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Learning and Embracing Your Personal Growth Journey as Adults
This is the last blog in the Live Heart-Fully Conversations. We’ve talked about a lot of things, and hopefully, we have been challenged and have made some lifestyle habits through all of the conversations we have had. That is why for this last conversation, I want to talk about personal growth. My goal is that you will take this Live Heart-Fully Conversation and continue on your own personal growth journey to deepen your relationships and also better care for your own mental, emotional, spiritual health.
When we talk to our preschool-age son about growing, what he understands is his height and weight. We measure him and weigh him and smile as we tell him how much he has grown since the last time. He gets excited about his growth!
We are all always in a state of growth. For some, it may look like learning to practice kindness toward others or extending a favor or a helping hand to someone in need. Others may need to overcome an intense fear or courageously speak out in loving truth to a family member who needs to be held accountable. For all of us, our personal growth is a constant, ever-changing plane that we are learning to navigate as we head towards a particular destination.
About the Live Heart-Fully Convesations
Welcome to the Live Heart-Fully Conversations! The Live Heart-Fully Conversations are a series of interviews and conversations created to inspire, provoke, and challenge you to go deeper in feeding your own soul and pursuing stronger, authentic relationships with others. Over the next year, I am talking with some amazing powerhouse people who have had some true challenges, lived through them, and are now sharing their own personal power stories.
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Welcome Jessica Ashley Powell
Jessica Powell certainly has a very full, but heart-filled life. She has been with her boyfriend for six years after having experienced the heartache of divorce. She is a mother of two-an adorable 6-month-old baby girl and a beautiful 10-year girl. Jessica is also a bonus mom to two amazing teenagers ages 14 and 16.
Jessica is a virtual solutions specialist helping business owners, not-for-profit agencies, attorneys, politicians, and influencers manage day-to-day tasks such as administration, social media, recruiting and onboarding, and paralegal. She holds several degrees- Associate of Science degree in Paralegal Tech, a Bachelor of Applied Arts and Sciences in Administration, and is working on a Bachelor of Science in Psychology.
In addition to managing her own business, Jessica is preparing to launch her blog and podcast (coming in 2022). She is currently leading a Facebook group for entrepreneurs called the Entrepreneur’s Vault. Ultimately, Jessica has an increasing desire to support small businesses and help business owners find success and prosper in their endeavors.
The Conversation: Personal Growth: Settling Instead of Growing
This is a tough question. Sharing honestly and transparently, was there ever a time in your life when you believed you had arrived? I mean, fully arrived at the height of your growth (physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually)? If so…
How old were you at that time?
Jessica: At barely 22 I was a single mom, going through a divorce and working at a “decent job with good benefits” but less than ideal pay. I was quite certain I had reached my full potential, where I would be and I wouldn’t be going anywhere else. This was my reality and I would always struggle to make it from paycheck to paycheck.
Sarah: Honestly, aside from the living ‘paycheck to paycheck’ the job itself doesn’t seem half bad for being just twenty-two. In fact, I’m pretty certain there are many people who would settle for a job like that and eventually be too comfortable to leave.
Jessica: It definitely was hard to leave because it was something easy to get settled in and comfortable with. Which is likely why it took me five years. Don’t get me wrong. Overall it’s an amazing company but I didn’t want to remain content in a role that just wasn’t going to work for me to get out of a “rut” in life.
Sarah: I totally get it. A good company is not always the best company for us. But even so, my main point here is that it can so easy to just settle because it is familiar and comfortable. Our human nature is to search for the familiar and the comfortable, and then to stay there. But of course, I cannot say with confidence that we will ever actually grow if we are always in the familiar and the comfortable. I hope that makes sense.
Also, being a new mom, despite how hard and unplanned it may have been that you were single, I can understand how you might have easily fallen into that trap of “This is it. I have arrived at adulting, and I’m a mom, I’ve experienced heartbreak. So what else is there for me to experience and learn?”
