each stage of my life, I have taken my wish to create and lead with me. For me, this looks like taking personal struggles and experiences and turning them into advocacy projects. Whenever I face something difficult, working through the problem with a creative project in mind helps me heal.
The biggest manifestation of my entrepreneurial spirt and my current work is becoming the founder of Bake it Till You Make it LLC. Bake it Till You Make it is an organization rooted in community and works to cultivate authentic mental health conversation in the kitchen, around the table and beyond. I accomplish this by creating mental health cookbooks which include recipes, resource pages and stories of resilience as well as the facilitation of mental health workshops and events.
Like the Not So Off Broadway players, Bake it Till You Make it began in my childhood home. During the summer of 2017, I was living back with my parents. I was a student at Northeastern University pursing my Master’s Degree in Public Health. This was an overwhelming time. Not just because of my studies but also because it was the end of a first relationship and the entrance into a depressive episode. That summer I shed so many tears, had extra therapy appointments and was looking for some way to cope. Toward the end of July, I got in a car accident. This accident that totaled my car, felt like my literal rock bottom, I couldn’t fall any deeper. Not having a car in the middle of the suburbs, I was very limited in what I could do outside of the house so I began to bake. Struggling with an eating disorder for most of my life, I never entertained the idea of seeing food as fun. It was always ridden with shame and fear. However, when I began to bake during that summer, not only was it fun, I found a way to cope. Not only cope but I found a way to talk about what I was struggling with. I had friends over to bake together and I shared openly about my struggles, I found they were more likely to open to me too because I was so forthcoming. There is something about working on something side by side that really allows for honest communication.
After a few weeks of testing my hands at baking, I had the idea to create a mental health cookbook and over the next three years, I worked to put a book into the world where people felt, safe, represented and connected. I thought this would be the end of Bake it Till You Make it: the book was out in the world and that was amazing but little did I know it would become a movement and my first “true” career in entrepreneurship.
Dayna, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My name is Dayna Altman and I am an authentic, creative and enthusiastic mental health entrepreneur, author and speaker. I live with OCD, depression and am in life long eating disorder recovery. I am also the sole operator and founder of Bake it Till You Make it LLC, I believe is my true purpose in the world. Creating a community and a way to speak openly about mental health using baking as a tool to connect has brought me people and to places, I could have never even dreamed of and I am so grateful for that.
Bake it Till You Make it accomplishes its mission to cultivate authentic mental health conversation in the kitchen, around the table and beyond through the publication of mental health cookbooks, the facilitation of mental health and baking workshops as well as the creation of community events.
There are currently four (hopefully five soon!) mental health cookbooks all focused in authentic storytelling. Whether that is a book comprised of many different people’s experiences or just my own, all of these books combine stories of resilience, recipes and resource pages.
Additionally, I travel the country to tell my story and I use baking as a mechanism to do this. Using ingredients as metaphors, I share my story with a diverse group of audiences, while also baking brownies. I have done this presentation in beautiful test kitchens as well as on a folding table in the library of my high school. While the environments differ, my story I believe truly touches people. The best part of speaking is hearing from individuals at the end who believe they have been seen and understood because of hearing my vulnerable truth..and I make sure I keep that as real as possible because recovery is a long process and one I never want anyone to feel they have to do alone,
Finally, Bake it Till You Make it is also a proud host of many community events whether those be local to the Boston area or virtually. Through decorating competitions, self care afternoons or Bake it Till You Make it book clubs, connecting people is what I do best!
I am so proud of the places that Bake it Till You Make it has taken me. I certainly reflect on my invitation to the Youth Mental Health Action Forum presented by MTV and the White House as one of my proudest moments. However, I am also proud of the moments I have not given up on Bake it Till You Make it in moments I have really wanted to, Being rejected or misunderstood, having a presentation that only one person shows up to, I have showed myself that this organization and its mission means more to me than any one person’s opinion but it is also not that easy all the time. And yet, I have never given up on this creative way to tackle difficult mental health conversations and even making them fun and full of color and creativity!
Currently, I am working on another cookbook called “For All My Tiers: Baking Cakes and Embracing my Big Emotions”, I am also in the continued process of facilitating screenings of the Bake it Till You Make it documentary that came out in October 2023. I am hoping that my continued creative ventures help me reach the most people possible, I don’t want anyone to ever feel alone.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
Being a recovering perfectionist and people pleaser, I am actively unlearning and resisting the urge to be perfect. For so long, I believed all I wanted to be in my life was to appear lovely and pleasing. I thought I would be someone who always followed the crowd and never a disrupter.
However in my mental health recovery, I have identified this really isn’t me. I am a change maker and someone who wants to be in the middle of advocating for something I believe in. And yet, this is complicated when I feel anxious or overwhelmed and revert back to my people pleasing behaviors.
Because I really am both: I want to be uniquely myself and there will always be a part of me that wants to be liked.
Recognizing this pattern as a trauma response, has been something so helpful in my mental health recovery and in my leadership in my organization. While we usually hear about “fight or flight” as the two trauma responses, my therapist explained to me the definition has expanded and has also added “freeze and fawn.”
This tendency to people please when I am overwhelmed or threatened is called fawning. And I find myself falling back into fawning patterns when I am met with difficult decisions or choices. Learning this is just the way I am wired and allowing my authentic and true self to take control has helped me more than I can say. It is not intuitive yet though but I am excited to see progress and hopefully that identification can help others if this resonates.
If you could go back in time, do you think you would have chosen a different profession or specialty?
A lot of times when I feel overwhelmed or uncertain with my trajectory and not sure what is happening next, I say that I wish I could have picked a profession with a little more certainty. A profession that has a straight path. By this I mean, you study finance and you become an accountant or you study physical therapy and you become a physical therapist. Of course, no career or professional trajectory is that simple, but sometimes having so much at my finger tips can be overwhelming.
However, I always combat this thought with the knowing and belief that something with such a straight trajectory wouldn’t be unique to me nor would it “fill me up”. This flexible freedom and creative opportunity, is a stark contrast to the likings of my mental illness, specifically my struggles with OCD or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. OCD loves control and certainty, something I don’t have much of in my current field. Speaking engagements or event plans do not always keep me consistency busy. There is also no framework to work with, I am building this from the ground up, which scares my OCD but excites me.
I like to remember this on days I find the work that I do specifically hard and recognizing that the true authentic Dayna loves the opportunity to be creative and explore the next path the Bake it Till You Make it journey will go down and choosing uncertainty is one of the best ways to live out my truth and not allow my mental illness to control me.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.bakeittillyoumakeit.co
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/daynaaltman, www.instagram.com/bakeittillyoumakeitllc
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bakeittillyoumakeitllc
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daynaaltman/
- Other: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/BakeItTillYouMakeIt Tik Tok: @Bake it Till You Make it LLC Pinterest: @Bake it Till You Make it LLC