Childhood Clues: The Seeds of Purpose

Ever wondered how your childhood hobbies could reveal your true purpose? Journey with me, as I reconnect with my early passions for learning, creating, and sharing, and discover how they paved the way for my career in media and design. From crafting homemade magazines to hosting an unconventional radio show, these formative experiences were more than just fun—they were clues to my future. We'll also tackle societal expectations that often make it difficult to align our hobbies with our careers, and explore tools like the human design chart that can facilitate self-discovery.

Transitioning from an overwhelming executive director role to founding MJ Media Productions wasn't easy, but it was a leap fueled by passion and necessity. I share the highs and lows of this transformative journey, emphasizing the importance of following your true calling. By acting on persistent dreams and aligning yourself with your passions, you can not only achieve personal fulfillment but also make a significant impact on your community. Tune in to learn how embracing your authentic self can lead to a brighter, more purposeful life.

Learn more about MJ Media Productions
Follow me on Facebook & Instagram: @mjmediaproductionsllc
Human Design with Jenna Zoe

Chapters

• 0:00 Finding Childhood Clues for Life's Purpose
• 15:29 Follow Your Passion and Purpose

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:01

Welcome to Life Unfolded, the podcast where we dive into the beautiful chaos of growing up, navigating love and relationships and forging a fulfilling career. I'm your host, melody Jordan, a 30-something creative professional who's taken life by the horns. In this podcast, I'll share my personal experiences and the hard-earned lessons I've learned along the way to inspire and empower you to live your most authentic life. Whether you're seeking advice, a fresh perspective or just a good story, join me as we explore the twists and turns of life's unfolding journey. Let's get started.

Speaker 2: 1:37

On the last episode of Life Unfolded. I talked about self-reflection and personal improvement a lot and getting to know who you are so that way you can show up as a better version of yourself for those around you and, ultimately, the world. And I'd mentioned that I'm a Gemini and I'm a one on the Enneagram, but I hadn't done a human design chart yet, but that I was going to and so I did. I'm a manifesting generator and I just thought it was so funny because the things I described throughout that whole episode lessons that I learned about not trying to force myself into a box that society tells us we need to fit into, and struggling with consistency and jumping from passion to passion or job to job All of that is included in a manifesting generators description and, oh my gosh, it is so cool. If you haven't done your human design chart, I highly recommend it. I used Jenna Zoe's website it's Z O E is her last name and she's got a great app, the human design app, and it's got so much information what your design means, how to apply it and how, I guess, to heal and to recognize like, oh, this is how I'm designed, like this is me. So I think there's like a release from shame or guilt, and how can I implement this into my life now to make it even better? So I love that. I just thought it was so funny and I could not wait to come back and share that with you guys. Like the whole episode is green manifesting generator and I had no idea.

Speaker 2: 3:22

So, anyways, today I am talking about childhood clues, like finding clues from your childhood to figure out what your purpose is in life. If you're anything like me, you're probably introspective. You probably have big curiosities for life and are almost like philosophical, I guess, just thinking about the way things are and why they are the way they are and different ways of living and belief systems, and just like a hunger for learning and growing and improving and making this life. Learning and growing and improving and making this life this one shot we've got right here, right now, the best that it can be. So in recent reflections, seeing where I am now in my life and then looking back at my childhood, it seems that I've come full circle from what I loved doing as a kid to what I now am doing in my professional work, and the path to get here has been long and winding and often frustrating and unfulfilling, because I spent so much time just not even realizing and so then not believing that I could follow those purposes to an actual career. Instead, I was just trying to find something that was acceptable and respectable. You know, you have your hobbies and then you have your real job. But why can't your hobbies be your real job? They totally can.

Speaker 2: 5:10

As a kid, I loved creating and I loved learning and I loved sharing. So let me reorder that. I loved learning, creating and sharing, creating something about what I'd learned and then distributing it. Something about what I'd learned and then distributing it. And I was a computer geek from a young age and learned graphic design and HTML when I was like nine and 10 years old, and I would learn about different topics and then I would write little articles and make my own magazines. One of my best friends and I had this little radio show that we made up two different personalities my friend was the reporter and then I was this quirky, adventurous grandma and she would interview me about my latest adventure and we would use different voices and we recorded it on a cassette tape on a karaoke machine and creating different skits or choreography to favorite songs and recording those. So media like video production, entertainment, design, have always been like a core part of who I am and what I've loved doing, what I could spend so much time doing. It took a while to realize like that's what I'm actually supposed to be doing and I actually can make a living doing that.