Growing Into Motherhood vs. Finding Your Lost Self
Jessica: Exactly. It also goes along with the whole losing yourself in motherhood part I think. For a while, it’s all I knew I was, a single mom. It was quite an adventure to find me again.
Sarah: You might disagree with this, but I like to say ‘discover’ ourselves rather than ‘find.’ Ourselves. I have another blog about this, actually.
I don’t believe we lose ourselves because and/or when we become mothers. In fact, this is directly related to this topic of personal growth. Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand that feeling of not having time for ourselves, and being so caught up in motherhood that we neglect to enjoy life in the same way we used to before becoming mothers. I totally get that. But, I don’t believe we lose ourselves, and then have to find ourselves again.
Instead, I believe that motherhood forces, or pushes us into a new level of personal growth and maturity. We don’t change. But our values might evolve. We take on new interests that connect us to our new role as a mother. We make efforts to connect to others who are like-minded.
Maybe I am placing too much emphasis on word choice here. But I do believe that the way in which we choose to view the changes that we undergo when we become mothers can either spiral us into regret and depression, or they can propel us into hope and joy. So rather than feeling lost and needing to find ourselves again, I believe that every new mother feels the pressure of all the responsibilities, and struggles internally. Then, when she comes to terms with her new role as a mother, she can then begin to discover all the new, wonderful possibilities that motherhood has for her as an individual.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this, as related to growth. What was this finding, or in my words, discovery experience like for you?
Jessica: It’s definitely a discovery experience and was more so with my firstborn than my most recent. I didn’t know who I was “supposed” to be so to speak and this led me to feeling [sic] so lost.
People we know and society as a whole like to tell us who to be, what to do, etc., and when you’re the only parent doing the parenting, it’s even worse. I felt so deeply that my options of who to be were limited because of this. I [felt I] needed to just suck it up, go to work, make what money I could, be home with my daughter, do only “mom-type things” only hang out with other moms, and just BE MOM. But, that’s not just who we are. We aren’t just mom [sic].
We are mom [sic] but we are also so many other things. For me, I’m also a forever student of so many things. I am now an entrepreneur helping other entrepreneurs. I’m a foodie and an amateur dancer. I’m a homebody and a social butterfly. I had to grow in a way as of not caring about others’ opinions. I had to determine who I was, who I wanted to be, what worked for me, and just do it. No matter what I did people would find issues with it. I’m sure they still do but the difference is that I’m no longer listening to it and I’m no longer wallowing in the expectations of others who aren’t taking care of my children.
Sarah: Yes! I totally understand and agree with that. Every mother, every person (mother or not), would benefit by living by this principle. We all get to be exactly who we are, despite the opinions and expectations of others. And in truth, we are always changing and evolving. So what that means is that we are always on a mission to discover and then rediscover who we are, in every stage of our lives.
Personal Growth: I Haven’t Arrived and I’m Not Done Yet
Going back to the first question about your belief that you have ‘arrived’ at the peak of your growth, was there anything in particular that inspired that belief?
Jessica: Lack of confidence and belief in myself. It stemmed from my own inner fear and emotional/mental abuse of being repeatedly told I couldn’t do better and would never be better.
Sarah: I’m sorry you had to experience that.
At what point did you come to realize you still had so much more growing and maturing to do, and that you were not at all close to ‘arriving’ at the peak of your growth?
Jessica: It took a few years. I met back up with a man I knew in what seems like a previous life now. We have been together now for 6 years. I know I did a lot of working on myself, but he played a major part in it. He showed me what I deserved and that there was so much more. Basically, one day I woke up and decided I was done sitting there doing nothing. I knew I was meant for more and I enrolled in community college for paralegal school that same day. I knew it was all up from there and the only thing that could stop me was me.
Sarah: What an amazing, and also inspiring story of, not only realizing you weren’t done yet in your own personal journey of growth and development but also, of not settling and instead, following a dream.
Experiencing Growing Pains as Adults
In the Live Heart-Fully Journal, I provide some examples of ‘Adult Growing Pains’ (ways in which we as adults are still growing and maturing. Can you share an example of how you have continued to grow, even as an adult?
