Episode 33: Growth

00:00

Well, hey, everybody, welcome to the 33rd episode of Don’t lose your balance. My name is Mallory Durrick. Today, I’m going to be talking about growth growth, we never stopped growing, as long as we keep focusing on something new. I really truly believe that I have done a lot of growing over the last 20 years, especially despite the fact that we generally grow in our youth. I learned a lot, a lot of lessons, a lot of hard lessons. In the last 20 years, I’ve done a lot of different things. I’ve worked in sales, I worked in marketing, I still work in marketing, I wanted to get into design. So I’ve been learning and growing within my career. I also think I’ve learned to grow in my relationships with people. And even though my status of being single, and living alone has probably people might look at that and say you’re not growing into a relationship. I’ve actually learned what works for me in relationships. And I’ve learned that the best relationship that I can have is the one that I have with myself. And if I meet somebody, and there’s room in my life to grow and develop into a new relationship, I certainly will do that. So I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about growth. And I think the biggest thing I can talk about is just personal growth. And when did I really believe that I was actually growing as human being professionally, just personally, how was I growing?

02:23

I have to say a lot of my growth happened almost like a growth spurt happened in quarantine. You know, when a lot of people were suffering from and rightfully so anxiety and and just uncertainty for me. While quarantine did start with a lot of uncertainty, I had already been setting myself up for success, meaning I had stopped drinking in 2019. And by you know, obviously March or 2020, when things shut down, I didn’t feel like it was a problem to have alcohol in the house to get through it. I knew that there was this way I was feeling that was just amazing. And I’m proud of that. I also can say that, you know, by continuing on that course of not not consuming alcohol and not worrying about so much of everything. Everybody was in the same boat. And I felt this sense of camaraderie. I also had, you know, I hadn’t found Yeah, I did. Did I find clubhouse? I did. No, I don’t think I found clubhouse until 2021. So from let’s say, March until December, all this time being spent alone and not going out and not really communicating with anyone. I started watching YouTube a lot. And I discovered Behance for creatives. And I always wanted to be in the graphic design world, I was clearly a web designer, I wasn’t really super confident, I guess with my skill set. I mean, I felt okay about it. But I don’t think I was as good as I am today. Obviously, I feel really competent now. And in 2020 I looked at quarantine as an opportunity to grow and to improve my skill set and to learn new things that I had just been interested in that I might not otherwise have had time for. I invested in some new technology which I’ve talked about in the past and I learned that every single day I could learn new skills and whether it was in Photoshop or Illustrator, InDesign. As a result, I found myself growing personally, but also growing professionally. I wasn’t getting new clients, but that personal growth of creativity and discovery. And I realized well of all this time I could have been so much better at the things that I wanted to do if I had just known how to do this, but we don’t know what we don’t know. So I didn’t know that this was a whole world that existed that I wanted to be a part of. But I didn’t know that this world existed. And that was a huge growing opportunity for me. And I was okay. Being alone. I was okay. Being at home, I was okay. In, really okay, in the sobriety, and I was growing from that personal perspective, I was, I was working out and I was feeling super good. I was eating healthy, I knew that I had made these great changes for myself. And I was really proud of myself doing all that. If I were to think back on many decades, because I’m gonna be, you know, 59. This July, I think about all the times that I grew, and how did I come out the other end of it, even during some of the worst of times, and growth does not come without growing pains, I have to admit that I wanted in my, I guess, my 50th year to go to culinary school. And I have talked about this in the past. But I have absolutely no idea why I did this, other than the fact that I wanted that degree. And it seemed like a good idea at the time. But I knew in my heart of hearts, there was no way I was going to be working in a restaurant, as any kind of an executive chef or a prep cook or anything, I had no desire to do that. But I did have a desire to, I don’t know, get this culinary degree, and to prove to myself that there were things that I could do and not stop growing. And it’s not as if I didn’t already have a degree, I have a bachelor’s degree in communications, marketing and minor in fine arts. And, you know, Wasn’t that enough, obviously, it wasn’t enough. And I think that I put this goal in front of myself, I’m proud of that goal that I achieved, I truly am, I feel like I was able to accomplish way more than what culinary school teaches you it’s way more than cooking. While it may be the majority of that, you know, I talk about that chemistry class, organic chemistry class that nearly destroyed me and I got through it, and I got through it, you know, maybe not with an A, which I’m used to, but with a C plus, which I’m extraordinarily proud of that c plus is probably one of my greatest achievements. Because I learned how to grow inside of that course, I learned that I am capable of just about anything that I put my mind to. And that’s that’s growth. That’s serious growth, I think about my relationships with people. And I was watching Christo this morning, and I had been listening to his podcasts a lot. And I’m thinking about taking another one of his courses. And what he talked about was very interesting. He talked about friendship, and how he cycles through his friendships. And I thought, well, I sort of cycle through my friendships. And what he said was, and I’m not going to quote him verbatim, because