Speaker 2: 6:29

When I was in high school, I remember a class project as a sophomore where we had to pick a career and do a report on it about what the job specifics would be. Where is the best location for that type of career? What could you expect your salary to be? And at the time I picked journalism, and I remember being so discouraged when, at this time, I learned the average salary was 15,000 a year. I was like, well, forget that. How is that even possible? How can anyone live on that? And so that was one of the moments that I just put my passions aside, like, okay, I guess these are just things I do in my free time, so let me find something mundane and soul-sucking that I can actually make a job out of. Well, I still didn't want to stick to that.

Speaker 2: 7:33

So my senior year in high school, I applied to the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising for visual communications. I thought, you know I love graphic design. I like making collages and designing websites and playing around with funky outfits and makeup. So how can I use this for a career? I was like, well, visual communications. I can work on store displays or window displays for a corporation, like go around to all the Macy's or something, and so I was trying to figure out how I could fit all of my passions into something not totally boring, and I did get accepted to fit them.

Speaker 2: 8:16

But because it was a private institution and we weren't super well off, there weren't a lot of scholarships available I just it just seemed out of reach to me. Obviously, I've had a lot of limiting beliefs around things like that to not think I could make it happen. But the next best thing to me was then cosmetology. So I went to Paul Mitchell and started learning how to cut and color and style all that good stuff. And at that same time I had been growing a YouTube channel, which I don't have the old channel anymore from when I was in high school, but it had been gaining traction and I had a Paramore cover on my channel that, just like overnight, climbed in thousands of views. I had 22,000 views on it, which I'd never had a video get that much recognition before and I know, in terms of like today's hits for like viral videos, that sounds like nothing. But then, when YouTube was fairly new and there weren't a lot of other social media platforms besides like MySpace, that was kind of a big deal, at least to me, and made me really think like huh, maybe I do have something here, like maybe I can make something happen with my creative passions, with writing and with music and performing. And so while I was in cosmetology school I transferred and moved down to LA and joined a band that I found on Craigslist and started performing, and that move to LA just opened up the door for so many new opportunities and experiences. I ended up working in various salons and then moonlighting as a semi-professional singer and that's where I got to start incorporating my creative gifts again, because I had to market myself, so I was creating content for social media to promote my hairstyling services and also my music. That was my longest stint for a career. I mean, I worked in several different salons. I didn't really stay in one place for too long, but overall I really enjoyed that.

Speaker 2: 10:41

When I moved to Oregon, I was pregnant with my daughter and I'm in a more rural area, so at the time the chain that I was with there wasn't one any closer than like 45 minutes, almost an hour away, and which isn't a huge deal. But then standing on my feet all day long with a ever-growing belly just did not sound appealing to me. I was already so exhausted in my first trimester, and so this was another pivot in my life. From learning to creating to sharing, this poor thing that I've carried with me from childhood, fitness was something that I had gotten into in recent years, and so I thought well, I'll study while I'm home and then get my personal training certificate. So that's what I did.

Speaker 2: 11:32

After my daughter was born and a little bit older, and I recovered a bit, I got a job as a personal trainer and really became passionate about pre and postnatal exercise, and so I dove into specialty certification courses to teach that, to teach that, and loved it. So I loved learning about the pre and postnatal process and like the bodies and the muscles and the tissues and how they're all affected and how careful one needs to approach exercise in that delicate time, and there really wasn't anyone else in my area who was teaching that, and so I reached out and teamed up with physical therapists from time to time to teach workshops, and we even shared clients, and I found that a lot of what I learned applied to people with back injuries, because the main focus is core rehabilitation. And so I decided to branch out on my own and got to use the digital marketing, like creating all my content for social media and even recorded my own exercise videos and built a website and created a membership portal and different courses people could download or join and then access my pre and postnatal exercise programs, and I would see clients in my home too, and around that time was when I started being reached out to by other entrepreneurs in the community asking for tips about social media marketing. It didn't even occur to me that maybe I could be doing that too. So as I branched out on my own as a personal trainer and growing this what I wanted to be totally online based fitness company, I had a contract position for a nonprofit organization that supported rural entrepreneurs and startups, and so I created flyers and helped coordinate events and did website updates for them, and that ended up being the bridge to being connected to the business communities and chambers of commerce.