Jessica: Three of the main struggles I’ve grown through:
Outgrowing Friends
Jessica: Outgrowing friends – they say it’s lonely at the top. I have so many friends dear to my heart that I still love so much, but never see and rarely hear from. We don’t have much in common and life is just very different. I tried for a while to push different relationships but realized that sometimes, these things happen. As you grow and change, so does your circle.
Sarah: Oh my gosh, that is so, so true, and so important. And having to learn that and let go of relationships is so hard to do too. That really demonstrates great personal growth and maturity. How long did it take you to come to this realization of letting go of these friendships?
Jessica: Honestly, a while. I pushed for a lot of them and I still find myself from time to time wanting to push more. It’s hard to grow apart from people you’ve known and loved forever. I still adore so many of them and wish them all the best, but making them a priority isn’t in the cards. At least not for now.
Sarah: There are seasons where certain people come into our lives. And some of those seasons may be longer for some friends and shorter for others. But again, it shows great maturity that you have been able to respond so well, and let go of some of those relationships. And you’re right- may again another time. But not for now.
Learning to Forgive
Jessica: Learning to forgive people for my own mental and emotional well-being. My daughter’s father is less than ideal, he does as he pleases and blames me for his lifestyle and having nothing. I hated him so much during and after our divorce, for how he treated me and how useless he is as a father. She’s 10 now. He still blames me for so many things wrong, but it doesn’t affect me how it used to. I hurt for her. But I forgive him for all he’s done and still will do in regard to myself. I can’t change it and it’s only hurting me to sit on it.
Sarah: Being able to see someone’s worst side, and even worse than that, coming to realize that even their best side is still pretty awful, and yet, still forgive. Being able to come to terms with the fact that there will still be hurt in the future from a person, and still forgive – these are not small things!
Coping with Loss
Jessica: Learning to deal with death – I’ve lost a lot of loved ones I was close to in my life. My great grandmother when I was in elementary school was my first encounter with death followed by my mom right after I turned 13, my grandfather who raised me after my mom passed the same year I got divorced, my stepdad who raised me as his own until my mom passed away and I went to live with my grandparents a few months after my grandfather, my grandma a few years after that and then my other grandmother about a year after that. A lot of death in a short time after barely becoming an adult.
Sarah: That is a lot of death for sure! While I can’t say I have dealt with a lot of death, I certainly have experienced the death of a handful of people I loved, (still do), and deeply care about. I know the pain and the grief of losing someone you love. How did you cope at the time in a way that pushed you further into growth and maturity?
Jessica: A lot of it was concentration [sic] on my mental health. Losing loved ones is one of the hardest things we have to do as love us don’t want us to be hurt and definitely not for long. This thought always helped me. I also spent a lot more time on myself-meditation, yoga, long baths with wine and a book, or audiobook, or music, whatever I felt was necessary at the time to soothe my heart and soul. Just being in touch with my emotions and my mind helped me to move past the pain into a more empowered state and realize more potential for myself.
When Breakthrough Comes in the Midst of the Pain
Sarah: These three things: letting go of friendships, learning to forgive those who have wronged and hurt us, and experiencing great and deep loss, are growing pains for sure. I wasn’t initially thinking about growing pains in this vein of thought. However, I can see a theme here of literal mental, emotional, and perhaps even physical pain. Would you say that experiencing pain (whether mental, emotional, physical) is in part, or in whole what often catapults us into growth? In other words, does experiencing pain inspire growth in us?
Jessica: I think a lot of negativity is placed around pain, fear, loss, etc., but in all reality how we handle those things is what leads us into a direction of growth or leaves us standing still. These things are huge. And oftentimes our biggest breakthroughs come when it seems as if the entire universe is against us and we are at our lows. How we handle these things, is what makes us or breaks us. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something as major as death, it could be anything that makes us feel that defeat.
Staying on the topic of growing pains concerning our mental, emotional, spiritual, and relational growth, what might growing pains look and feel like?
Jessica: Overwhelm, anxiety, tears, happiness, just an overall flood of varying emotions.