I’m just going to quote this from memory, that some of his friendships don’t allow him to continue to grow. And I stopped, I pause, I thought, what does that mean? Well, I’ve cycled through friendships, and I think that my cycling through friends, because I have a trust issue, while part of it is trust. But what about thinking of it more? I don’t know. It, just thinking deeply about what that means? Do friends prevent people from growing? Sometimes? I’m sure sometimes they do. And because they’re happy within wherever they are, and whatever place they are, are in. Yeah, I wonder if my cycling through friends has allowed me to continue to grow. Let’s take the friends and make it relationships with partners. You know, I am alone now. And I’ve had my greatest growth in my late 50s. As a result of being alone, how am I cycling through my relationships, so that I can grow to achieve something greater? And I’m, I’m only talking about this on this podcast, because I like to put some context around my life and having suffered as much as I did. And I’m not the only person in the world that suffered, but I only know about suffering. From my own perspective. I feel like I need to make some sense to a lot of it. Why am I alone? Well, it’s a choice. Clearly, I’ve made a choice. But as a result of being alone, yeah, I’ve grown. I keep growing. And what happens when being alone isn’t enough anymore. You know, maybe I need to be in a relationship with somebody who can challenge me and make my life even more rich than it feels to me now. You know, I never set out to create a podcast for any other reason than for what it was and that was To help me, I think it was to help me make some sense out of my life, whether I have 5 million listeners or five, it didn’t matter to me, it still doesn’t matter to me, I hope that when people are listening, that they’re listening to, you know, I don’t know, maybe learn to grow themselves not to feel like they are so alone, because they’re not. And by having these episodes that I’ve created with topics, it feels like taking the sum and breaking it into the parts. So maybe you’re really not interested in wellness, maybe you’re only interested in anxiety, because that’s what you’re going through right now. And in order to grow as a human being, maybe you’re listening to a lot of topics on anxiety, maybe you’re reading a lot of books on anxiety, maybe you’re watching people on Instagram, talk about anxiety, this is providing you if you’re listening to to look at all of these things, just some anxiety, for example, to grow and to grow out of it, or learn to grow and how to deal with it. I don’t know. But I do hope that I do. I do hope that that’s been helpful for people who might be listening. You know why I say that? It because it’s really helpful for me and I, I do struggle sometimes in these episodes. And I wonder if I am just recording them just to get another episode out. Like I feel like that today. And I have stopped and started and stopped and started and I realized Mallory, it doesn’t matter if the episode is boring, or if you have to maybe edit some of the copy out of it. Because it doesn’t make any sense. And you’re talking into circles, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. You know what matters, it matters that at the end of whatever it is that I walk away from, at the end of this episode, for example, on growth, do I feel like I am continuing to grow because I would hate to feel like I have just stopped growing. You know why I say that, because I remember feeling very lost in my 30s and 40s. And not feeling like I had been growing. And it was very unfulfilling, I thought and I remember thinking this, this cannot be it, this cannot be the rest of my life. And if I had known that I would have improved on my skills and learned how to take the things that I truly enjoy, and turn that into a career, not to the point of something that I would hate, but something that I would love. If I had known how to get there back then I would have felt a lot happier, I’m sure. And I would have probably approached it much earlier in my life. But it doesn’t matter. Because I can’t go back. What I can say if somebody is listening is that you have that control in your life, you can make choices in your life to make those changes. And it’s it’s not always easy for everybody. You know, sometimes these choices that we make are going to be so impactful on other people, and we have to be able to look in the mirror and live with ourselves. But how else do you grow? If you don’t? I don’t know, shake it up? Is that what I’m doing? I’m shaking it up. I don’t feel like I’m shaking it up now. But I certainly feel like I shook it up pretty good last, in the last 20 years. I’m proud of my accomplishments, I’m proud of the skills that I have. I’m super proud of what I can offer my clients. I know they can rely on me, I want to grow and have more clients that I can help but I have to have the right clients and you know, who are they? Well, they’re the people who allow me to be who I am when I’m working for them. You know, I always have such incredibly good intentions. And sometimes that falls on deaf ears for some people, you know, and that’s unfortunate. But clearly I can’t control what other people feel what other people think. And in the gratitude room this morning, we talked about, you know, the there are things that we can control and one of them is our reaction to certain events or certain people but in the conversation of growth, I want to be able to continue to grow and to continue to improve and to continue to be my best self. And when I say that I truly mean it. And I look around at some of the people I like and admire on Instagram, or I may follow on YouTube. And I love watching them grow despite the fact that I may not actually like the courses or the the path that they may be following. I don’t necessarily like that. But I absolutely like watching them because I can see how much more confident they are getting and that makes me feel super good. I just don’t always think that the direction or the path that they’re taking is the right one but I’m not the one who can say anything about anything. If somebody wants to take that direction and that path to grow