Speaker 2: 13:51

Well, when the pandemic hit, personal training tanked because gyms were closed and I just didn't have enough growth online to be able to sustain a livelihood and then my contract ended. So then the opportunity came up that the Chamber of Commerce was looking for an office manager, and so I applied for the position, and I didn't get the job for office manager, but they created a new position and offered it to me as marketing manager because of my experience with digital media and social media. So I ran with that and was actually able to make a difference in a community and eventually then was offered the office manager position, which turned into the executive director position, and I was using all of these things from childhood that I loved so much in this position at the chamber. So that was like the first time in my life where I felt like I finally had a career, seemed respectable and acceptable, but I also was able to tap into those core passions, those things that give me so much joy, the things I was born to do. Well, in typical manifesting generator fashion.

Speaker 2: 15:30

After a couple years, the admin side of things was just wearing me down and there are a lot of things that I wanted to do, but it just maybe didn't fit what an executive director should be doing, and that, mixed with a really rough season in my personal life, I wasn't able to give what I felt the position needed to continue to grow and thrive Like. I was there for a short amount of time and I was able to contribute a lot to the growth of the organization and positivity in the community, which I'm so thankful for. But I feel like that was it. That was my purpose there. I don't think I was meant to be there long-term, and so a few months after I left that position, I honestly like by a need to survive. I needed to be able to provide for myself, I needed a place to live, I needed income like stat, and so that pressure led me to start MJ Media Productions.

Speaker 2: 16:40

I really had no idea what it would turn into. I just knew I needed to start, and so my first thing was creating branding packages and putting those online for download. That was the first thing I did. I was like here's my business, here's what I'm doing, and I. Then I got a couple inquiries for website designs, and so then I was like, okay, good, this is. It's like starting to take shape, and so it was like websites and custom graphics. And then I knew like I loved video and wanted to do more video. I love podcasts, and so all of that started taking shape over the course of the first year. It all just seemed to fall into place, like every step along the way has led me to where I am right now and like what I really feel I'm supposed to be doing.

Speaker 2: 17:39

And with all this experience, all these things that I'm bringing to it from what I felt was like a waste of time or pointless or another failure or just something else that I started and didn't like, all of that has come together to align my career with my true self. And you know, I've heard stories, I've read books, autobiographies, I've listened to podcasts about people who take the leap to follow their passions, what they believe their purpose is, and to start a business and to create massive success doing that, and I finally just decided to stop believing that it was unattainable for me or that they were just lucky. There's some big difference for why they can do it and I can't. I mean, I've got a long way to go and my business has a long way to go, but it started and it's going and I know now that is absolutely possible, not just because I've heard stories of other people having success, but because I've stepped out and I've taken some leaps and I've seen, hey, okay, that was a little scary, but I did it, I handled it, I was able to overcome that.

Speaker 2: 19:03

And each step like that is just reaffirming confidence in yourself. And then that confidence grows and you take the next step and you figure it out. And then your confidence grows and you take the next step and it becomes more comfortable being uncomfortable on that way to creating your dream life. And so if you've had just an idea stirring around in your head, in your heart, something that keeps resurfacing, if there's a blog you want to start, or if you want to start your own podcast, or if maybe you wanted to start a business baking cupcakes or photography or whatever it may be it could be teaching music lessons, it could be drawing architecture designs, whatever that little nudge is that you've maybe been shoving aside as unrealistic or yeah, that'd be nice, but that's just not how life works. I encourage you to dig a little deeper into that and see where it comes from. Is that something that has been inside of you from childhood? Is that something that you've been carrying along with you and that's been showing up in your life trajectory that maybe you hadn't noticed before. And then ask yourself well, what's the first step to doing this, to doing more of this, to making a career out of this, my livelihood? What's the first step? And just ponder that and just take the step and see how it feels, see how it goes.

Speaker 2: 20:50

I think we're all born with our purpose and I think, as kids, we naturally gravitate towards it and we know what it is. And I don't believe we're supposed to hide those things or diminish them in order to fit into what others think is the right way to do life. I think when we tap into who we really are and what really lights us up, then that light shines from us. It shows up in how we interact with our families, with our friends, with our communities, at work, and that is how light spreads, that's how we create a better world. Thanks for tuning in for the second episode of Life Unfolded. I can't wait to talk with you again soon.