How can we remain joyful (or positive and hopeful) in the midst of growing pains?
Jessica: Recognize your feelings and where they come from. Know that it’s okay to hurt and it’s okay to be angry, it’s how you accept those feelings, deal with them and move on [to things] that matter most.
Going through the Motions isn’t Enough for Personal Growth
Sarah: As humans, we have a structure and routine around how we do life. We go to college, we find a stable job, we get married, we have babies, etc. That structure also applies to our daily habits: we wake up, drink our tea or coffee, head to work, stop for groceries after work, come home, make dinner. I say all this because if we are not careful, we can easily just go through the motions, mindlessly. Many parents, in particular, are just walking through their days in survival mode.
How do self-awareness, self-reflection, and self-evaluation help facilitate our growth?
Jessica: If we end up going through the motions mindlessly, we tend to end up stuck and unable to grow up. Being able to look at ourselves, what we are doing, how, and why helps us to see where we are and know where we want to go and helps create steps to get there.
Sarah: Yes. Stuck, primarily in the choices we settled for. We become comfortable, complacent.
Learning to Self-Reflect and Becoming Self-Aware
What are some strategies or tips we can implement to help make self-reflection a regular part of our lives?
Jessica: I believe meditations and journaling have helped me to be more in touch with myself. I brain dump into journals post-meditation or when I am having strong emotions. Recognizing those emotions, accepting them, and learning that you [we all] deserve to be able to feel, and be able to love your [our] own emotions to understand yourself [ourselves].
Sarah: I just love the idea of journaling daily, or as often as possible. It really does force reflection in our lives. Thinking about mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, and relational goals is essential to our health and well-being. But also, these things are essential to our ability to NOT get and/or stay stuck (as you mentioned before). When we are looking within ourselves and reflecting, we can often begin to see areas where we may need to improve. And without that reflection, we may never truly know those areas, because, let’s be honest, most people, even those closest to us, will never tell us.
When meditating and journaling, what are some of the things you ponder and/or write about? Are they any particular questions you ask yourself that help facilitate that self-reflection?
Jessica: For meditation, I try to clear my mind. I once took a yoga class where the teacher taught us to visualize looking into an empty dumpster to calm our thoughts. I’ve been doing that now for about 10 years. I use this method and then recognize what thoughts pop in after the day-to-day mess like “did I unplug that” leaves my mind, these ideas are usually the more important ones. After meditation I’ll dump those ideas onto paper, I also dump ideas onto paper as I have them at any time of day. If I don’t, they’ll leave and I’ll lose them. You never know when a world-changing idea may surface.
Sarah: I just love the idea of dumping ideas onto paper. I know someone who says that she will go the entire day without having either brilliant or day-to-day mundane thoughts. But the moment she sits down to read her Bible, all sorts of thoughts rush into her mind, all at once.
Of course, how can you sit down and read the Bible with all these thoughts you need to sort through. So she always has a notepad with her, next to her Bible. When a thought comes, she writes it down quickly, and then immediately goes back to her Bible.
Later on in the day, she can entertain all those thoughts she wrote down. But at least this method helps her to focus on the current task.
Meditating and writing down the thoughts to come back to them later is a similar thing. And I think that is such a great idea.
Jessica: I like to journal when I’m having strong emotions, so some days there is a LOT more than others. The days there’s high emotion I ask myself what is wrong in the situation, what I’m feeling, what is good about the situation, what I can do to change it, if I can’t do anything about it why am I worrying.
Be Patient and Give Grace in Your Personal Growth Journey
What does it mean to give ourselves grace and patience, even while also challenging ourselves to push forward into that next level of personal growth and maturity?
Jessica: It means everything. It is so important to recognize that even with ourselves we must have patience and know we aren’t perfect. Progress over perfection. Recognizing that we will be uncomfortable moving up and moving forward. Discomfort is stepping outside of the comfort zone and those moments are when we need to show ourselves grace and patience more than ever.
Share an example of when you had to do this yourself?