15:03

good for them, I certainly would hate for any person ever to go through the amount of suffering that I went through in my lifetime, to be able to come out the other end, and everybody has to make their own choices. And in order to help, especially young women, grow into strong women, there are passive, they’re going to follow and they may fall down, and hopefully they get right back up like I did, and they keep going. I cannot say this enough, because we talk all the time about, especially for women, if you want to support a woman just support her, you don’t have to put her down to make yourself feel better. And there is so much truth and value in that. And I hope everybody hears that worry about what you are doing yourself. And if you’re watching other people who are seemingly growing in whatever they are doing, whether it’s their personal life, whether it’s their professional life, whether they are growing in their capacity to run their own business, and you may not like the path that they’re taking to get to be a success, then don’t worry about that worry about what you’re doing. You can support them in many, many different ways I’m looking around, I guess, is the best way to put it. And I’m seeing all these beautiful, powerful women grow and develop into even better women. And I hope that’s the case. Because I would hate to think that what I’m just looking at on screen is a facade, because I know what it looks like for myself to appear like I was growing and dying inside, you know, not growing, and barely being able to get out of bed, but only getting out of bed because I had to and I had children. And even when I didn’t have the kids around anymore, I didn’t feel great. I hated that feeling. And I hope that nobody ever has to go through it. But I know that that’s not the case. You know, I imagine that in order to come out the other end and to feel the way that I feel today, I had to go through every single one of those things to get there. I had to cycle through friendships, I had to go through jobs that I hated. And people I hated working for in order to know exactly what I wanted. You know, as a as I talk about what I want for my career, I love working the way I work, I love working from home, I like the clients that I’m representing I like the freelance jobs that I’m taking, even if I’m having a bitch fest about it maybe in a small way, during something that may not be going my way it doesn’t matter, I’m I still love it. And what I’ve realized is that there are things that I cannot have in order to keep what I’ve got, meaning I don’t want to go into an office, right, and I’ve talked about that a lot. And I just don’t I like working from home, there are things that I may actually have to live without, in order to have what I’m looking for here, in order to grow in my business. And I don’t have to be a multi million dollar business owner, I’m pretty happy exactly the way it is. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped growing, because I can be the very best at what I’m doing. The other thing I was watching with Christo or listening I should say with Christo was when he had said specialize, you know, I don’t know if it’s just about niching down, but he said specialize and be super exceptionally great at you know, maybe one or two things. And so when I look at what I’m doing, I have a small marketing agency. But there are parts of my marketing agency that I certainly don’t want to do. And I should find people who can do that for me, so that I can focus on the web design, web development and the graphic design and be completely happy doing it. And in order to keep growing into that part of my business, I need to keep improving my skill set because I’m self taught. And I didn’t have the benefit of being born in a different generation where technology and these programs and everything that goes along with it was at my fingertips. I have a very strong technology skill set, which is serving me quite nicely. And I’m going to continue to improve so that I can continue to grow. And I hope for everybody that they get that same feeling and they don’t have to take 20 years to figure it out. Maybe you do maybe you don’t I don’t know. But I certainly hope that whatever you want to accomplish, you recognize it as part of growing as a human being. And with growing comes growing pains, like I said in the beginning. So you’ll get through those growing pains just like I did, and come out the other end, then hopefully, you’ll be even better, smarter and more You’re brilliant at whatever it is that you want to accomplish in your life

20:04

just like I feel like I am doing for myself. So that’s what I got. Okay, well if you like this or any other episode of Don’t lose your balance, you can share it you can download it you can follow me you can even write a review. You can follow me on Instagram I have two handles, one is Mallory underscore direct and the other is Don’t lose your balance. M Sc That’s Mary Sam, David. We also have a website that’s Don’t lose your balance calm, and I hope today tomorrow and always you don’t lose your balance along your life’s journey and I’ll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Hi, I am Mallory Durrick. I am a creative. A Marketing Strategist and Web Designer with a small and modest boutique Marketing Agency living in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I am the creator and narrator of this podcast, Don’t Lose Your Balance. This is a culmination of decades of self-help books, countless doctors, numerous hospitals, including rehabs. Once a wife, now divorced, a mother, a grandmother and an addict in recovery. These are things that I am and have experienced.

I’m sharing it all. Baring it all. Hoping to help others; not lose their balance.