Jessica: During my second pregnancy, I reached a point where I would rather work for myself than for someone else. I would rather be able to make my own schedule. To spend time working when I want and with my family when I want. I had to step out of my comfort zone and give myself soooo much grace and patience while I lined out my business and launched it. I had to learn what to do and what not to do.
During the beginning phases, I would jump at basically any job opportunity, like I see so many others doing even now. I did work for free to show I had certain skills, the work was taken and used but I was not hired or paid. I learned quickly that not everyone values you [me] the way you [I] do. This clearly put a damper on things and I really wanted to just throw in the towel. I barely was able to get clients. And I was wasting SO MUCH TIME trying to find the “ideal client” and was getting NOWHERE.
I had to take a step back and realize that I needed to show myself patience and the grace I was showing others. Also, I needed to let the clients come to me, not continue desperately to try to find them and find the money. Since calming my crazy need for clients, I’ve found more and have come up with much better business ideas. I even have a new offer coming at the end of this month that I’m super excited to start helping clients with!
Give yourself grace, give yourself patience and love, you deserve it and with the calmness, even within the chaos of being an entrepreneur, you’ll find success, whatever success may be to you.
Sarah: What a beautiful example. I know so many people who just jump on any and every opportunity, and they have no real plan laid out. I love how you previously said that you ‘lined out’ your business. I’m sure there are a lot of entrepreneurs out there who are learning and growing in that same exact way, through tying anything and everything before realizing their perfect niche.
Final Words on Embracing Personal Growth
What encouraging words or affirmations can you share with readers that will inspire them to continue growing as an adult?
Jessica: We all face hardships, we all go through hard times, it’s how you deal with it and what you choose to do moving forward that makes all of the difference. Don’t feel like you can’t exhibit your emotions, exhibit them, feel them, have them and let them go. Pick up and move forward, push every damn day to be all you can and you’ll grow exponentially. One day the growing pains your [sic] feeling will be something you’ll be able to look back on, and [you’ll] see how far you’ve come by the work YOU put in.
Sarah: Thank you so much for this conversation, Jessica! It has been very insightful for me and all of my readers. I really value your thoughts and opinions. And of course, I am so excited to see you continue on your own personal growth journey, even at this stage of your success.
Key Highlights
- There are times when we can easily be fooled into believing that we have reached the peak of our growth because of our success(es). Other times, our feelings of inadequacies can cause us to feel stuck, and unable to grow. Don’t be fooled by either of these extremes. There is always more growth to be had in our journey.
- It’s most often the people in our lives who push us further into our personal growth. This can happen abruptly, subtly, or through positive or negative circumstances.
- Unfortunately, pain is an essential component of personal growth. Breakthrough comes, often, when it feels like everything is pushing against us. It is how we handle these periods of pain that determines the extent of our growth.
- There are many ways we experience growing pains. Three of them are: letting go of friendships, learning to forgive, and experiencing deep loss and grief.
- Letting go of friendships- Our circle of friends and relationships may change as we grow.
- Learning to forgive- Forgiving others facilitates healing and freedom for ourselves.
- Experiencing deep loss and grief- Realizing all your emotions empowers us to move past the pain of loss (and trauma).
- Self-reflection is essential to growth. Without it we cannot know where we are, or where we’re going, or how we can get there.
Take Action
- When someone inspires you, ask yourself why. Is there a desire to push forward in an area where you lack? How does that person inspire you? Is there something he/she can help you with in your personal growth journey? What can you learn from him/her?
- When someone in your life causes pain, is there a lesson to be learned (either from that person directly, or from the experience)? Be honest with yourself and take time to assess and ask yourself the hard questions. How can you grow from the experience?
- Journal about a time you had to let go of a friendship. Write about the back story, and the circumstances that led you to your decision. Was it difficult to let go? Why? How did you grow through the process?
- Do you need to forgive somebody in your life this week? Who is it, and why?
- Have you ever lost a loved one? What emotions did you have over the year that followed? Journal about them all and try to specifically recall the order in which they came.
Connect with Jessica
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